Video game movies always get the short end of the stick. Not to say they can't be awesome. Prince of Persia, Mortal Kombat and maybe the first Resident Evil film were cool. But ya the rest.............not so much.
Why did Alone in the Dark, Street Fighter, King of Fighters etc etc all suck? For a variety of reasons.
- totally did not resemble the game
- characters were too different
- changed the plot too much
- changed the whole genre of the movie (eg: Alone in the Dark changed from a survival horror game to a loud guns a blazing action movie)
So it got me thinking. If "infamous" directors got their hands on other video game rights, how else would they totally screw with the movies???
Here are some fictional synopses of how i figured such movies would turn out.
NOTE: the following story synopses are based on each director's "style" of screwing up a game's story. They are meant to only poke fun and not to be take seriously.
1) PORTAL
by Paul WS Anderson (past movies: Resident Evil series. Trademark style elements: formula, Swat team, heavy metal/synth music, adding unecessary elements not present in the video game)
Inside Apature Science, a top secret underground robotics research facility, an unidentified person attempts to hack into a computer terminal intending to sabotage the facility. Just then, the facility's security A.I called "G.L.A.Dos" awakens and attempts to stop the sabotage by sealing all exits and gassing everyone in the facility. All personnel seemingly die from the fatal nerve toxin released into the air.
An eye opens. It belongs to a woman who wakes up from her slumber in a sterile white room. She seems to be suffering from amnesia and its is left ambiguous whether the events in the prologue are just a part of a dream. She is identified by a name tag on her orange jumpsuit "Chell". In a daze she wakes up, exits her sterile white room and into a huge hall. Behind her, the white room she was in suddenly closes up and descends into the floor as a pedestal in front of her rises and produce a palm size device that fits like a glove. Chell silently puts on the device and clenches her fist. The device shoots out an orange charge which hits the wall and dissapates into nothingness. Chell tries again, and the device shoots out a blue charge. The nature of the shots are unknown.
Just then the wall behind Chell opens and lights turn on, beckoning her to walk into a corridor. At the end of a corridor stands a large steel door. As she reaches the door, which turns out to be a door to an elevator, it opens and a S.W.A.T team enters, quickly securing the area and taking Chell into custody. The team report in their status to an unknown listener when the elevator behind themd detonates and plummets down the shaft. The team is now stranded.
Suddenly, a computerised voice communicates with them and welcomes them to the Aperture science testing facility. The team makes their way from room to room. intending to reach the GLADOS core and shut down the rogue A.I. They discover that the device Chell has is a portal gun and use it to navigate hard to reach areas. Along the way, GLADOS uses traps and stuff to slowly kill off the team.
When they finally reach GLADOS and turn her off, it also turns off the locking mechanisms on a number of vaults deep within the facility. From those vaults come the illegal cybernetic experiments of Aperture Science; lethal walking turret guns, shambling human/cyborg hybrids and a hulking robot bruiser called "Dog".
Suspecting a traitor among them, Can the team pull together to survive the horrors within the halls of Aperature science? Will they make it out alive? Slowly, Chells memory starts to return and she recalls that she is an intern at Aperature science. She discovered the illegal experiments Aperture was conducting. At the same time, she was in contact with an unknown informant who actually turned out to be GLADOS herself. Chell was tricked into activating GLADOS in the hopes that GLADOS would be able to contain and destroy the illegal experiments and then expose Aperture's atrocities to the world.
A desperate chase sequence ensues with the remaining SWAT members and Chell running and gunning down the cyborgs and mobile turrets. Now we get to see the Portal device in action as Chell uses it to get the team across a bottemless chasm. With the portal device, the team makes it back to th facility's hangar bay and confront "Dog", the hulking 20 feet tall robotic monstrosity. The last of the SWAT team die and Chell is left to confront the monster. She manages to trap the monster in between portals in a perpetual state of falling until it reaches terminal velocity. Then she re-opens another portal that sends Dog crashing to its doom.
Now safe, Chell makes a break for the door that would open up to the surface. However when the door opens, she finds herself in a much larger underground facility with similar doors leading to other areas. A gas fills the room and slowly puts Chell to sleep. GLADOS' voice mentions that Chell has passed phase one of the tests. On to phase 2.
2) ANMESIA
by Gordon Chan (Past movies: King of Fighters. trademark style elements: Alternate dimension, kung fu, overly convoluted and unresolved plot, police/swat team, magic.)
The setting is modern day Europe. Daniel has been a private detective for five years. Five years ago, he suffered from amnesia and cannot remember anything about his life prior to his time as a detective. All he knows is that he has survived near death experiences mysteriously. His only clue is a mysterious shard that he keeps with him as a good luck piece. He recieves a mysterious letter one day telling him to investigate an old European castle in which it is suspected that organised crime members use it for a hideout.
