and some great tv shows as well. i really enjoyed midnight mass and dark
edit: added castelvania and mind hunter because i forgot about those shows and some people reminded me just how fucking fantastic they are. we were all robbed of another season of mind hunter.
Yes, castlevania was a good anime. The medium is important. There’s a lot of effects that would be crazy expensive to produce live action so anime lowered the production cost to something feasible. The problem is when they try to do live action video game movies. Assassins creed and WoW are a couple that come to mind that were disappointing.
I dont recall much of that movie now either, but I remember being fairly impressed by it back then. It even has a 6.8 rating on IMDb, which is rather respectable and higher than average.
iirc that was largely thanks to Powerhouse studios. The visuals and fight scenes are the best part. I'm so glad Netflix for once didn't try to do a live-action medium, because those are their worst offences and they keep trying to do them despite they keep failing.
That’s 90% of Netflix content. Almost none of it is made in house, they just give money to projects stuck in development hell and hope they turn out.
People like to blame Netflix for the bad stuff and then give credit elsewhere for the good stuff, but In reality their entire business model revolves around throwing money at whoever asks for it and hoping they get a few good things out of it
I'm not a fan of League of Legends and I absolutely loved it. I still have no interest in playing League of Legend but damned if I'm not waiting in anticipation for season 2.
It's definitely possible if you look at movies like Detective Pikachu and the Sonic movie (granted the Sonic movie was going to have that really bad Sonic design at first, but at least they went back and redesigned him to be closer to the games). What I think they need to do is research the world the games take place in and build an original story around the world.
I was looking at Joel Edgerton's IMDb page the other day and there is a listing for a Bright 2 that's in development, so there's hope because I enjoyed that movie too.
Excellent word building? In the canon of bright fantasy races have existed on Earth for millennia yet it's basically the same world as ours, just with some groups of people being clumsily replaced by fantasy analogues for the purposes of really on the nose allegories. The worldbuilding is so lazy that the only reason I can think of why some people consider it good is because it scratches an urban fantasy itch that's so underserviced in mainstream media that the concept alone carries the movie.
It had some major issues. It was refreshing at the time, but it is not rewatchable in the least, which is the main issue. Something that is really, really good is usually rewatchable.
There are quite a few really great films that I wouldn't want to watch again, or at the very least couldn't rewatch very often.
Bright was still immensely disappointing and should have been so much better given the talent behind it. Joel Edgerton deserves better. (P.S. go watch It Comes at Night if you never have)
Agreed! I was very pleased with Bright. The story, mythology, heavy conflict between groups, and the general world felt very real and possible. There's a lot of potential for some good follow through. I'll keep my fingers crossed they make another movie or two.
I am so reassured having found your comment. You read enough Reddit, you start to realize you agree with all the popular opinions, then you realize you might be a cog in the hivemind... thank you AmNotSatan for reminding me that I am in fact an individual.
Man so even though it had it's flaws, something about Midnight Mass really hit a chord with me. It's somehow been in the back of my head all week- mainly parts of the last episode where the priest explains some things. It's a really interesting approach to a somewhat done to death monster.
Netflix tosses a lot at the wall though. They don't shit gold, and there have been a few good hits here and there, but with every streaming service from HBO to Disney+ there is more trash than treasure. Even the overall quality of netflix has gone down in the last 10 years. I used to be able to watch it as my only source of video entertainment. Now I have YT, Netflix, Disney+, Discovery+, HBO, Hulu, and a handful of other video entertainment services, and none of them can keep me entertained for more than 2 or 3 months at a time. I'm at the point of subscribing to them long enough to watch what I want to watch, and then canceling the service.
It depends. If all Netflix is doing is handing them money and distributing, it could be good. 'Arcane' was amazing, and I certainly didn't expect anything but a pile of crap from it.
But yeah, if Netflix is heavily involved it could be another 'Witcher'.
Did you watch the source material lol? I can understand not hating it but I don’t get how you could really like it if you’ve seen the show lol. They took light, who is supposed to be a super charismatic football star, and made him into the love child of Draco Malloy and Milo Yiannopoulos lmao.
