@Andy_117 said:
@JoelTGM said:
@FCDRandy said:
I cannot imagine a situation where Half Life or Portal as a movie are any good, JJ Abrams or not.
There's no reason they have to follow the exact plot of the video games. If they used the setting from Half Life it would be awesome. Kind of like District 9 maybe, with a very realistic feeling world, but with futuristic elements. I've always thought it would be cool to see those half life baddies on the big screen, with their stun baton and masked electronic voice. It's like a Nazi invasion in the future, but not as ugly as Killzone. And you know, Gordon Freeman is sorta like a super hero when he puts on that suit.
Personally, the idea of a drama-comedy set in old Aperture starring JK Simmons as a pre-dead-cos-moon-dust Cave Johnson makes me giddy. They could be doing a bunch of dubious pseudo-science! Or maybe even founding the company! Man, any kind of Portal side-story that doesn't focus on GLaDOS or Chell would probably be amazing. A Ratman movie? A Caroline movie? A movie about the doomed Aperture Borealis ship?
I just don't think the story or setting of either franchise lends itself particularly well to a non-interactive experience.
Portal rewarded non-linear solutions to puzzle mechanics with a narrative that informed the setting. It was well-written and acted, but at most a Portal movie would be origin stories of ancillary characters. A Cave Johnson movie would just be a story of an eccentric industrialist who goes crazy, and then it's just "and after this, he was the guy what did the Portal thing." A Rat Man movie would just be a story of a dude on the run from robots, and then it's just "and after this, he was the guy what wrote on the walls in the Portal thing." If you're going to make those movies, just go ahead and make them independent of the Portal connection, which would be tenuous at best, even with the best writing.
Half-Life, on the other hand, has just been systematically filtered through countless rose-colored lenses that people forget what a linear and self-contained experience it was. You're a dude who shoots some bad dudes and runs away from some other stuff and then a gravity gun. That's not a good setup for a movie, and even if it were, any way you shoehorn it into the Half-Life fiction, it's still just "and then this dude was the guy who showed up at that one part in Half-Life." Both games benefit well from the depth of their writing, but not enough that thoroughly exploring the edges of these worlds or doing anything outside of continuing the stories already in progress is a worthwhile pursuit.
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