Well, we’ve seen quite a few movies over the last decade that have been based on video games, from Doom, Resident Evil, to Silent Hill.
But look out! Now Universal Studios has announced that it will bring you a movie based on the arcade classic Asteroids!
That’s quite an admission and may not bode well for the future of Hollywood.
Though there is a big difference between making a movie about Doom and making a movie about Asteroids; Doom has a plot – such as it was – and characters. Asteroids has neither a plot nor characters. It was simply a game where you are a spaceship flying around blowing up chunks of interstellar debris. On the one hand moviegoer/gamers can’t complain that Hollywood botched the story (see Aliens Vs Predator – which would have been a better movie if they’d followed the storyline from the AVP2 video game). It also leaves the scriptwriters with a nearly blank slate. All they have to do to satisfy the Asteroids requirement is to set the movie in space and have asteroids. Lots of asteroids.
With all the remakes of old classics like the Taking of Pelham 123 or Inglorious Bastards (a sure ripoff of the Dirty Dozen movie) and now with Asteroids – The Movie I have come to the conclusion that Hollywood is like a Red Giant about to go supernova. It has exhausted nearly all of its usable fuel (original creativity) and is about to go nova.
We can only wait and see but with the failure of Doom and the last two Resident Evil movies I cannot help but be pesimistic.
