by Jonas Kyratzes

That most critics have little time for the still-young interactive medium is not a surprise; as with every other new medium of expression, it takes critics several decades before they will admit it’s art. But let’s not get into that discussion now – let’s talk about movies, instead. The time when everyone sneered at film as a form is over, after all. Now we have television and the internet and computer games to blame for the supposed death of the novel.

So yeah, let’s talk about movies. To be more precise, let’s talk about movies adapted from computer games, and why most people who review them seem to intentionally turn off their brains.

Before we start, I hope we can all agree that a movie should not be judged on the basis of what it’s adapted from. Comparisons of quality are legit, to some degree  – you cannot talk about the shallow superficiality of recent Harry Potter movies without mentioning that they have little to do with the books they’re theoretically based on – but we must also acknowledge that sometimes great movies have been created on the basis of less-than-great material. Alfonso Cuarón’s riveting masterpiece Children of Men, for example, is based upon one of the most dreadful and boring books I’ve ever read, a badly-written work of religious propaganda by P. D. James. Pirates of the Caribbean is a wonderful adventure movie based on a theme park ride – not exactly a likely source of great art, one might think, and yet the Pirates movies are brimming with wit and charm and aesthetic pleasure.

And so, we should all agree, there’s nothing inherently wrong with adapting a computer game into a movie, right?

Let us disregard those, for the moment, who would answer the above question with a resolute no. We know their absurd arguments: computer games don’t have stories, computer games are only about gameplay, computer games are the work of Satan, and so on and so forth. Let us agree that in principle, it should be possible to adapt a computer game (of any quality) into a good movie.

Why is it, then, that every single movie based on a video game gets bashed on the basis of the same clichés, whether they are true or not? It’s always the same nonsense:

• “The story is incomprehensible!”
• “It just goes from one level to the next!”
• “It’s all soulless CGI!”
• “It feels like watching someone play a game!”
• “And here’s another pun about video games, ha ha ha, I am so educated.”

No-one is denying that there have been a lot of miserable game adaptations, more than half of them directed by Uwe Boll or Paul W.S. Anderson. There’s Mortal Kombat, Street Figher, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege, and many more. But are these movies bad because they are based on video games, or because they are just bad movies? If you apply the common clichés to these movies, you will find that most of them don’t apply – even to the Uwe Boll ones.

Let’s take story first. Most of the stories in these movies are not incomprehensible, they’re just stupid. But you have to be equally stupid to claim that you can’t follow the plot of Tomb Raider or Dungeon Siege. The plots are simplistic, contrived, and often miserably structured, but that does not equal incomprehensible. Neither does it usually have to do much with their origins as video games, because the plots of most of these adaptations barely resemble their source material. An excellent example of this is Silent Hill, a flat and boring movie based on a game renowned for its atmosphere and sense of dread. On a superficial level the movie and the game have some elements in common, but so do Varney the Vampire and The Wisdom of Crocodiles. In the end, “the plot was incomprehensible” just means “I switched my brain off because it was based on a game.”

What about action? It’s undeniable that most or even all movies based on video games have taken action games as their inspiration. (Leading many people to believe that all games are action games.) But do video game movies really feel like watching someone play a video game? With the exception of the one first-person sequence in Doom – which is really quite silly – I can’t really think of any good examples of such a thing occuring. By nature, the experience of playing a video game is cohesive, with one event clearly following another – it must be, because in video games there is no editing, no cutting away to another camera angle for a close-up. Games are, generally speaking, a continuous experience. The dreadful action sequences in most of these movies, however, are the exact opposite: they are incoherent, quickly-cut garbage designed to hide the director’s inability or unwillingness to create a good action scene. They are cheap, uninspired martial arts nonsense imitated from better movies. They are many things, but like a video game is not one of them.

