This weekend I had an argument with someone about video game movies. The person thought that there could never be a good movie made from a video game, while I said that there’s no reason the basic structure of a video game couldn’t be grafted onto a good story. Sure, video game movies until now have been unrelenting shit, and video games themselves make for generally awful narrative (and don’t write me a zillion emails, it’s true. Video game narratives tend to be convoluted and constructed much like dumb action movies, in that the narrative only exists to get you to the next set piece), but all it would take is one good filmmaker to step in and kick the genre in the ass, as has happened with the superhero genre.
And now that may have happened. Peter Jackson is going to executive produce the movie version of the popular video game Halo, and his already over-extended WETA will do the FX and props.
Now I know that the executive producer credit can mean a lot of things, and often nothing. It’s very possible that Peter Jackson’s name is just on the film and that he’ll throw a couple of opinions around, but it’s also possible that he may actually have some ideas on how to make this film – which looked like a terrible idea as recently as this morning – into something really cool.
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