Criticizing Criticism: Video Game Adaptation Edition: Why Roger Ebert’s Argument that Video Games Were Not Art Had Validity – And Why The New York Times Recent Criticism Arguments They Were Doesn’t

 

One of the many reasons I respected and admired Roger Ebert was his willingness to not dismiss out of hand so many adaptations of pop culture into cinema the way many of his brethren seemed willing to do without even needed to see them. If it was an action movie, a comic book film, a version of a television show, even stories based on toys, if he could find some merit in the film he would praise it as such. Sometimes, I’ll be honest, that took extreme lengths: he gave raves for The Phantom Menace, both Garfield films (even Bill Murray hated them both) and adaptations of Land of the Lost and American Girl movies. But credit where its due: I can’t see contemporaries like Joel Siegel or anyone from the New Yorker even bothering to screen them, much less review them.

The only major area he was not willing to give was video games. To his dying day he refused to acknowledge that a video game could be art. As someone who was gaming long before he started to read Ebert’s reviews, I have always respected Ebert’s position – and from a critical standpoint, appreciate it.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint video games to have an artistic capability. Anyone who has seen the graphics of Donkey Kong Country, explored the world of Zelda and Mega Man and spent so much time among the world of Mario knows that from a technically standpoint video games can be visual, musical and edited masterpieces. But the standards of an art critic and a film critic (or television, for that matter) are different than those of a gamer.

Video games have always filled the position of distraction, therapy and companionship for most people, myself included. As far as I know no one has ever spent an afternoon playing Call of Duty or Street Fighter for the same reason one would spend that same period watching The Godfather or a Breaking Bad marathon. The former is always a more active form of distraction as the latter: there is a certain amount of strategizing involved but it’s not the same kind of critical thinking. I enjoy spending hours playing Earthbound or Final Fantasy and I enjoy watching Big Little Lies or Parks and Rec marathons but I also know that you’re more active in the former and slightly more passive in the latter.

More to the point they have different goals in mind. And that’s where I think Ebert’s criticism is valid. Because while today’s video games do have script’s, dialogue and plots all of them are incidental to the main point which is essentially having your avatar kill a lot of creatures onscreen with some puzzle solving in between. This may seem like a very brutal description to any gamer fan, but let’s not kid ourselves: it doesn’t matter whether you’re blasting zombies in Resident Evil, jumping on monster’s heads in the mushroom kingdom or using spells and magic in any of the Final Fantasy games. You’re their to mindlessly kill creatures and move on to the next level towards the end.

This doesn’t comer as a judgment or even a criticism, merely a reality. It’s a game and the object of any game is to win. And this doesn’t mean that games aren’t capable of more than that. Indeed part of the reason I agreed with Ebert’s decision that video games were not art was because I’d seen more than I’d wanted of many of the examples of video game adaptations and they were to put it mildly, horrible, both as films and not even really being faithful to the game they were inspired on.

And I don’t truly blame the filmmakers, the actors or even the studios that greenlit so many of the horrible adaptations I grew up with in the 1990s to fairly recently. All of them were trying to take what was a popular form of entertainment and turn into a movie, same as they do with books or music. The problem is, almost every video game they chose to adapt really had no story to speak of. It didn’t matter whether it was Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Doom or any others you can probably think of. Everything that works in a gaming environment isn’t going to translate to a film for all the reasons I listed above. It’s fun to have Guile beat up M. Bison or Johnny Cage beat up Sub Zero when you’re doing it but that takes two minutes at most. Trying to beat any of these fighting games in an arcade or at home can maybe take twenty minutes at most. And while all the characters have a backstory, it’s just incidental for the special moves and the background scenes. To try and make this stretch to even an hour and a half long film is going to be a bloated and disastrous idea for even the greatest screenwriter and director and I doubt that Spielberg and Lucas could manage to make that exciting. Movies can crossover well to videogames because there’s so much to do with the property. It never worked well the other way.