Daniel travels to castle Brunnenburg and encounters two hired thugs intending to kill him. Again, Daniel survives and makes it to the castle but soon discovers that it is abandoned. After exploring the castle, Daniel enters a dark room and is knocked out by an unseen force.
He wakes up in a dungeon with a note in front of him. His shard is missing and the note tells him in complete exposition that the shard has been taken by the evil Baron Alexander to be used in an occult ritual by reconstructing some orb. Daniel has to stop him. As he makes his way through the castle, Daniel experiences hallucinations and weird noises that slowly drive him mad. His only refuge is this torchlight that he has. When he finally encounters a room full of zombies, his mind snaps. He flies into a mad rage, busting out kung fu moves he never knew he had. With slow motion too. Only by turning his torchlight back on does Daniel return to sanity.
In another room, Daniel conveniently finds a note seemingly written by himself. It reveals that the shard that Daniel has been keeping has imbuned him with "interdimensional powers". (lol wut??). When his madness takes over, Daniel is able to tap into an otherworldy dimension and call on the power of a "dark shadow" in which he is able to see the physical forms of demonic forces. The dimension also imbues him with supernatural fighting skills.
In an undergrond flooded passage, Daniel encounters a seemingly invisible humanoid creature. He allows his insanity to take over and the room around him changes to something out of this world; everything takes on a purple hue, stone turns to metal, wet vines turn to wires. The monster is now visible as a grotesque scaly humanoid and Daniel engages it in a kung fu throwdown. Every hit that contacts lights up the place with a bright flash.
Just as Daniel is about to get swarmed by evil zombies in a big hall, A SWAT TEAM BREAKS IN and fires wildly, taking down all the zombies. The Swat team is led by a man named Agrippa. Together, Daniel and the team fight their way into the inner sanctum where he finally confronts the evil Baron. The baron explains his plans that involved luring special people to his castle, killing them and extracting their "vitae". But only Daniel managed to escape before the experiment could be completed. The Baron drinks the vitae and manifests mystical powers. Daniel gives in to the full power of the dark Shadow and engages the Baron in climatic combat.
Agrippa reveals himself to be an ancient wizard in disguise and he helps Daniel fight the Baron. He retrieves Daniel's crystal shard and produces a similar shard of his own. Harnessing otherworldly powers, the shards produce an energy chain that binds the Baron's soul into another dimension.
The world is now safe again.
3) HALF LIFE
by Andrej Bartkowiak (movies: Doom, Street Fighter Legend of Chun Li. Trademark style elements: long first act devoid of action, cliche, super soldier experiments, more fighting and less shooting, swearing, excessive violence.)
A disaster at the Black Mesa unleashes an unspeakable animalistic horror that chases a group of scientists through the dark corridors. One by one, they are picked off until one scientist manages to lock himself in the communications room and send out a distress signal. A knocking sound comes from a vent above the scientist. The vent swings open and a figure in what looks like an orange hazard suit drops down. Just then the door behind the scientist explodes open revealing a hulking otherworldly horror. THe man in the orange suit brings up his shot gun and fires. The gun's reports are lost amid the screams, gunfire and chaos happening all over the facility.
A short time later, a team of commandos are sent in. Among them is Sgt Adrian Shepherd.
The team break into the lockedown facility with the objective of rescuing any scientist and retrieving a valuable piece of data deep within the Delta complex. After a harrowing search turns up nothing, the team decides to venture deeper. They encounter their first scientist and their first alien creature. The scientist babbles something about interdimensional travel before dying. The team carry on through twisted passage ways lined with dead bodies but never encounter any hostiles.
The team split up to cover more ground but One by one the team is ambushed and killed. The rest of the team get to him but all that is left is a corpse. All the while, screams of terror can be heard in other parts of the complex. At the entrence to the Beta complex, the team regroup in time to fend off a hulking alien grunt that fires piercing insects from its arm. Shepherd and the team leader, "G-Man" are all that is left when reinforcements arrive in the form of a rag tag band of scientists and a security guard named Barney. Together they take down the alien.
G-Man starts to interrogate the scientists brutally and it is revealed that retrieving the data and survivors was only their secondary objective. Their primary objective was to kill a man named Gordon Freeman. Shepherd expresses disdain in the mission stating that saving this group of survivors come first but G-man insists on taking the scientists with them into Delta Complex. As they journey deeper, the scientists start to loose their nerve and tensions mount between them and the soldiers. Inside a large room, they discover that the scientists were working on genetically engineered soldiers using an element that they discovered from a portal experiment meant to breach another dimension. The creatures loose in the facility are those failed "super soldier" experiments. Furthermore, it is revealed that the element has been released into the air, causing random mutations in everyone exposed to it, including themselves. Looking at each other, they start to notice od pigmentations and small growths on their bodies.
