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Gore Verbinski takes up Bioshock

By Priyankar ⋅ May 9, 2008 ⋅ Trackback this Post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

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Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy has signed a deal with Universal Pictures to direct an adaptation of Bioshock, a first person shooter video game. It was highly praised for venturing into moral grey zones, its haunting atmosphere and its Ayn Rand inspired dystopian storyline. It received an aggregate rating of 96% good reviews on metacritic and has sold more than 2 million copies till date. In the game, the player takes on the role of a plane crash survivor who has to explore the underwater city of Rapture. The city was designed to be an objectivist utopia. But events spiraled out of control.

The article in variety reveals that the publishers of the game, Take-two Interactive have obtained a multi-million dollar advance against gross points in the movie. It is the biggest video game deal since the aborted Halo venture. Numerous studios approached Take-Two since the game was published in August’07 but they waited till the end of the year when it swept the various gaming industry awards.

Verbinski noted that Rapture’s art deco design and visually arresting characters, such as the mechanical Big Daddys who protect genetically mutated girls called Little Sisters, particularly inspired him to see the game as a film. The movie is being adapted by John Logan, who has worked on the scripts for Sweeney Todd, The Aviator, The Last Samurai and Gladiator. He is also writing the original screenplay for the Lincoln biopic to be directed by Steven Spielberg. It sure sounds impressive. And Verbinski is adept at popcorn action fantasy.

The track record for movie versions of video games has been worse than bad. It’s been terrible till now. The very strength of imparting decision-making abilities on the players which makes games addictive and immersive, can turn into a debilitating weakness in a movie. More often than not, they turn out to be a series of mindless action sequences. After all it’s not that much fun to watch someone else playing a game on the screen. In fact Roger Ebert has a long-running debate with readers on his web-site regarding this issue. He argues that a video-game cannot reach the level of art. I don’t know sufficiently about games to comment on that but at present, it will take something exceptional to convince me that it is worth turning a game into a movie. In this case the storyline sounds intriguing and the crew is decent. Let’s see if the outcome is worth all the hype.

(Source: Variety)