adaptationsrant

That's right, making my unpopular and unapologetic stance on remakes just wasn't enough. Now, most of you have probably noticed that in addition to being horror-loving gorehounds, we're also pretty big geeks. We love comic books, video games, cartoons from our childhoods, and movies. Putting any of all of those together should be like chocolate and peanut butter. Unless you listen to the fans, who'd describe 90% of the results as more akin to putting peanut butter and/or chocolate with shit. Namely, it LOOKS like something good, but by the time you realize it's not, anything good about the components are ruined forever.

I say fuck that, and here are a few of my reasons.

Wolverine: Origins. Yes, I'm starting with the one most likely to bring villagers and pitch-forks. "They ignored canon". "None of those people were in Weapon X at the same time". "They sewed the Merc With a Mouth's mouth shut!" Now, don't get me wrong: everyone is entitled to their opinion. That being said, have ANY of you people complaining about these things actually read the comics? Wolverine's backstory changed every five minutes until the Origins comics, and even now it gets retconned fairly regularly. Plenty of people took the comparisons by Logan and Sabretooth as subtle implications they were brothers (remember, a lot of this was at the same time they were debating making Apocalypse one of the Summers family). As for the Weapon X thing, it's not like they had 10 years to spread things out. Would you really have preferred Wolverine running around with a bunch of nameless grunts? They used established characters anachronistically so we would actually CARE when/if they died. I'm not saying it worked, but I am saying that I was a lot happier to see mutants than I would have been just seeing black-ops soldiers in balaclavas. Speaking of (not actually) mutants...

Yup, it's Deadpool time. I'm really, truly, honestly let down by the Deadpool fandom. Go pick up a Deadpool collection. Seriously, this post will be here when you get back. Notice how any time Weapon X or the Workshop get mentioned, it shows how horrid they are? Notice how those two things are about the only subjects that can make Wade Wilson stop wisecracking and get completely serious? That's part of the point of Origins, kids. They were trying to make a new Wolverine. One that followed orders, couldn't be killed, and had the ability to destroy anything. Go read some comics. Wolverine wasn't the last Weapon X (yes, the movie implied that X was a roman numeral, but that falls apart in the comics when the next "mutant killer" is also named Weapon X, but that's a minor complaint), and every "model" after him used whatever powers they could synthesize. They didn't want a soldier who would think on his own and make his own decisions (something they learned the hard way in both the movie and comics when Logan turned on them), they were looking for a mindless killing machine who would never question authority or talk back. Stryker flat out says Wilson would be perfect "if not for that mouth of" his. You know who else has implied that? Nick Fury during Secret Invasion. Hell, a running theme in the comics is the fact that if Deadpool wasn't constantly joking and acting like a maniac, he'd be the most dangerous creature on the planet. We were NOT supposed to cheer for Deadpool in Origins. We were supposed to be shocked and appalled that Stryker would do something as cruel as sewing the mouth of a soldier who willingly volunteered for the process shut. ESPECIALLY those who were already Deadpool fans, since we know he signed up for Weapon X purely out of the hope that it could cure his cancer. He just wanted to stay alive, Stryker lobotomized him and sewed his mouth shut, turning him into a silent, mindless killing machine. As for the adamantium skeleton and wrist blades, go look at Deadpool vs. the Marvel Universe. About halfway through, there's a sequence where Wade and Bob are falling through time, glimpsing their futures, pasts, and alternate realities. One of those has Deadpool as Weapon X. The surgical marks from the adamantium bonding, blades coming from his hands (not Baraka style, admittedly, but the idea is there), and even showing signs of the metal rejecting, which Wolverine dealt with in a one-shot. Which means that the only part of "Dudepeel/Weapon XI" that hasn't been blatantly implied by the comics is the teleportation (which was actually a nod to his personal teleporter in the comics) and eye beams. Wait a minute... those are both mutant powers. How did Deadpool get his healing factor, again? They synthesized Logan's? So the rarest, most powerful mutant ability in their universe is replicable, but freaking eye lasers and teleportation isn't? Riiiiiiiight. As for his demise, just off the top of my head I can name twice that he's been dispatched by decapitation. Once in the aforementioned Deadpool vs. the Marvel Universe, where Wolverine gets irritated and cuts Deadpool's head off, bluffing to Bob and Weasel that they'd better re-attach it before the brain damage is irreversible. The other is in the Age of Apocalypse (the actions and characterizations are only canon in the AoA AU, but the abilites are played the same as in the "real" Marvel Universe). At his wit's end trying to keep Dead Man Wade down, Nightcrawler grabs his head and teleports away. Wade's body drops, and he's no longer a threat. So stop complaining about completely justifiable changes with plenty of canon precedent and be happy that they're actually making a Deadpool movie.

