Cracking the code: why video game movies could be the new comic book movies

Attracting millions of viewers each week and winning constant critical acclaim, HBO’s The Last of Us is a far cry from the kinds of video game adaptations many people are used to.

From the ’90s atrocities of Super Mario Bros and Double Dragon, to the soulless set-pieces of Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, to practically the entire awful filmography of director Uwe Boll, films and TV shows based on video games have a bad reputation, and for good reason. So, is The Last of Us a one-time fluke, or has something finally changed to lift the curse?

On the surface, The Last of Us looks like a special case, as the original 2013 game is almost uniquely suited to becoming a TV show. Created by Naughty Dog, a studio previously most famous for Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted, it was arguably the most cinematic game ever made at the time of release.

It took a restrained and understated approach to extremely complex and mature themes in a way that was more the realm of a Cormac McCarthy novel (or, say, a $20 million per episode HBO series) than a standard high-budget video game. And though it also innovated in terms of gameplay mechanics, for example in the extended gunfights, environmental puzzles and scavenging to create improvised weapons, that aspect is easy to separate out (and indeed doesn’t really feature at all on the show), leaving a ready-made template to be massaged into a prestige TV drama. I’m pretty sure most people tearing up over the finale of The Last of Us TV show would have also been hooked by the game, had they been in a position to try it.

This all makes for a key difference compared to past adaptations, where stripping out the play from an excellent video game seemed to leave film-makers with nothing but cringe-inducing plots, preposterous characters, monster designs that are hard to do in live action, or martial arts experts in bikinis to work with. Even the adaption of Naughty Dog’s own Uncharted fell somewhat flat; the games may have borrowed a lot from Indiana Jones, The Goonies and Errol Flynn, but the scenarios and even the dialogue are robbed of almost all impact when you remove the interactivity.

Still, in some ways The Last of Us is the herald of a new wave of high quality video game adaptations. But as with comic book movies, they won’t all be the kind of thing that gets a traditional film critic’s tongue wagging.

As the gaming audience has aged up (the average age of game-players in Australia is pushing 40), professional film-makers inevitably have a better grasp of why game stories work and how to adapt them to linear formats. Plus video game stories and worlds are now more diverse than ever before, creating far more options to pull from, and technological advancements have led to games (like The Last of Us) more closely emulating theatrical greats.