The CGI “accusation” is, of course, derived from the fact that video games use digital graphics, and also works in reverse – anything that uses CGI, no matter how, looks “like a video game.” The root of this cliché is generally no more than a pathetic mixture of childishness, technophobia and plain old faulty logic. Oh, I won’t deny that some of the movies mentioned feature some badly-executed CGI effects, though even Uwe Boll manages to pull off the occasional good effect. But are they driven by CGI? Is CGI the main selling point? No. Actually, in quite a few of these movies CGI isn’t even particularly prominent, with a bigger focus on bad make-up and terrible lighting.

So what, you might say. Bad movies getting trashed for the wrong faults? They’re still bad movies that deserve trashing, right?

But that’s not how things work, or at least not how they ought to work. The point of criticism is to expose the real flaws in things, so that our understanding of art can be increased, so that art can be improved. If we trash movies for the wrong reasons, we’re perpetuating the nonsense that is keeping better movies from being made. To use a more political example: there are many valid and serious reasons to criticize the Obama administration, even to condemn it – but the President’s skin colour is not one of them. But the more irrational hate groups scream about Obama’s birth certificate (or whatever else they’ve come up with), the harder it gets for those who disagree with him for political reasons to speak up.

Furthermore, once these clichés become established, they are suddenly applied to everything, and thus are perfectly capable of harming a good video game adaptation. And you know what? Such things exist.

Mike Newell intended to make Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time a movie very much like those widely-loved adventure movies of the 1930s: witty good-looking characters running, jumping, fighting and flirting their way through an amusing plot with, on occasion, a couple of slightly more serious moments. And that’s exactly what he did. Prince of Persia is a highly enjoyable adventure movie. It’s not more than that, but since when is that a crime? Are adventure and wit and fun not also aspects of the human experience, aspects that art should celebrate?

But that’s not the criticism, is it? The same critics who are bashing Prince of Persia would declare most Errol Flynn movies to be the amongst the greatest masterpieces ever filmed. No, what we are getting instead is a long list of clichés.

It’s too chatty. The plot is a quagmire of major and minor villains, exotic desert cities (one brought down around their ears) and a quest whose goal line seems to move as the editor pads the picture to get it to “epic” length.

But that’s over-thinking a very popcorny summer movie, a ditzy film that offers more evidence that good actors, good action and one-liners don’t solve the one thing missing in every movie video game adaptation – a story that makes sense. – Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel

Apart from the fact that the editor of a film does not determine where the story goes, one wonders what exactly is so confusing about the fairly straightforward adventure plot of the movie. A quagmire of major and minor villains? The cast list is actually not that huge. Too chatty? Oh no, dialogue!

Maybe he reveals what his problem is right in the last sentence. It’s a video game adaptation, so its story cannot make sense.

Dastan does discover the aforementioned dagger — complete with a jewel in the hilt that functions like a video-game controller — along the beautiful and feisty Princess Tamina (recent James Bond girl Gemma Arterton, as hilariously inauthentic as Gyllenhaal). - Lou Lumenick in the New York Post

Where does one even begin with a comment like that? Because the movie is based on a video game, we must sneer at a prop for having a button? Surely the idea of a button that can be pressed to activate something predates computer games? Is there a single scene in the movie that would suggest a connection between the dagger and whatever Lou Lumenick imagines a video game controller to be like? (A joystick, I suppose.)

He goes on:

Yes, it’s another one of those summer movies. In this case, Tamina’s “destiny” essentially leads up to knocking off the climax of “The Raiders of the Lost Ark” with surprisingly cheesy effects that are in no way 28 years better than that classic.

Ah, the good old “everything was better back in the day” argument, popular with many movies, but especially good for movies based on games.

The fact is, the CGI in Prince of Persia is excellent and well-integrated. One can disagree on the aesthetics, but “cheesy” isn’t really an appropriate term. But reality has little to do with how special effects are rated: the miserable effects in large parts of The Return of the King (which do look like they’re from a video game – an old video game) were lauded as revolutionary because Peter Jackson made a big deal of using “bigatures,” while the excellent effects of the new Star Wars trilogy were bashed for looking “unreal” even in the cases where they used the exact same techniques. It seems to be more about memes than about technical excellence.