I never played Resident Evil, Doom or so many other of the games that Uwe Boll tried to turn into films but I can’t imagine that would have led to great art or even decent blockbusters. There’s only so many ways you can kill a zombie or aliens before it becomes redundant and that’s really all those games are. Zombie and alien movies can be exciting but they need a great story and character development behind that and again, these games are just an excuse to kill them.

The reason I didn’t judge Ebert for his assumptions was because if these films had been his only idea of what games were like, of course he’d never consider them art forms. What I found frustrating was that there are video games with intricate storylines, character development, brilliant graphic and heartbreaking twists. I should know because they’re my favorite games and if you came of age in the 1990s they might be yours as well.

Anyone who played the various games Square Soft developed over the 1990s – first with Nintendo, then Sony, knows that so many of those games were art. Final Fantasy IV and VI had all the character development, plots, swoon-worthy romances, and heartbreaking twists that one sees in so many great works of art. They reached their peak in their final vision Chrono Trigger, a time traveling, steampunk vision that nearly three decades after its release still ranks as one of the greatest video games of all time.

When Square Soft moved to Sony the games got bigger and better and not just in terms of gameplay. Final Fantasy VII was one of the seminal moments of so many gamers teenage years. Many of us remember the ad to this date, ending with “never coming to a theater near you’. The characters in this game transcended it and while Square doesn’t make direct sequels many of them have been making cameos in other Square games ever since. Other Final Fantasy’s would strain for this kind of majesty; some would succeed, some would fail but the designers did something that no filmmaker has dared: they never made the game kind of game twice.

Even what should have fundamentally been the worst kind of attempt at pandering – the Kingdom Hearts series – ranks as one of the emotionally wrenching and entertaining game series in history. It shouldn’t be, this is clearly an attempt to just crossover Disney and Square and usually these things end in being ham-handed. But this series is the exception that proves the rule. While Disney has been failing in so many other areas of its output, in the Kingdom Hearts series it realizes an emotional connection with even some of the lesser films in its repertoire. Who would have thought that the version of Tarzan and Tangled could find some kind of artistic value in them?

Yet the only attempt to try and adapt these kinds of games into film so far was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. This computer animated game cost over $100 million to make and was true to the spirit of Final Fantasy even though there were few direct links. It is the only video game adaptation that Roger Ebert raved about, giving it 3 and a half stars. But the film bombed at the box office and to date, no one has tried to adapt a game in that world that way since.

So what Ebert had to deal with were Resident Evil sequels, Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and so many version to try and get Mortal Kombat right it was more painful that having your heart ripped out. He died before Hollywood ever got a chance to get video games right.

Now it seems they have – and according to this week’s Times Magazine opinion piece: “I wish they hadn’t”

I would like to give the Times credit for acknowledging video games exist. Having spent decades reading their Arts and Culture section most of them think television is a passing fancy that will someday give way back to opera and ballet given how they tend to review it. And I will give some credit to Marsh, when he decides to criticize Last of Us, he doesn’t do so giving into the toxic masculinity and the body shaming of so many of the actors. (That’s a future article for the record.) But at the end of the day Marsh is no less guilty of the kind of nostalgia for a better kind of work than so many critics are – except his fellow critics would laugh at the kind of films he was praising and the gamers who saw those movies then and now would find he was insane.

He compares Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead, who he acknowledges as a notorious disreputable film maker to The Last Of Us. He acknowledges the former film had no coherent ideas and its primary motivation seemed to be cram ‘as many bare breasts, exploding corpses and nu-metal songs into one movie as the MPAA would allow.” He also acknowledge the game it was based on was not ‘a paragon of artistic merit to begin with…but even by the crude standards of the source material, Boll’s film…was equally tasteless.”

And yet he says even though he knows Last of Us superior, ‘some recess of my soul yearns for the lurid, tooled up lunacy of House of the Dead. “When was the last time you put on a movie and saw slow-motion of shots of a Star-Spangled Banner leotard dodging a sledgehammer chasing zombie?”