Tension with the scientists turns all out hostile as they are now held captives by a crazed G-Man. After accessing the Delta complex, one of the scientists goes crazy and suddenly betray the soldiers, locking them and Barney inside a vast network of passageways and killing the other scientists while slowly mutating into a hideous creature (resembling the video games' "Vortigaunts"). The creature escapes but just then, G-Man catches sight of a familiar face: it is Gordon Freeman crossing the gangway just across from where they are. Determined to fulfil the primary objective, G-man pursues Gordon who returns fire with a prototyle E-Gon gun (it fires a blue stream of plasma). Sheperd and Barney try to stop G-Man and convince him to scrap the mission and escape but G-man kills Barney and knocks out Sheperd.
When he awakens, Sheperd gears up and navigates the Delta complex, killing mutants as he goes along. He encounters Bullsquids, houdeyes and even a Gargantua which he dispatches by luring it into a room filled with motion detection turrets and the activating those turrets.
Sheperd finally catches up to G-man and sees him sitting among dead human bodies. G-man has murdered all remaining survivors that he encountered in a fit of rage at having failed his mission. Gordon Freeman is nowhere to be seen. He blames Sheperd for his failure and the two soldiers, by now seemingly enhanced by the alien mutagen, engage in heated super powered hand-to-hand combat.
After a prolonged fight, Sheperd kills G-Man with a wrench. As he slumps to the floor in fatigue he glimpses Gordon Freeman walking toward him, then helping him up and dragging him toward another door. The door opens to an elevator as as they ascend to the surface, Sheperd drops his gun.
4) DEAD SPACE
by Uwe Boll (past movies: House of the Dead, farcry, Alone in the dark. trademark style elements: sex, nudity, taking comedy too seriously, over the top action sequences, utilising the names and nothing else from the source material)
The year is 2057 and here we see the USS Ishimura, giant colony spaceship. On board, the civillians are celebrating the Captain's birthday by throwing a ship-wide rave party. Sadly, poor Issac Clarke and his friends are on duty mining a nearby Asteroid. After a lot of complaining, the six friends decide to not give a shit anymore and just return to Ishimura. Issac and his girlfriend Nicole barge in on two of their friends, John and Synthia having zero-G sex. They chase them out of the storage compartment to go up front and pilot the shuttle back to Ishimura. They begin a prolonged sequence of docking with the Ishimura. All the while, Synthia is secretly giving John
a handjob.
They arrive on board to find it seemingly deserted. The main hall where the party was is the scene of a bloody massacre with body parts floating in the punch bowl and dead bodies everywhere. Suddenly grotesque mishappen creatures emerge and chase them through the ship. They get seperated but Issac and Nicole manage to seal themselves inside a storage room. During the lull, they talk about themselves and about how Nicole is scared of the dark. Issac comforts her and they are about to have sex when the four missing friends barge in on them.
Making their way to the bridge and the main control room, the friends encounter another group of creatures. Surprisingly the asian chick knows kung fu and takes on the creatures in hand to hand combat. Not surprisingly, she gets overpowerd and devoured by the creatures.
The friends run in terror to the main control room where they find the captain holding out. He tells the gang about some horrible experiment gone wrong down in the science labs and how they have to go and fix it. He then opens a hidden case to reveal an array of high tech weaponry. Now armed to the teeth, the captain lead the 5 remaining friends down to the engine room in order to set a self-destruct sequence. Within the engine room, they engage a huge horde of monsters in a prolonged largely slow-motion gun battle. At the end of the uberly cool slo mo, the african american dude gets killed off.
After the captain activates the self destruct sequence, he is killed by a new monster. One that resembles a foetus with tentacles. Whats left of the friends try to escape back to the hangar bay but they get seperated again. Synthia and John are killed while Issac and Nicole make it back to their ship.
Shipwide engine detonation is due in ten minutes as Issac and his girlfriend make it to the hangar. There however, the confront Dr Kyne, the instigator of the ship wide massacre. He was the one who tampered with genetic code to create grotesque monsters. The couple engage Dr Kyne in battle with knives. Nicole is stabbed and Issac kills Kyne in a fit of anger.
Issac then leaves with Nicole's corpse on board their shuttle as the USS Ishimura detonates. Issac ponders his fate and whether he would be rescued. Behind him, Nicole's head turns to look at Issac; her eyes now crimsom red like the creatures in the Ishumura.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, pray that these projects never materialise.