The audience should be given game controllers upon entering the theater. It wouldn’t mean the film would make any more sense, but at least you’d feel like you had some say in the matter. – Billy Goodykoontz in the Arizona Republic

Are we seeing a familiar pattern? The film makes no sense, game controllers, yadda yadda yadda. And again we have to wonder: if Prince of Persia is so hard to understand, what about Memento? Or Mulholland Drive? Or Brazil (“The movie is very hard to follow. I have seen it twice, and am still not sure exactly who all the characters are, or how they fit.” – Roger Ebert on Brazil)? Surely the story of the magic artefact that must be brought to a specific location to avoid disaster, a not entirely unusual mythological archetype, is not that hard to get?

Alas, we simply sit and watch as a bulked-up Jake Gyllenhaal bounds from one scene to another, dispatching evil and treachery along the way, each episode falling after the next like another level of, well, a video game.

Or like, well, episodes in an adventure movie. Or scenes in any movie.

The episodes in Prince of Persia don’t even follow any of the clichés you would expect if they were based on levels or the concept of levels, like having different “themes.” They clearly take place in the same reality, and follow from one another with pretty understandable continuity. And even if that were not so: does the Odyssey read like a computer game because Odysseus has different adventures on different islands connected by an overall narrative of adventure and travel?

It’s an entirely normal structure; in fact, one of the oldest we know. But if the movie is based on a computer game, then…

It’s meant to be fun, not work, but the plot is so loosely constructed it takes a lot of effort to piece things together. Better just to wait for Jake to mow down more bad guys and hit reset.

I suppose it’s petty to point out that most games these days don’t really have reset buttons. But I have to come back to this idea that the plot takes a lot of effort to piece together. Can the writer be serious here? Can this most simple of plots, this fairy-tale adventure, really be so hard to understand? Do we need more exposition? Do we need a voice-over that tells us exactly why things are happening? If understanding Dastan’s motivations, or Tamina’s attempts to prevent the dagger from being used for ill, is so hard, what happens when Mr. Goodykoontz tries to watch some Shakespeare? Must he carefully avoid even coming close to a production of Hamlet or The Tempest lest his head explode at the unfathomable complexity? Or is he just sneering at something without thinking, repeating the most common clichés without the slightest murmur of activity in his neocortex?

The dagger is essentially a game controller, complete with a red button on top that, when pushed, reverses time. – Mark Jenkins at NPR

And familiar territory once again. One does wonder: what makes the dagger so much like a game controller, apart from having a button? Most game controllers have multiple buttons, and multiple functions to go with those – the dagger in the movie is, well, a dagger. It turns back time, but that’s all it does – you can’t move it like a joystick, or swivel it about like a Wiimote.

There is no rational reason to compare the dagger to a game controller, other than a disdain for the film’s source material.

That kind of  disdain also leads critics to sneer at the movie for other, wonderfully contradictory reasons. Jake Gyllenhaal seems to be a particularly favourite target (almost every review seems to mention his muscles), probably for his crime of starring in an adventure movie after making so many dramas.

Dastan grows into a man, played by a beefed-up, often shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal. Along with the muscles, the actor has also grown an English accent, which is passable but clashes with his aw-shucks American demeanor. – Mark Jenkins at NPR

For hilarity, compare this with:

But howzabout those Jake Gyllenhaal abs?!? Sorry, Gyllenhaalics: They’re on display only in an early scene, in which his Prince Dastan, a former street urchin who earned a royal title by impressing his province’s king, demonstrates some Bowflex-sculpted prowess in a brawl. – TimeOut

So which is it, really? Is the movie constantly flashing a half-nude Gyllenhaal at us, or is it surprisingly tame?

(His accent is also a subject of debate. One review claims it’s Oxbridge, another says it’s Cockney. I wouldn’t be surprised to find one that claims he sounds Australian, or Swedish.)