To be clear if that is the standard of pleasure that Marsh is in favor of, I am glad I don’t know him or his work. (This is, apparently, his first article for the Magazine.) He claims that what he wants is idiosyncrasies. He says that The Last of Us and The Witcher and Super Mario Bros and Sonic The Hedgehog are formula movies. He seems to be yearning for a simpler time when these films let artists – “and yes, hacks – attack the problem with creative abandon.” He acknowledges these films were critical reviled but that seems to be why he loves them.

He acknowledges that these video games of the past didn’t have much of a narrative that was often a liability but he claims they led the filmmakers to make ‘surprising choices. He truly seems to believe the Resident Evil series is a work of art. He seems to be upset that video games have become more sophisticated and more complex. He acknowledges that their quality has improved and then says – ‘even quality…can become boring. Where zombies swinging sledgehammers in slo-mo is the kind of thing that never gets old.”

Any one who calls themselves a critic should be appalled by what Marsh is saying here, particularly it basically goes everything critics like Ebert believed it. One wonders if Marsh thinks it was a travesty homeboys from Outer Space was canceled, thinks Michael Bey’s Transformer films are too cluttered with plot – or even if pornography these days is to hung up on sex and less on stories. Most people when they advocate for nostalgia at least tend to argue for products that were actually good at one point. I seriously doubt even the makers of the original Bob Hoskins-Dennis Hopper Super Mario Brothers film were trying to emulate Blade Runner when they made it. And one might call it original – in the sense that Pluto Nash or Jupiter Ascending were. Original doesn’t necessarily equal good as people like Ebert knew.

Now as someone who suffered through that film and found the animated Super Mario Brothers film delightful and entertaining I know which one I prefer: the latter will never be mistaken for Toy Story or Shrek but it’s a lot of fun and I’m glad I saw it. Marsh may say the other film is better because it’s more original. That remark would no doubt make Bob Hoskins, who justly thought the movie killed his career in America, start to spin in his grave.

And while the kind of toxic masculinity that normally is at the center of this kind of nostalgia isn’t directly present, it is still there: the films that Marsh is celebrated, like the games they were based on, did have the kind of sexualization of female characters that were overwhelming present in the games of that period. He may not be body-shaming Bella Ramsey the way so many of his ‘bros’ online are in regard to Ellie but the fact that he tends to hold up Milla Jovovich’s sexual portrayal at the center of Resident Evil as the height of video game adaptations as a contrast is the other side of that coin. In a way one almost prefers the review bombing that is being done on Rotten Tomatoes to The Last Of Us to Marsh’s silk-gloved criticism. Essentially Marsh is saying “I may know art but I know what I like”   when he gives a tacit approval to House of The Dead over Last of Us.

I have no desire to ever read another piece of Marsh’s ever again if this is the kind of insight he brings to arts and culture. In one short piece, barely two pages long he has demonstrated a complete lack of appreciation for the artistic merit of films, television and video games. We come away with no understanding if he thinks the latter is capable of artistic merit but reading his article I’m not entirely convinced he did much gaming either, growing up or now.

But as someone who has huge respect for the artistic merit of all three and who looks at the brilliant achievements of shows like Last of Us and Fallout as the first step forward in achieving respectability in television – and to an extent sees at least an attempt to reach it with Mario and Minecraft -   as a genuine step forward for the medium I love. Do I want to see an anthology series of Final Fantasy or the cinematic equivalent of Chrono Trigger attempted now? Yes, but not just because I’m a fan of these series but because these previous examples show that Hollywood can realize the potential of these games on the big and small screen. To me those films that aired during the 1990s and early 2000s that Marsh rhapsodizes about were everything Ebert rightfully called them – and the adaptations that Marsh now despairs about are signs that the rest of Hollywood may finally be able to see in them what we gamers have known this whole time. I have little use for nostalgia even for those projects that my previous generation rhapsodizes over; that Marsh seems to yearn for the era that gave us  Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile  and John Leguizamo as Luigi shows that his true north could not be found with an old NES Advantage.

And if this is the kind of criticism the Times wants to put front and center – I honestly prefer it if they stuck to looking down on ninety-five percent of movies and TV that come out. Better to say that The Last of Us is a terrible show then to say Doom is an underrated classic.