About that ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ movie …

Via Ben Fritz and the Variety Cut Scene blog: Shadow of the Colossus is being adapted for the big screen.

Sigh.

This probably a bad idea. I’m sure to somebody in a boardroom at Sony (which published the game and is backing the film), it looks like a good idea. The game sold well enough. It’s a favorite of critics and players (including this one). Unlike a lot of action games, it’s incredibly moving and cinematic at times. It’s the only game to ever make me tear up because of an emotion other than frustration.

It’s pretty strange, then, just how poorly suited Shadow of the Colossus actually is for a film adaptation. There are practically no characters beyond the player character. There’s hardly any dialog outside of the intro and ending. There is zero action in between the 16 giants the player must first find, then figure out how to take down. Where other games fill the space between high points with pointless fetch quests or vapid townspeople, Colossus designer Fumito Ueda created a barren wasteland with nothing but miles of deserts, forests, lakes and ravines for the player to explore.

Defying common sense and conventional wisdom, this is actually one of the game’s biggest assets. The emptiness of the cursed and isolated world Ueda created imparted a feeling of loneliness on me as I made my way through it. Besides a few birds and scampering lizards, the only other souls I encountered were the colossi, the dead woman I hoped to bring back to life, and my horse. The solitary, sinking feeling I got as I wandered the terrain made the ending all the more bittersweet. I’d done what I had set out to do, but to what end? The girl is alive, but what kind of life will she have if she’s trapped in such a lonely place? For me, the desolate landscape was as much a character in this story as was the lively and life-like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4.

It worked so well only because I spent so many hours in that place, alone. Passively watching a shortened version of someone else’s journey there will not be the same.

Something else the game lacks that actually added to its effectiveness for me, again despite conventional wisdom: a back story. You have no idea where you’ve come from, or why the girls is dead. There is no cut scene explaining the details of some ancient myth about bringing souls back to life. There are no explicit instructions about why you must do what you’re about to do. So much of the storyline is implied, and I loved that. There is something about being in the shoes of a character that makes implied narrative work so well. Was it my fault the girl died? Was it just an accident? What will happen when she finally opens her eyes — if she ever does? What is this place? I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, and I would never try to, but for this player the questions fueled my motivation to keep going, even as other questions about the consequences of my actions began to creep up on me the further I went.

My fear is that the filmmakers will be tempted to fill in the spaces Ueda artfully left open. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog, lead writer Justin Marks said he will try to avoid adding cliches like a cheesy sidekick. But in the same interview he also says SOTC holds such great potential for a film adaptation because there is so little to begin with and the writers can “start building” on what’s there rather than “tearing down” the things that won’t fit in the two-hour screenplay. Marks also says fans shouldn’t be afraid of adapting stories from one medium into another, citing how many of the greatest films were book adaptations. He has a point, I guess, but can somebody show me a game-based movie that comes close to being watchable?

So Shadow of the Colossus fans are anxious. Yet if the movie somehow manages to be well-done and true to the game’s spirit, might that lead a few more people back to Ueda’s modern classic? I thought The Watchmen movie failed to translate very well to the big screen, but it did get me to pick up a copy of the graphic novel, which I hadn’t read before. The hype turned me onto the book, and helped me appreciate the original work for what it was.

Maybe it’ll be a blockbuster and turns new legions of players onto the game. Or maybe Sony will go the next step in cashing in, and just offer those people the inevitable tie-in — Shadow of the Colossus: The Movie: The Game, featuring a third-person cover mechanic, rocket launchers and a multi-player death match mode sold seperately as DLC.