Oh yes – Rapture for real will be quite the sight to behold.
Oh no – It’s to be directed and produced by Gore ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Verbinski. Well, the first film was loads of fun, but even discounting those sequels, high seas hi-jinks seems an unusual pedigree for undersea rumination upon the nature of man. But hey, both have water and zombies.
“It’s believed to be the biggest videogame-to-movie deal since 2005, when Universal and Fox signed onto the since aborted “Halo” pic, for which Microsoft got $5 million against 10%”, reports Variety.
“”I think the whole utopia-gone-wrong story that’s cleverly unveiled to players is just brimming with cinematic potential. Of all the games I’ve played, this is one that I felt has a really strong narrative”
-Gore Verbinski.
Erm. Perhaps he hasn’t played all that many games, then – although such a comment might explain why the last two Pirates films were so porridgy and incoherent. Let’s hope he’s enthusing more about Bioshock’s setting and backstory than its pay-off, eh? “It’s a much more intimate story than “Pirates.” Although it’s an adventure, it’s a dramatic adventure. I see it more along the lines of ‘Blade Runner’”, he adds in an interview here, in which he also talks about his chuminess with Ken Levine. He makes some of the right noises – at least name-checking free will and Ayn Rand – but the pervading sense is very much ‘big summer blockbuster’. And understandably so. Unlike Andrew Ryan, I very much doubt Verbinski is willing to design an immense underwater city solely for the arthouse crowd.
The immediate problem with using the existing narrative is that, unlike the game, the audience isn’t in the shoes of the lead character, so Bioshock’s moments of greatest resonance will be that much tougher to achieve. Potentially the big reveal could be a bit Sixth Sense – which, in fairness, was reasonably affecting on the first viewing.
Surprisingly, this is Take Two’s first ever movie deal – they’ve resisted a GTA flick for yonks now – and so they’re claiming to be heavily involved with it. They’re also getting a multi-million dollar advance, which means there’ll be a great deal of bigwig self-congratulation about buying up Bioshock developers Irrational last year.
No word yet on whether there’ll be one ending for normal people and another for those who believe there’s nothing wrong with killing little girls.
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Mouse Hunt (Verbinski’s first feature length film, I think) was brilliant. If he can make a good film based on a board game, I think he’s the best bet any film based on a computery videoey game can have.
It’s unlikely that the film would follow the storyline entirely James G. So while you’re right about that not really translating to the screen, I’d argue that it matters not since the movie will simply deal with the themes of the game.
I’m already pencilled in as “Crumbling Mutant 6″… IMDB here I come!
I am looking forward to the pair of lovable splicers who although wicked, amuse us with their comedic antics.
I have to admit I amazed that they attached a big director to this film. Considering that the standard procedure in Hollywood is to hire a guy who worked the third camera in a music video, I take this as a sign that least the studio is taking the movie seriously.
Dear Gore Verbinski,
Kindly fuck off and die,
KTHXBAI.
Well, at least Verbinski can make pretty pictures, even though I don’t hold him in all that high regard as a director. Anyone claiming he’s a good storyteller hasn’t taken a good long look at the last two PotC movies . Mind you, he had an unfinished script to work with, but that doesn’t excuse the vast amounts of nothing in those movies. World’s End in particular was absolute garbage.
The first one was good fun though, even if it was half an hour too long.
There’s no need for fighting about this topic surely. What happens happens. They’ll probably lighten it up and make it PG
Let’s just think of the things we all can enjoy: tucking in to a nice meal of sea slug on a bed of freshly opened small child.
Gentlemen, to evil.
@Meat Circus
Very knowledgeable and intelligent comment. I’m sure Hollywood took notice;-)
Seriously, I think Verbinski isn’t a bad choice at all because of three factors:
1. He has a sense for that “aquatic” theme/ aestehetics which is very important because in a project like this artdirection and setdesign pretty much define the whole thing.
2. He knows how to handle a big budget Hollywood film. Levine might be a very talented writer but directing such a hollywood monster is certainly not his shoe size.
