[Movie] Max Payne

Originally Posted by LeHah

No it wasn't. You can't improve on a Richard Donner movie.

It was a damn near word for word remake with better special effects and heavy application of a blue filter towards the end. It didn't improve on the original, no, but it wasn't a bad film per se. If someone had never seen the original I'm sure they'd enjoy it just fine. I know that most horror film remakes are shit compared to the original but Omen was ok.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

In a film where they didn't do much actual acting and spent most of the film practicing their moody glares, I think so. I guess the only way you'd ever know would be, you know, to actually watch the film rather than dismiss it out of hand because you have this weird, tenth grade film studies student opinion that films are there to be disseminated and poked at rather then watched and enjoyed. I'll bet you're one of those people who says that the Rob Zombie version of Halloween takes away all the suspense and tension of the film by revealing a bit about the character and having people actually get killed once in a while as opposed to anyone who's watched the original Halloween recently and realised that the majority of the film is Mike Myers shuffling around outside the school in broad daylight like a third rate WWE wrestler, looking more like a particularly unsubtle paedophile than a knife wielding psychopath. I'm not saying that the remake of Omen was a masterpiece, not by any stretch of the imagination but it is a decent film that brings the now-dated original up to pace. The Omen was never a really scary film and at least the remake injects a couple of shocks, even if you don't get to watch Gregory Peck looking a bit lost and constipated throughout proceedings.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Nintendonomicon

I'm with LeHah on this one. The Omen remake was terrible. Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles turn in pathetic performances, and the dialogue is awful. Mia Farrow is the only thing in that movie worth a damn. An enjoyable movie? Maybe, but you would have to have really bad taste to take it seriously.

LeHah admitted himself not to have seen the remake, the script is all but word for word lifted from the original and anyone who takes horror films seriously needs to reassess their priorities in life frankly. Then again, I've had a look in that horror movie thread and you've listed a lot of shit as "good" horror so I can safely ignore your opinion on the subject.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Alright, I'll give you that one. Still an ok film in my opinion though.

Aaaanyhow, back on topic, why does it matter so much to some of you kids that the film follows exactly the plot of the game? As I said when Hitman came out, a game and a film are hugely different media. If nothing else, the film will run to a couple of hours max whereas the game will take considerably longer. Granted the exposition sections probably don't amount to much time (Unless you're playing Metal Gear Cutscene of course) but the game is all about the action bits and anyway, the creators have a much longer timespan to develop the story. Also, everyone who's played the game knows the story already, why you'd be interesting in seeing the whole thing acted out exactly the same only without the interactive bits is beyond me.

Films are always based on game concepts, they're never really the film of the game because gamers already know what happens and casual viewers would probably find it dull. Let's face it, who ever plays Doom or Max Payne for the story? You play it for the shooting things, otherwise you'd jus download the cutscenes and save yourself £20. The fun of games is the interactivity so to make an interesting convertion to a passive media like film, something has to give so the story writers take the basic feel of the game, keep a few main characters as reference points and then make up the rest as they go along. A film following the plot of pretty much any computer game exactly would probably be overly long and pretty boring, that's why nobody makes them.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.