How do you turn a video game about zombies into a television show? If you’re making “The Last of Us,” HBO’s Emmy-winning post-apocalypse drama, you take a sober approach, treating the zombie-killing action as an opportunity to articulate profound things about the human condition. You remind viewers that what matters is not the spectacle of the end of the world, but the resilience of the survivors as they cling to their tattered humanity. And so, like the PlayStation game on which it is based, “The Last of Us” becomes a grim show with big themes: the power of hope, the futility of vengeance, the terrible things we’ll do to survive.
But if you were making “House of the Dead,” based on the 1990s arcade game, you went in guns blazing. This 2003 film, from the notoriously disreputable German director Uwe Boll, contained practically no coherent ideas, and its primary motivation seemed to be to cram as many bare breasts, exploding corpses and nu-metal songs into one movie as the Motion Picture Association of America would allow. The game it was based on was not exactly a paragon of artistic merit to begin with. But even by the crude standards of the source material, Boll’s film, with its constant slo-mo and goofy “Matrix”-style camera movements, felt especially tasteless.
Everything I know about movies and television tells me that “The Last of Us” is the superior adaptation — subtle instead of broad, mature instead of childish, concerned with real feelings instead of lizard-brain titillation. And yet every time I watch it, some recess of my soul yearns for the lurid, tooled-up lunacy of stuff like “House of the Dead.” “The Last of Us” is a duly touching story of trauma and grief, but it feels as if everything lately is a duly touching story of trauma and grief. When was the last time you put on a movie and saw slow-motion shots of a woman in a Star-Spangled Banner leotard dodging a sledgehammer-wielding zombie?
It’s not the trashiness itself that I’m nostalgic for. What made “House of the Dead” charming was its idiosyncrasies, and idiosyncrasy is precisely what the current generation of video-game adaptations has managed to iron out. Hollywood has learned how to produce successful, respectable game adaptations by slotting them into proven formulas, like comic-book blockbusters and prestige TV. You know what to expect: either a serious-minded, no-nonsense drama, as with “The Last of Us” or “The Witcher,” or an irreverent, wisecracking comedy full of inside jokes and fan service, as with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Sonic the Hedgehog” or “A Minecraft Movie.” Adaptation is a solved problem.
The earlier Mario was played by Bob Hoskins; the new one is voiced by Chris Pratt.
But before Hollywood solved it, the industry simply let artists — and, yes, sometimes hacks — attack the problem with creative abandon. The results were as delightfully singular as they were critically reviled. You could walk into Andrzej Bartowiak’s “Doom” movie with no idea that you were about to encounter a five-minute point-of-view action sequence shot in one unbroken take. You could also read a one-star review of it by Roger Ebert, who hated it so much that he ended up provoking a debate over whether video games could ever be art. These movies had a lowly reputation, but I look back on them with gratitude and affection. For all their faults, they were alive with creative possibility — with the freedom to be bad on fresh terms.
The video games of decades past didn’t have much in the way of a narrative. When movies wanted to cash in on game I.P., they had to invent stories to suit the material. The 1993 film version of “Super Mario Bros.” reimagined the vague premise — two plumbers saving a princess — as a kind of fantasy epic set in an alternate dimension. “Street Fighter” and “Mortal Kombat” turned arcade fighting games into martial-arts thrillers by adding their own elaborate lore. Practically the only resemblance that the 1994 film “Double Dragon” bore to the game was that its heroes wore red and blue.
This looseness was often a liability, resulting in slapdash scripts that bordered on the improvisatory. But it also liberated films to make surprising choices. In 2002, Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of “Mortal Kombat,” returned to gaming to adapt “Resident Evil,” a survival-horror game about a mansion crawling with zombies. But instead of delivering the obvious haunted-house flick, the film transplanted the action to a futuristic facility full of laser traps and deadly elevators. This unique spin spawned five successful sequels — peaking, for me, with “Resident Evil: Retribution,” whose opening scene depicts an operatic raid of an aircraft carrier that unfolds in slow motion and in reverse.
You will never see something so wonderfully odd in a game movie now. As games became more sophisticated, their stories became more complex, in ways that often resembled Hollywood films. At nearly the same time, the dominant mode of Hollywood — big-budget, effects-driven action spectacles — came to more closely resemble video games. This convergence has been detrimental to both films and games, but it has certainly made it easier for games to leap to the big screen. Toward the end of the last decade, a string of largely faithful, straightforward adaptations — “Warcraft,” “Assassin’s Creed,” a new “Tomb Raider” — seemed to signal that game movies had shaken off their stigma and embraced their material in earnest. By the time “The Last of Us” arrived in 2023, replicating some scenes from the game almost shot for shot, The Wall Street Journal was asking whether we had reached “the golden age of video-game I.P.”
But the decline in imaginative potential is also apparent — perhaps nowhere more than in the case of the two “Mario” movies. The original “Super Mario Bros.” movie was a dark comic fantasy with stylized sets and pleasingly tactile production design, like a cross between “Blade Runner” and “Brazil.” Its tone — spiky, semisatirical, oddly downbeat — had nothing whatsoever to do with the jovial tenor of the game franchise. It also featured marvelously bizarre sights like a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper, his hair bleached and spiked, bathing in a vat of mud like Baron Harkonnen in “Dune.” The film is not without its faults, including strained logic and corny one-liners. But it is nothing if not distinctly, almost defiantly original.
By contrast, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” from 2023, feels as if it were designed in a lab. This animated movie takes as many cues from the games as possible, sticking to its sources so closely that it even recreates a car-selection menu from the racing game Mario Kart. What it doesn’t take from the games, it borrows from Marvel movies: winking, self-referential humor; action heroics; a busy, ingratiating, eager-to-please zeal. The earlier Mario was played by Bob Hoskins; the new one is voiced by Chris Pratt. The film has been calibrated to please fans while remaining appealingly safe to newcomers — and it has clearly worked, becoming one of the highest-grossing animated movies of all time. But I don’t think even its most ardent admirers would mistake it for a work of great imagination.
Many more adaptations are coming: “Mortal Kombat,” “Street Fighter,” “The Legend of Zelda,” “Watch Dogs,” “Splinter Cell,” “God of War.” Many will be successful, and some, I’m sure, will be genuinely great. But I don’t expect any of them to be eye-opening or surprising. Has their quality improved? Probably. But even quality, like stories of trauma and grief, can become boring. Whereas zombies swinging sledgehammers in slo-mo is the kind of thing that never gets old.
Calum Marsh is a writer and editor who specializes in art, culture and sports. This is his first article for the magazine.
Source photographs for illustration above: HBO; Warner Bros. Pictures; Paramount+; Nintendo, Illumination Entertainment/ Universal Pictures.
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