3. Verbinski demonstrateded that he can “retell”/ remake a story with the US remake of the Ring which was solid entertainment even if the original will always be the better one.
Many people in Hollywood and Europe (mainly France) are trying very hard to find a way to translate the worlds of videogames into movies. Although both media are very much based upon moving pictures and the creation of “virtual” space this still is a challenge. It will take time and failures but the efforts are clearly worth it. Imo those people really deserve proper support and constructive criticism and not the usual avalanche of fanboy hate.
This is what I was thinking of exactly, as I can’t really envision how they would recreate the storyline from the actual game into a good movie. However the whole rise and fall of Rapture would definately make a great movie, what with Ryan and Fontaine duking it out whilst the citizens undergo the horrors of genetic manipulation and face the morality of creating the Little Sisters and Big Daddies. It would work a lot better than “random mute guy finds way into Rapture, turns out to be some kind of hero and eventually saves the day”.
I’m excited. Big time. I reckon Verbinski, who has been working with Levine a couple of sites have reported, will tell an original story that covers the fall of Rapture.
That way, we all get to see a brand new character set up for Rapture, possibly getting invited there by Ryan, discovering it (and by virtue of that, the audience too), only for the second Act to detail its downfall and how exactly that happened.
Key events from the game that were entirely player character-based likely won’t appear in the film.
This excites me tremendously because it’s the though of exploring Rapture at its inception, then detailing its downfall and the main character(s) escape that would best fit a film version. That way, we can have a fully-functioning main character who – y’know – talks n’stuff.
I agree with James G. If they’re basing the movie off the game’s events and not the fall of Rapture, they’re missing an opportunity to not be tied down to the inherent gameyness of the storyline. They’d have to write in their own twists and stuff though.
From the way they’re talking it sounds like they’ve already decided to use the game’s time frame, which is a shame.
ALSO: GEOFFREY RUSH FOR RYAN!!!
It seems like many are missing the point in their focus on “this is how I would do it”.
Listen, this is the guy who took an amusement park ride and turned it into a really likable movie. If there is anyone in the world qualified to turn a video game into a good movie, we’ve found him.
Loving the source material doesn’t make you qualified to turn it into a good new piece of work. And the guys who made a good video game aren’t necessarily the guys who would make a good movie.
This guy has the exact skill set needed for this job. Add in the Ring, and he’s got more history taking the work of others and turning it into a well-crafted movie.
Plus, as mentioned above, his selection is Hollywood showing us all that they take this seriously. You don’t get guarantees, it could still turn out bad for any number of reasons, but I doubt the reason will be that they picked GV to direct.
Yeah, I mean the major point of the game’s plot is that it is a game, not a film. The cleverness doesn’t work when translated into a film (indeed, I’ve argued the reverse – that novels and films shouldn’t be made directly into games – on the PC Gamer forums recently).
Geoff also makes another good point: That Pirates managed to turn a funpark ride into a film is the best counter against “Videogames intrinsically can’t be good movies”.
KG
Well they are going to have to add characters as you can’t have the guy wandering about alone in a film. Furthermore, if it is a film of the game rather than a film using the same setting as the game everyone who played it has seen the plot and crucially the things the plot relied upon entirely, the plot twists.
Could be they will go down the route of basically making their own version of it. Also I think video games are basically treated as entertainment for the masses. It is hard to predict obviously but it seems more likely that the “philosophical complexity” some people felt was a strong feature of the game will be overwritten. That would fit in with the talk here about the fact that he made films from theme park rides. It may well be the game is viewed as a theme park ride in terms of the kind of entertainment it is meant to be, and the film will reflect that attitude.
Fairly cynical and speculative I know but those were my first thoughts when I read about it.
“If anyone were to do a Bioshock film it should be alongside Marc Caro. He was largely responsible for the art direction and writing of 4-year project Cité des enfants perdus (watch the video trailer to see what I mean). This is exactly the sort of person who could do Rapture justice.”
