REVIEW: Alone in the Dark

There are times when I may forget a movie that I had watched.  It isn't very often, but it does happen. I can quickly recover by looking at the movie's IMDB page.  That jogs the memory.  Last year, however, I saw a film that I had completely forgotten by year end.  The IMDB page didn't jog my memory.  Reading the entire plot synopsis on Wikipedia didn't work.  I even re-watched the first twenty minutes and nothing could make me recall the film that I know I had seen.  This was a first.  But it just got outdone.

Three days ago, I decided that I should finally watch an Uwe Boll movie.  For people who don't know, Boll is a director who is completely unapologetic about the quality of his movies, ready to insult and get into a boxing ring with his detractors.  Not that Rotten Tomatoes means everything, but his highest scored movie is at 25%, and he has five films that scored less than five percent.  It is one of those films, Alone in the Dark (1% on Rotten Tomatoes) that I decided to dig into.

The film starts off with a narrative scrawl of text to explain the setup for the movie.  It is quite long.  Not only do we get to read all of this, but it is also spoken.  After a number of minutes of that, we jump to narration by Christian Slater, who plays Edward Carnby.  That's a total of three devices to deliver expository dialogue right off the bat, and it doesn't end there.  Everything is overly explained. And yet, somehow, a miracle happened.  Even with being told everything along the way, I completely lost track of what was happening.

This film was watched over three different sittings, but that's not what caused me to feel like I was forgetting what was happening.  In all honesty, there were so many times that I completely blanked out while watching.  I ended up getting trapped into thinking about grocery lists, what was going to be for dinner, what chores I needed to do, and so on.  All matter of mundane found its way into my mind while I should have been paying attention to this film.  Seriously, I cannot give you a coherent outline of what happened.  As hard as I tried, I just couldn't pay attention to this hack job of cinema, this duel-seated, century old, full to the brim, outhouse of a film.

(Alone in the Dark kind of outright stole from Alien, even to the point where monsters were called Xenos)

This is the story, at least what I can remember of it.  There is an ancient native tribe.  They made something out of gold, perhaps?  And then an orphanage had a Christian Slater, and a nun stood outside.  Then the Christian Slater found an artifact, and Tara Reid hasn't been in anything of note since 2005 other than Sharknado.  Bunny Lebowski is looking at artifacts, and then is completely useless and doesn't add anything to the plot, outside of suddenly having sex with the Christian Slater.  Some old guy has a boat, and I think he didn't know what was in a box.  Then an animal got loose.  Another old guy liked artifacts, and I think he liked the animals that got loose.  Suddenly a tippity top notch squad of soldiers show up.  They look like they are on their way to roller derby.  Rock music blares, and people are shot.  There's a gold mine, and a bobby trap pit has a ladder built into the side of it.  Then an old man yells at the Christian Slater, and a knife kills him, but he opens an ancient closet door.  And then I think something happened, and Stephen Dorff runs through a mine tunnel that has a lot of natural light.  Then there is a vacant city, and seven minutes and forty six seconds of credits.

Actually, I think that was a pretty concise summary of the film.

There is a huge part of me that enjoys watching awful movies, but that part of me was not satiated with Alone in the Dark.  It was just boring as anything you could ever imagine.  There were some awful special effects that lightened things up a little, but nothing was a proper cure for the comatose state that Uwe Boll put me in.  This is the first movie, ever, that I forgot about while I was watching it.  It would be getting zero stars, except the Christian Slater did some sort of flip via way of MacBook Pro.

That is all.

Rating - 0.5 out of 4 stars

Are Video Game Movies Really That Bad?

This week on the Rotten Tomatoes there is a piece that ranks the scores of all video game movies, showing the recently released Rampage as having the best critical score.  The interesting thing here is that Rampage sits at a 51% rating.  That means that all forty-six other films have a score worse than that.  What this illustrates is a verification of the feelings throughout the years since Super Mario Bros. came out in 1993 that video games do not make compelling cinema.