And the clichés go on:

“Prince of Persia” was adapted from Jordan Mechner’s popular game, and it mostly plays like progressive levels in a video game: Dastan, aided by CGI, bounds over the walls of a city. Dastan tippy-toes past cavernous sinkholes. Dastan copes with poisonous snakes and whirling-dervish assassins. Dastan outwits Amar (Molina), a farcical sheikh who makes his living from ostrich races. – Amy Biancolli at SFGate

The same review concludes:

As a Jerry Bruckheimer production and a game adaptation, “Prince of Persia” has every business being jumpy and sequential, and as a frivolous summer popcorn flick it has every business being inane.

It would be silly, at this point, to doubt that Ms. Biancolli is ever likely to walk into a movie based on a video game and actually like it; no matter what its content, she would see it as jumpy and sequential, because that’s what she wants to see. Her critical faculties are at zero, because she is convinced that she doesn’t need them.

Or take this review, which includes a bit of everything:

Dastan is framed for his father’s death, but the real reason for the chase is because the dagger has a doohickey on it that, when pressed, releases mystical “sand from the gods.” The resulting storm sends the knife-holder back in time for a minute in the dumbest, clunkiest bit of mumbo-jumbo since anything in “Lara Croft Tomb Raider.”

That comparison is apt, since “Prince of Persia” is based on a popular videogame and sets up challenges for Dastan that are essentially get-to-the-next-level obstacle courses (he gets through many with his ability, shown in slow-motion, to leap like a flying squirrel). Within this world, the newly-buff Gyllenhaal is essentially an avatar, although his puppy-dog eyes always seem on the verge of tears, so maybe he knows he’s trapped somewhere he shouldn’t be. Kingsley scowls enough for the entire Persian army, while Arteron appears to have strolled in from making “Clash of the Titans” without even changing her wardrobe.

Only Alfred Molina, as a tricky sheik, seems alive. He plays his tax-hating, ostrich-racing sidekick role as if this were a Monty Python comedy. The rest of “Prince of Persia” is laughable in a different way, as we watch characters we don’t care about fight unnamed villains with unexplained powers for an artifact we’re unimpressed by. - Joe Neumaier at NY Daily News

This one actually makes one wonder as to whether the critic has even seen the film, or is merely copying other critics. What’s particularly offensive to logic, though, is his criticism of the dagger. In Tomb Raider, the time travel thing is in fact clunky mumbo-jumbo added at the last moment; but how can one criticize a movie about a magic dagger that turns back time as containing a magic dagger that turns back time?

And again we have the repetition of the idea that scenes in this movie are the equivalent of levels in games. (Simultaneously, however, the film is “too chatty.”) And yet, where in the movie is there a scene that can only be compared to a video game, and not to any other adventure movie? In fact, don’t adventure movies and action games simply share some basic characteristics? To have action, you need either a conflict between characters, or a conflict between characters and their environment. In Prince of Persia, as in any good adventure movie, these conflicts proceed from the plot (or are justified by it) but are, of course, also meant to be a part of the fun in their own right. How is this different to your average Errol Flynn adventure, or 30s serial?

The digs at Gyllenhaal are actually kind of pathetic. Yes, he’s buff. Yes, he’s got pretty eyes. (Or at least some people think so.) But so what? The point is to determine the qualities of the movie, not to jealously whine over the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal gets laid more often than the critic. Get over it.

But perhaps the most disappointing and silly review comes from Roger Ebert, who is well-known for his disdain for computer games. Shortly before Prince of Persia, he was bashing Robin Hood for not being an Errol Flynn movie (an absurd criticism, if one knows anything about the history of the legend); but Prince of Persia, for all its wit and adventure, was doomed from the get-go.