That. Would. Be. AWESOME.
But yeah, with Verbinski at the helm and the blessings (and possible collaboration?) of his buddy Ken Levine, this stands a chance of being the first truly awesome video game to film adaptation. As has been noted, the guy built a Hollywood mega-franchise out of a Disney ride. I don’t think Verbinski can take credit for Johnny Depp’s immensely quirky Oscar-nominated performance from the first Pirates movie, but he can certainly take credit for supporting and defending that sort of artistic risk when studio bigwigs were deeply skeptical. The talent that is already attached to the film is exciting, but Verbinski’s flare for attracting and nurturing talent in unpredictable ways makes it doubly so.
Listen, this is the guy who took an amusement park ride and turned it into a really likable movie. If there is anyone in the world qualified to turn a video game into a good movie, we’ve found him.
while i am skeptical about the whole thing, this is a really good point. talk about turning nothing into something.
and at the very least it will look pretty. i do hope it keeps the “i burned my forest rather than give it to the feds” story because never have i cheered a game’s acting so hard and so heartfelt. we need more game characters telling the feds to go bone themselves with a rusty spoon.
(starts writing notes for “ruby ridge’s revenge”)
This is a good candidate for “least surprising gaming news ever”.
Over-rated, shiny turd of a game to be directed by a man waxing poetics about gaming’s “untapped potential” but barely likely of producing anything different in the current marketplace? I should have bet on it.
Phil: Judging by the conversion process, BDs have the standard amount of eyes.
Oo, what’s all this then?
Dracko, do you enjoy being the vocal minority?
I don’t get the “they turned a funpark ride into a film” argument. No they didn’t. They made a movie about pirates (and they’re not the first to do so). They then named it after a popular ride that had pirates. That’s it. What else did they take from the ride other than the name?
Also, I credit PotC (both the good one and the bad two) to Jerry Bruckheimer. They have his signature style all over them, whereas the movies don’t even remotely resemble Verbinski’s other works.
I think ‘Atlas Shrugged’s own adaptation will be along at the same time too.
About the Pirates movies being based on a ride and that’s some sort of recommendation; I don’t know about that at all. It seems substantially easier to me to take what is basically a setting and throw in a lot of elements and make it half decent. Whereas something with actual content, a lot of which is designed to work in a media specific way, is several orders of magnitude more complex to adapt, particularly if you want to keep as much of said content as possible. They’ve called this flick an ‘adventure’ story already, presumably based on it being a “shooter”, and it basically has to be a big budget tent pole picture. Despite how the game is played, I’m not sure that really says ‘Rapture’ to me. All Verbinskis good films have basically been comedies (Mouse Hunt, Pirates) and he introduces a large amount of slam-bang obviousness in to one of the most low key “horror” films ever, to Americanise it (even though the end result was pretty good). So I think Bioshock the Adventure film is a pretty good guess for the way it’ll go. Whither serious subtext and moral ambiguity, I ask?
It’ll be shit. It always is.
Really what has this got to do with the PotC films? They are mindless, fun action flicks with a bit of humour and a heavy dose of unreality.
This BioShock film should share nothing with them.
o lol, lo Muz o/
@Muzman,
Yes, I think we agree on most of the points. Everyone is arguing over what he’ll do with the story, or the main character, or the experience of playing it, and I expect the answer to almost all these questions is:
That stuff is part of the videogame. He’ll throw that stuff out and make a good movie.
I doubt he spent millions of dollars and months of shooting in a struggle to stay true to the source material of the amusement park ride. He just took the good stuff he could use and made an entertaining movie. Yes, I suppose if you loved the ride, you could leave the theater shaking your fist – “That’s not the amusement park ride I went on!” but that just says something bad about your expectations, not his film.
No, Bioshock the movie won’t be like your experience with Bioshock the game. It’ll be a movie. But I think if there’s anyone we can trust to take a bunch of the good parts (like atmosphere and concept) from the game and transition them successfully into a good (but very, very different) piece of entertainment, it’s this guy.
