Super Mario Bros.:The Movie- The beginning of a hideous thing

So being that this is a video game class, how better to start this blog by saying it will not be about video games...entirely. This week I chosen a different path to walk (blog) and want to talk about video games and their adaptions into movies. Reason being for this topic is that I was lucky (any normal person would say unlucky but hey normality is not one of my talents) enough to catch this movie on TV...

This marvelous chunk of coal, never destined to be a diamond, is Super Mario Bros. the movie. Now although this movie has one of my favorite actors of all time (Bob Hoskins), the movie is a train wreck. It had no relation to the games other than borrowing names from the video game franchise and dressing the main characters up in Mario and Luigi's usual attire. This however is beside the point. The important factor about this movie is that it is the first of its kind, a video game adapted into a film.

There have been many video games that were adapted to film, ranging from childish, lighthearted games such as Mario Bros., to the dark and dramatic games such as Max Payne. All of these movies have something in common however, they are all terrible! The only video game franchise that has had some success is Resident Evil, which has just had its 4th movie hit theaters. But if you are a fan of the games, and good movies, you would know that the on-screen adaptions are a perversion of what the games are all about, and despite their success, the movies (according to my infallible opinion) are cheesy, poorly written, and overall painful to watch. I shall try to humble myself and learn to appreciate the films for the action scenes they contain, but sadly that will not happen any time soon.

This has sparked the idea in my mind that video games are a dead end medium, what I mean by that is video games are the final frontier for adaptions. Still confused? Don't worry, I will give a less metaphorical definition. Novels, comics, and movies have been adapted into video games with huge success (well maybe not movies so much, but a few do get good reviews, but that is a different story, see JAWS blog) and when video games reverse the role and try to become movies, they crumble like a castle made of sand. So the options that the writers who adapt these games have is to either abandon the concept of video game to movie adaptions, or go back to their respective college and refund their English/Writing degrees for something else, because they are not up to the desired snuff that I, and I'm sure many, many others, wish they were.

Until then, let the bad times roll with masterpieces such as this...

Oh Yea...