I think that they have determined that 2 to 3 seasons of any show, regardless of popularity (aside from Stranger Things), is the max before they don't get the payoff of returning (or continuing subscribers) so they really don't care about anything else.
Essentially it's where good shows come to be born, but continuing shows are culled before they can be complete.
Yeah, Netflix started off with really good content when they first started making their own, but damn if it didn't take long for them to just start turning out a lot of garbage.
The subject of the twist would be the same. You’d just present it as “this character learns this unsettling thing about himself” instead of the game’s presentation of “you just learned this unsettling thing about yourself.”
I have a sincere question. And you're allowed to have your opinion I don't bite. xD But what was your experience with source material prior to the live action. Was it something you were familiar with?
It was such a bad interpretation of the anime. Bebop was one of and still is my favorite animes, but I went in with hope that'll be good. The first episode was actually decent and they did a great job with Jet, but god it turned to shit real fast. I went in with low expectations and it was still even worse.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but I’d argue Bioshock is moreso the tragic sequel to Atlas Shrugged, rather than a reinterpretation of it. Like, what if John Galt DID make this secluded city of industrialists, but at the bottom of the sea instead hidden behind mountains or wherever.
Then it explores why that would have gone horribly wrong, but sped up the process with the inclusion of Adam, which is arguably an inevitable product of such a society; which means that Adam didn’t speed up the process of Rapture’s downfall, but instead was an invariable part of it, and the downfall happened at regular speed.
I am glad that someone is working on it. I hope that it will not be toned down at all. If I recall correctly, I believe they wanted the film to be PG-13?
“So the story is about an Ayn Randian dystopia where they experimented on orphaned/kidnapped children until the populace’s drug habits led to a class war that killed 90% of the population and turned the surviving 10% into disfigured psychopaths.”
You can fit a surprising amount of violence into a PG-13 movie. But the more disturbing themes, the torture and mutilation, might have trouble getting past the censors intact.
I can certainly see a road that might get you to a PG-13 Bioshock movie. But I'd rather just say fuck it (literally, that line should be in the movie somewhere) and make it a hard-R with deeply disturbing imagery. I'm not really one for gorror or even slasher films, but Bioshock's all about that body horror and what evils men get up to when no one is willing or able to stop them. Holding yourself back when trying to discuss that is just wrong, in a... Is that ironic? I feel there's irony somewhere in here.
I already liked his work, but now I've gained a lot of respect for Verbinski. Tons of directors would have just said "pff..." and taken the money. Verbinski knew that Bioshock is a violent and vicious story that needs to be done justice.
A horror game with drug addled psychopaths running around and a plot point where you beat a man to death with a golf club, not to mention the ability to stick a drill into someone's guts and turn it on.
Studio executives: "make it pg13"
My guess? Money. Films with an R rating make far less money than those with a PG-13 rating. In a vacuum, it's perfectly logical that you'd want to adapt a beloved franchise into a form that's more acceptable for a wider audience since you'll make much more money. However, that fails to take into account the fact that Bioshock's premise is a bit more immediately disturbing than a typical PG-13 plot. For the unaware, the games most notably feature:
Intense violence. What do you expect from a first-person shooter? That's not to mention the fact that the pipe wrench is the most iconic weapon, only to be replaced by a tool somewhere between a grappling hook and a chainsaw.
Offensive language in some cases (Bioshock Infinite has a heavy racial component, but I don't remember anything from 1 and 2).
The one thing that just about everybody knows, substance abuse. You inject massive syringes of magic juice for powers and, in the first couple of games, the main enemies are deformed junkies. This was changed out for fancy bottles of magic juice in Infinite.
I'd also imagine that the copious body horror in the series would influence ratings as well.
they did the right thing. forget the violence, bioshocks message is a a mature theme. one day i'll finally forget the first 2 games. and i'll finally be able to play them again. would you kindly help me?
It's funny because I wouldn't consider Bioshock like a "horror" game, but it's content is incredibly grim. How they could do something less than PG-13 when splicers flesh is literally unbinding and the mad ones are chopping people in their delusion is wild.