Nobody mentioned that Verbinski directed The Ring, which is what I first thought of. Bioshock genuinely made me quivering-stomach scared at times, and so did The Ring. Plus, the common thread of creepy little girls! So it sounds kind of promising actually.
The Ring was a really, really poor copy of Ringu. Really bad. Terrible. A pox. It looked nice, had good actors etc etc Naomi yum yes, but it just misses the point.
I didn’t realise he directed that. That bodes badly for BioShock.
Two words.
MOUSE HUNT.
The Bioshock film can’t help but be amazing.
I really liked the first Pirates, the second just felt like an excuse for the third though, as nothing much happened but some rolling down hills fighting and plot set up for the final installment – which was annoying as the first worked best as a self contained film.
Not to mention that game they played on Davey’s ship made no fucking sense at all and annoyed me a lot.
Never watched the third as a result of the let down.
So.. it could be good, could be bad, butat least it’s not Uwe Boll.
Not sure how it will work as most people interested in the game have played it and thus know the big reveal and so forth.
Well, at least it’s not Boll.
@Subjective
Funny how you manage to put in so many adjectives to emphasize your aversion for the remake and yet you fail to give one single reason why it “misses the point” in your opinion.
The point about the funpark ride is imo a good one because it shows that the man not only managed to come up with a very successful pirate movie but also had enough business skills to connect it to an equally successful ride – a quality which is very appreciated when dealing with blockbustersized movies. For the Bioshock movie this could mean that Verbinski might be one of those directors who is actually able to think outside the box, respecting the source while transforming it for the big screen.
His business skills had very little to do with it, I suspect. Disney had been shopping ride tie-ins for years. Pirates wasn’t even the first
Yeah, don’t credit Verbinski with the savvy to connect a movie to a ride. He was hired long after the movie had been greenlit and the ball had gotten rolling. It was Bruckheimer’s baby.
euch… I can see it already
Our one protagonist will become a gang of 4-6 multi-ethnic stereotyped ‘misfits’, probably international smugglers or some bollocks, at least some of them played by christian slater, vin diesel, arnold voslo, paul walker, or maybe colin farrell to keep that atlas feeling.
Rapture will be some kind of abandoned military complex, full of CGI monsters instead of splicers. Oh, and they’ll befriend a big daddy like some sort of mute robbie the robot who can fight.
Geoff also makes another good point: That Pirates managed to turn a funpark ride into a film is the best counter against “Videogames intrinsically can’t be good movies”.
They made a funpark ride into a fun movie. Not exactly a giant leap of faith there. The ‘good’ part is up to debate.
Let’s be honest, though: An arthouse Bioshock film would be hilariously awful no matter who was at the helm. It’s about an underwater city where everyone is addicted to magic drugs and monsters in Victorian diving suits wander around yelling randomly. Actually, now that I re-read that last sentence, that actually sounds like a great arthouse flick.
“…At least name-checking free will-”y? I sure hope so. There’s a lot to learn from that classic series.
As James G said, the film would probably be fine as long as it didn’t go very near the events of the game. The scenes in a game are constructed for a game scenario and often wouldn’t work with a cinema ethic.
If the film did something interesting, like categorized the rise and fall of Rapture in a dramatic (documentary?) way, THAT would be worth seeing. Heavily character based action is more predictable, but won’t be as interesting (at least to me) unless it’s really pulled off well. I’d say Bioshock: THE MOVIE has a lot of potential, even if it is pissing gamers off right left and centre.
Edits- Verbinski did The Ring? Hurm. I don’t really respect it, but at least it was better than pretty much all the other American remakes of classic J horror- it was actually decent. Also according to the IMDB page for Bioshock (-the game, yeah I don’t get why it’s there either) the Gene Bank was originally called the Plasmi-Quik. That’s awesome.
Shit my comment’s set. Sorry for the DP.
@Subjective Effect.
“The Ring was a really, really poor copy of Ringu. Really bad. Terrible. A pox. It looked nice, had good actors etc etc Naomi yum yes, but it just misses the point.