Dastan is good at running on rooftops. He also can leap from back to back in a herd of horses, jump across mighty distances, climb like a monkey and spin like a top. This is all achieved with special effects, ramped up just fast enough to make them totally unbelievable. Fairbanks has a 1924 scene where he hops from one giant pot to another. He did it in real time, with little trampolines hidden in the pots, and six pots in that movie are worth the whole kitchen in this one. - Roger Ebert

Of course the special effects are going to be unbelievable. It’s a computer game movie. Of course everything was better in the old days, when they used trampolines. (Wait a second. Trampolines aren’t normally found in giant pots. So…it was all fake! Hah!)

It goes on like that. The characters’ names aren’t good enough (umm, huh?). Key events are obscure. Jake Gyllenhaal dares to have muscles. And Gemma Arterton, who gives such a delightfully witty and sensual performance, is reduced to resembling a still photo in a cosmetics mag. There’s nothing in the review that indicates the reviewer having been conscious during the film’s screening. All there is is self-congratulatory sneering.

Now you might think that I find Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to be the best film ever made. I don’t. It has flaws – one of the most serious, and least often mentioned by critics, is in its casting of extremely white people in all major parts but that of the villain (I call this Aladdin Syndrome). Jake Gyllenhaal I can excuse, because with his thick eyebrows and dark hair he fits the setting well enough; but Richard Coyle looks like a Simon Pegg lookalike, and Ronald Pickup looks like a bloody Viking. Maybe this was done in homage to older films of this kind; but it’s a bad thing to recycle, and harms the film both politically and aesthetically. Great sets don’t help if the people wandering around them look like they’re from the wrong part of the world.

This article isn’t all about Prince of Persia, or just about professional critics for that matter. The reaction to Max Payne was equally stupid and cliché-ridden.

Yes, that Max Payne. The one that committed a twofold crime: being based on a video game, and starring an actor people love to bash. The one that people tore to pieces with… well, with all the old clichés, plus hatred of Mark Wahlberg.

The truth is that Max Payne is actually an interesting, well-made movie. It’s noir through and through: from the writing to the imagery, it’s brimming over with the atmosphere and style of the hardboiled detective novel, combined with a more surreal horror element. (In many ways, it’s a surprisingly old-school movie.) It features stunning cinematography, and visual effects that are used with impressive poetic force. Its music is powerful and, like it or not, the performances are appropriate and good.

It may not be a popular thing to say, but Max Payne was a pretty good movie, and deserved a great deal more praise than it got. Anyone with an interest in the works of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler should have found a lot to like in it. But it was based on a video game, and that was the end as far as critics were concerned. Maybe part of the problem is also that people simply don’t get this kind of film anymore: the reaction to Walter Hill’s hardboiled masterpiece Last Man Standing was not dissimilar. Yet I can’t help but think that the biggest problem the movie had was its video game origins.

Critics weren’t the only ones who unthinkingly bashed Max Payne, though. There were plenty of fans who responded with rage: the movie was too boring, there wasn’t enough action, there were differences to the original, and so on. But while Max Payne is not a 100% accurate adaptation of its source material, the things it adds are not meaningless; the result has dramatic and emotional power, if one is open to its language.

But it was based on a video game, and the truth is that between cultural indoctrination and the internet’s obsession with hating things and making snarky comments, even a lot of gamers have learned to switch their brains off when it comes to video game movies.

You don’t have to like Prince of Persia or Max Payne, just like you don’t have to like Captain Blood or The Maltese Falcon. It is perfectly healthy for there to be critical disagreement. You don’t even have to like video games. As William Blake said: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” But when we start thinking in clichés, when we switch off our critical faculties to simply repeat the prejudices of others, we are doing both art and ourselves a great disfavour.

P.S. Can people please stop referring to Arabian Nights anytime they mean something to do with the Middle East and magic? Arabian Nights (or One Thousand and One Nights, as would be more accurate) is a literary work of incredible richness and texture with a structure that has writers and academics marvelling to this day. It’s not some simplistic cliché you can throw out whenever you find yourself lacking in arguments or words. Thank you.