Film adaptations of video games began with a rocky reputation.
In their infancy, video game adaptations were maligned for their poor quality, with infamous flops like “Super Mario Bros.” (1993) and “Doom” failing to impress both fans of the original series and new audiences. Even financial successes, such as Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Resident Evil” series, did not impress critics and are remembered as cinematic cash grabs rather than classics.
Recent adaptations have improved this reputation, with films like “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “A Minecraft Movie,” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (2023) releasing to high viewership and much-improved critical results.
However, as a fan of these games, I believe they do not represent quality adaptations. Each one accurately represents the games’ aesthetics, but their stories fail to capture the emotional heart of the game in favor of generic children’s film plots that have been done to death.
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” replaces the game’s sense of boundless fun and adventure with a boring emotional throughline about living up to familial expectations. Minecraft’s sense of quiet, slow creativity is lost in “A Minecraft Movie,” yet another film in which an outcast kid becomes a hero.
When it was announced that famous YouTuber Mark Fischbach, also known as Markiplier, was adapting the video game Iron Lung, I feared the same result.
Iron Lung is a short, independent horror game set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world where the player must search a mysterious moon covered by an ocean of blood, looking for any hope of saving the dying human race. The game is incredibly light on story, with the main character being unnamed and unexplored. Most of the game contains no dialogue, as the player hunts down points of interest in a rickety submarine and photographs them with a slow black-and-white camera.
The game is excellent at creating tension, as the player cannot see outside their submarine, relying only on a map to navigate. It is easy to be jumpscared by the eerie, low-quality photographs the player takes, the submarine’s motion sensors indicating another creature in the ocean or even by not paying attention and crashing into a wall. The game experience is also short — even shorter than the film — and only tells a story through a lore terminal where the player can read about the world’s backstory.
For these reasons, I thought the game was impossible to adapt. It would have been easy for the film to fall into the same trap as the above adaptations, supplanting the game’s unique traits with a generic sci-fi story. So I was pleasantly surprised when the film turned out to be really good.
More surprising was the fact that I liked it even though it wasn’t an “accurate” adaptation. The visual aesthetic was completely overhauled, swapping the game’s uncanny Nintendo 64-style graphics for a dark, industrial look. Instead of the nameless, faceless player avatar in the game, film protagonist, Simon, was a fully fleshed-out character with speaking lines and a gradually revealed backstory.
These changes are not cheap deviations that help to align the movie with similar films, but the essence of what makes the movie interesting. Just as crucial is that the film intentionally deviates from the game to provide an experience tailored to the medium of film, rather than striving for accuracy to its own detriment. The redesigned submarine’s appearance both makes the film feel natural in live action and conveys the claustrophobia of the game, even though the player character cannot move around the tiny space. The same cannot be said for “A Minecraft Movie,” which turns the game’s iconic and cute creatures into accurate-looking yet uncanny CGI abominations.
The dialogue and additional characters added to the “Iron Lung” movie allow it to tell a different story more suited to film. An hour of silence works for a horror game that tries to make you feel alone and scared, but a film cannot recreate that feeling when we are viewers rather than the ones driving the experience.
On the other hand, many viewers of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” felt that its celebrity voice cast was chosen for marketing purposes rather than artistic ones, and many were taken out of the story when hearing Chris Pratt’s voice constantly coming out of Mario’s mouth, a character who usually speaks infrequently outside of exclamations in the games.
Simon’s characterization is the most interesting change in the “Iron Lung” film. First, the fact that he receives a backstory conveys the information previously found in the lore terminal. In the game, that was a strong point, allowing the player to search for clues that hinted at the game’s backstory. Since this is impossible in a film, that information was transferred to the protagonist, allowing him to undergo a character arc in which he atones for his previous actions. This type of progression is unnecessary for a silent player avatar that only exists as a window into the game world, but it does make for a far more compelling film experience.
The character arcs in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “A Minecraft Movie” are generic and underdeveloped, feeling like they are present out of obligation, not because the writers had a vision for a unique character journey within the world of the game.
Both the video game and film versions of Iron Lung provide unique experiences that leverage the strengths of their respective mediums in ways unavailable to the other. The game maximizes the sense of fear in a way only a game can, so the film takes a different approach, telling a story that would be boring in-game. They are complementary experiences that show the value of adaptation, which other video game movies and shows fail to realize.
Why make an adaptation that is completely accurate when you could instead alter the story and characters to create a unique experience that does what the game could not?
Kevin O’Connell is a sophomore majoring in political science.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.