I didn’t realise he directed that. That bodes badly for BioShock.” (How the hell do I make that quoted)
Are you talking about the J novels or J movies? Verbinski basically just re-propped the J movie. I agree the J movie had little to do with the novel, and missed a hunk of the point- but it was still good and had a (fairly) coherent story. Verbinski’s adaptation was a damn fine one as these go, and shows that he can easily do film. Which bodes well for Bioshock.
Honestly, I’ll just be going to ogle the architecture.
I really liked the first Pirates film. As in, one of the best action-films I’ve seen. The other two weren’t good at all, of course. Though I agree with everyone who has said that this should be about Rapture before the fall (and during). That would actually make for a pretty good story.
Oh, and I have no idea how involved he was with The Ring (if he basically copied the original or what), but that’s the only horror movie I’ve ever been genuinely terrified of. I’m usually too logical to get scared by movies like that, but The Ring had me. Of course, The Ring 2 didn’t scare me at all, since it seemed to “change the rules”, and in my mind that ruined everything. First you’ve got to copy it, then you’ve got to show the movie to someone else. Oh, and she can get you anyway. At least keep scary illogical stuff consistent.
/rant
It bears reminding that many rather decent movies have been inspired from far less creative origins then video games and comics. I’m thinking of things like 20 page short stories, campy noir and science fiction pulp, etc which I suspect everyones initial reaction was “how could they make a movie from that?”
Wth? I can scarce believe there are people who, dare i say it, dislike Bioshock? Maybe they like, have old computers? Unbelievable!
*gasp!
Verbinski’s “The Ring” is the only J-horror remake I’ve ever liked better than the original. It just oozed tension. Then again, that might have something to do with the order I saw it in…it was my first exposure to the J-horror phenomenon. All the others, I saw the original Asian movie first and the American remake later or not at all.
I think this has potential at least.
Gore has a fairly good track record overall, Mousehunt was a thing of awesome and you can’t lay the blame of the last two PotC films entirely on his doorstep as they just fell to the usual diminishing returns law of Hollywood blockbuster Sequels. He does seem to have the knack of getting good ingredients together (script, cast, production) and baking them into a tasty dish
It could certainly turn out to be brilliant and that’s a big start, most game to movie licences don’t even have such a rich foundation as Bioshock to work with.
My fingers are firmly crossed.
@SixStringSamurai
BioShock is a shell of the game it should be. We were promised so much more and really all we got was something that is deeper than the usual FPS fare – it wows Haloites and so on. For anyone who played System Shock 2 (and is was billed as the “spiritual successor” to SS2) it was an exercise in frustration. The key moment is just that – nothing amazing precedes nor follows it (though it was good). The rest of it is just a massive hint at what could have been.
As to The Ring – it’s too in your face. Ringu was much more of a psychological horror. Yes, it delivers the boogaboos at the end but it was subtle and horrifying. The Ring is full of “He couldn’t see me!” Arnie-in-Predator moments. I understand why some people like that as it’s more accessible but that’s the problem – The Ring assumes you and it aren’t capable of engaging with the horror that is in the mind. And when you set out like that you pretty much fulfill your prophecy.
All this discussion about the pros and cons of translating videogames into movies, and I’m very surprised no one has thought about the possibility of this occurring:
Bioshock · The Movie – The Videogame, the official adaptation of the acclaimed film, coming soon to every platform… :-P You know it may happen…
dude wow i don’t give a rats ass about what any of u shitheads say about the last 2 pirates movie they were awsome! and this is about bioshock so SHUT UP!i think doin this movie would be
sick and think verbinski can make good monsters(splicers) and the ring was actually good i hear someone that worked on sweeney todd will work on this so combine verbinskis water and zombies and his thrill the ring with sweeney todds bloody delightfullness my theory is that this movie will be the shit and the game was cool to it would be awsome if they had it in first person it would give u the excitment of cloverfield!rock hard!
I request the rat’s ass to be given immediately.