LogFAQs > #950967208

ParanoidObsessive posted...

SF was an absolutely terrible movie. NO ONE liked it because it was good. We liked it because it was bad, and we enjoyed pointing at it and laughing.

That's not really an indicator of quality, and definitely not what we're talking about here.

It was a fucking great comedy, what it wasn't was a faithful adaptation of the source material. And a lot of things we laughed at were meant to be humorous.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If you hadn't included the "even though it was pretty bad" part, I'd have said this statement alone invalidated every opinion you've ever had about movies ever.

Though you did include it, so I'd say that just shuffles that right into the same category of "I like this because it is bad".

I wouldn't go that far. It's not the Mario Bros movie.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Speaking as someone who was in college when it came out, I never met a single person who had anything bad to say about it. Almost everyone who went to see it in theaters either loved it, or qualified their praise as "It was the best video game movie anyone's managed to make so far" (and honestly, there haven't been all that many made since that come close either). And a LOT of those people (probably most of them) were MK fans (I may have spent more time playing MK Trilogy in college than I did going to class).

I'm calling bullshit on that. I'm not sure I've ever run into anything that was universally praised, so unless you were sitting in a corner not talking to many people, you should have run into people who complained about it. And I have a hard time believing you'd run into many -- if any -- people who talked about it being the best movie based on a game at that point because that was barely a thing back then. And I'm going to knock the claim that few have come close since, because MK was the kind of video game movie that only worked as a video game movie and couldn't stand on its own legs as a film.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It was popular enough at the time to make back its budget like seven times over. And the main theme song got airplay on the radio about a dozen times an hour, every hour, for around two months or so. There was a huge rush of positivity towards the franchise at the time, and a lot of that was spurred by the film.

The movie was big because the games were big, not the other way around. And just because a lot of people went to see doesn't mean it was either good or well-liked, which is the problem with your weird obsession with box office numbers as a metric of popularity. Literally the only thing a box office will tell you is how many people saw something, and even then it's misleading because you'll get some people who see something multiple times.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The real sad part is that people keep asking for video game movie adaptations, and they're almost always going to be terrible, because games keep getting bigger and more complex, game narratives keep getting more elaborate and harder to duplicate or distill into a single two-hour movie, and nerd expectations keep getting higher in general.

But not really. There are still plenty of games with relatively simple stories that could be made into a movie. Most of the Uncharted games, for instance, play like movies... and given that so many games nowadays rely on actors for character likenesses and sometimes -- as was the case with Uncharted -- use motion capture, you're getting pretty damn close to a movie.
In fact, I'm always surprised we *haven't* seen any of them adapted until now.

Some other franchises it wouldn't really work for, like a good many RPGs. Otherwise the issue often isn't the complexity of the story, it's the people who work on the movie and the fact that they often only play lip service to the source material. It's basically Kevin Smith's Superman movie story every single fucking time.


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