It is my belief that a video game could turn into a solid movie.  We haven't seen it yet, but there is nothing stopping it from happening, other than maybe getting better pens to scribe the screenplay.  An intellectual property doesn't need to have any kind of backstory to turn into a solid film.  The LEGO Movie in 2014 proved that.  Stories for video games, I would argue, are getting better and better.  The industry deals with so much money that the production of triple A games are seeing larger and larger budgets to ensure the games not only sell the initial product, but that they keep a steady player base that will buy additional content or loot boxes post release.

The price tag of a triple A game hovers around $80 on a console, and players expect the best.  In the hands of the player, and a potential nemesis to the game developers, is the internet forum.  When one of those expensive games doesn't deliver in all areas, people will flood the forums, especially if the game is part of a loved franchise.  Because so much money is made for developers (and shareholders, something which seems to be the driving force behind post release monetizing schemes) after the release of a game, and because the budgets for the game are so high, developers cannot have a largely disgruntled community.  It was shown with the release of EA's Battlefront 2 (part of a Star Wars video game franchise dating back to 2004, and with ever a loyal base) that fan reaction can force a studio to change course even before a game comes out.  Fan reaction can spread fast and furious, pre-sales can be refunded, and ill-will be generated.  Because of all of that, parts of the game such as story need to be better than ever before.  This should set up a better foundation for transforming the properties to a appetizing film version.

A video game in recent years that had a really compelling story line to it was Assassin's Creed.  I honestly don't care about stories when I play video games, but I was right into the one that was in front of my from the moment I put the disc into my Xbox 360.  It was really imaginative, and provided amazing settings for game play.  I would have thought that this video game, more than any other, would have the best chance for success in theatres.

The studios seemed to share that sentiment and injected $125 million into the film and cast talents such as Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, and Brendan Gleeson.  That's five Oscar nominations between them, two wins, and while Gleeson had no Oscar noms, he did have three Golden Globe nominations.  That's a serious amount of acting power.  The director was Justin Kurzel, who directed had directed three three feature films, all scoring eighty percent on Rotten Tomatoes or higher (a personal favourite of mine was Snowtown Murders).  The elements were there for a solid movie.

Even with the pedigree that it had, Assassin's Creed could only muster support from 18% from critics and $10 million on its opening weekend.  It was a domestic flop, sitting alongside other big budget North American video game failures such as Warcraft and the $200 budgeted Prince of Persia.  Using popular titles for movies has proven not to be a guarantee for money made, and throwing large sums of money at them may not be the best idea.

While a number of the video game movies seem to be aiming with their sights quite low (such as the six that are directed by Use Boll, all 7% or under on Rotten Tomatoes) there have been a number that are trying for mass market appeal.  Having seen a number of these movies (four of them in theatre, sadly), I can say that it isn't one specific problem that plagues them all.  The closest commonality in their failing would probably be story, but, as I mentioned, the source material is doing better in that realm now.

It's not specifically video games that aren't well done, it is pretty much any adaptation of a game.  Battleship, Dungeons and Dragons, and Clue didn't receive a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  In fact, I think that the only movie based on a game with a fresh rating is Ouija: Origin of Evil.  It is crazy to think that of all of the movies based on types of games, the only critically received film is a sequel to a movie that scored 6% on RT.  I would love to say the reason why that movie succeeded where others didn't is because of the skills of director Mike Flanagan (I am a huge 'Flana-fan'), but other skilled directors have been in there and failed.  I already mentioned Justin Kurzel, and a favourite of mine, Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code) directed  the mostly woeful Warcraft.

For some reason, movies based on games appear to be cursed.  Whether they're sourced out to directors with notoriously poorly received movies (Uwe Boll and Paul W.S. Anderson account for 23% of all video game movies ever made) or handed over to proven talents, video game movies just happen to fail.  It's not some systemic issue happening here.  It's not because there aren't rich and enchanting worlds to tap into or backstories that captivate.  It simply is a case of coincidence.  There will one day be a well received video game movie.  I believe it will happen, and, laugh at me if you will, I could even see in the future a movie based off of a video game being in Oscar contention.  The games are continuously getting better and better, with many already setting their sights on having blockbuster quality content and talent.  They will shake the curse soon enough.