Now, I'm not going to get into any of the other comic movies, mainly because I'd just be re-iterating the same point over and over. Instead, I'm moving on to video-game movies.

Let's be honest here: most movies based on video games suck. Especially the earliest, since the plot of most of them wasn't much more than "We made up and excuse for you to jump and run and kill things", so when you go to write a script you have to make up enough of a story to fill an hour and a half. Which means we get everything from Super Mario Brothers (very little semblance to the namesake game) to Resident Evil (making a movie in the genre that the game was emulating) to Doom (a slightly modified version of the game's plot without any supernatural implications). I'm not even going to try and justify the Mario Brothers movie, but Doom and Resident Evil are a different story.

Let's go ahead and start with Doom. The biggest complaing I've heard is that whole "They took Hell out of the equation" thing. There's a reason for that. The main point of Doom is a badass Space Marine killing the shit out of a bunch of demons. It doesn't matter how they got there, the point is one man is stuck fighting a nearly endless horde of monsters. In the game, they used a teleporter/hyperdrive... thing that just happened to open a portal to hell. There's already a movie out about that, it's called Event Horizon. So the movie changed things up a bit. Taking a page from Total Recall, the scientists find the remains of a civilization that once thrived on Mars before some bad shit happened and everyone died. Ridiculous science is thrown in, and next thing you know the movie has justified heaven and hell, angels and demons. It keeps with the science fiction vibe that a space station inherently brings along and still pays lip service to the source. Sure, the whole thing was an excuse to give the main character Godmode and have him fighting monsters, but seriously, isn't that what most people played Doom for? Is it really such a horrible thing to NOT have a literal, real hell? I mean, if hell is real, why wouldn't the other side try and do something about the whole "Those stupid humans opened a portal to the afterlife of sinners" thing? Unless it wasn't really a supernatural hell in the game. Maybe it was just a dimension of creatures who inspired the concept of hell, which would mean... Mars makes just as much sense as the spawn-point. And seriously, as stupid and nausea-inducing as the FPS sequence was, you have to admit that it sounds like a good idea on paper.

I'm not going to go in-depth on Resident Evil. I never actually played the games because the cameras and ridiculously counter-intuitive puzzles annoyed the piss out of me (this whole paragraph also applies to Silent Hill). I did, however, watch friends play, and in both cases (yes, I just threw Silent Hill in there and now I'm acting like you should assume that's still what I'm talking about) I was enamored with the ambience, intrigued by the mysterious-to-the-point-of-vagueness storylines, and just generally liked everything but the controls (and stupid, stupid puzzles). Both movies came out to mixed reviews, but I'll sum things up. Resident Evil the game was about cops who get stuck in a zombie-infested mansion. Resident Evil the movie was about cops who get stuck in a zombie-infested facility under a mansion. The movie had Milla Jovovich in skimpy clothing playing the "ringer". Sounds like a successful adaptation to me. Silent Hill, on the other hand, is about a haunted town that may actually be some sort of purgatory or dreamworld. The town itself had crazy cultists as residents who may or may not have inadvertantly caused some or all of the weirdness trying to end the world. The movie is... that. Seriously. It's like people forget that when a game spawns a long-running and well-respected series, the movies aren't going to just retread the EXACT plot of the first game. It's going to take aspects from all the games, stick them together and knead it like bread dough until something decent comes around. Kind of like how Serenity wasn't just a 90-minute remake of the series pilot. Most people who see the movies are likely to have already beaten the games, possibly multiple times. Making it the exact plot you've already seen would be insulting, not to mention boring. So they take the basic plot and tweak it, bringing in aspects from later games and playing with the ideas put forth by the series as a whole. Note that this doesn't always apply to the sequels.

You know the problem with kid's shows? They suck. They're marketed to kids, and amazingly enough, when you're young enough to not care how skimpily-dressed the women are or how cliche the plot is, you pretty much enjoy anything that looks cool. Nowadays, it seems like the studios are realizing that Generation X will pay good money to see movies based on their beloved childhood series. So we get GI Joe, Transformers, and probably something else I'm forgetting. And then people complain that the acting was bad, the storyline was a cliche'd joke, and that the alien robots had too many moving parts. They ignore the fact that they're cool looking, and fairly exciting if you're just watching it as a goofy popcorn flick instead of expecting an oscar-winning performance by the guy who's main character aspect is "Kung-Fu Grip" or "Is friends with a living Volkswagon alien robot". Personally, I enjoyed GI Joe and both Transformers. They're not in my top 100 favorite movies, but they were fun.

That's all I have for now. Like I said earlier, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but take it from one of the Jerks: movies are a lot more fun if you just stop worrying about whether they're perfect. Find the good, enjoy it, and just be glad you're not watching something made by Uwe Boll.