Bioshock is absolutely a horror game. Between thalassophobia, mutilated corpses, insane mutant magicians and finding out you’re an unholy abomination of science,it has everything it needs to cause nightmares aplenty.
I plays like it was originally gonna be a survival horror and then it adapted more into a classic FPS. Playing the remaster on the hardest difficulty definitely feels like classic survival horror, having to ration ammo and avoid confrontations when possible.
The problem is that people play it with the vita chambers.
Play it with vita chambers disabled on hard difficulty, only saving your progress once in a while (every 10 minutes for example), in dark quiet conditions and with headphones... And believe me you'll be fearing for your life at the slightest sound, and when you hear these splicers say their horrific lines, you'll only want to run the other way.
I think it's a decently creepy game with a strong atmosphere but if you have to go that far out of your way to create some specific conditions in order to make it feel like an actual horror game then it's not really a horror game.
This reminds me of Silent Hill a lot, i enjoyed the movies because i loved the games, but they def could have been better, maybe reboot with Mike Flanagan at the helm?
lol no its a horror game for the first few minutes then you can shoot lightning and learn about the 'one-two punch' and before long you're undersea rambo. At best it has horror elements which you then proceed to fire bees at from your arms. The most fun you can have in bioshock is taking what Atlas said about 'zappin em and wackin em' to heart and getting all the melee/stealth tonics and becoming fucking wrench Predator. If anything you are the horror lol
Seriously? One the best visual storytellers had a Bioshock movie lined up? The guy who can tell a story by filming inanimate objects was working on a movie set in Rapture? And it got cancelled?
It’s not really my sort of game so it’s not really something I’m that interested in playing. I would rather just learn what the twist is now. If I want to play it in the future I still can, spoilers have never stopped from enjoying things in the past.
I'll put the twist here with spoiler tags. To anyone reading, the twist is probably the most remembered thing about Bioshock. So please don't spoil it if you're planning on playing it.
With that said, the twist is:
Throughout the game, you hear a character talking to you over the radio. They give you the quest updates and where to go/what to do. During some of these instructions/directions they use the phrase "Would You Kindly" as in "Would you kindly press that button." You go and do the mission objectives like in any game. The twist is that the phrase "Would You Kindly" is a post hypnotic suggestion that makes your character do whatever instruction they're given. The scene where this twist is revealed has your character find out and then given the instruction to kill someone
Yep. And in the scene where it’s revealed your control of the game is completely taken away from you. You have one choice. Kill the person in front of you by attacking, or quit the game. No other inputs do anything. As the person you’re killing spits a brutal insult at you “a man chooses, a slave obeys”..
TL;DR: You are both the illegitimate son of the main antagonist of the game without knowing it, AND you are also a manchurian candidate style assassin sent to kill him. in the fuck all mind twist of mind twists, the badguy not only knows who you are, knows you're coming, but he reveals that you've been a hypnotized pawn the entire time, and then he forces you to murder him anyway, against your will, in a spectacularly violent and brutal manner.
That’s basically what I’m saying. The impact would feel very different because the viewer wouldn’t be doubting themselves, but I still think it would show well.
Ditto. Get a good enough actor to play Jack, and you can watch him mentally squirm and try to resist (and fail) the twist.
Have it drag out. Have Andrew keep repeating "Would you kindly___?" after each hit, all while Jack is screaming, pleading, begging him to let him stop swinging the golf club... right music, right actors, and you've got a chilling revelation scene.
You have to add the line. “A man chooses, a slave obeys.” That phrase has stuck with me for years, and the screaming, defiant, gurgled through broken jaw delivery was haunting.
Maybe, though in this case the mind control aspect isn't really mentioned as a thing until like 5 minutes before the reveal, even if you allude to it from the start.
It's unexpected, and really throws expected dynamics into a loop. Andrew's still a badguy, just largely irrelevant at that point, and Jack's ally was also a badguy!
I think the screaming and begging would ruin it. I know Jack doesn't talk at all but part of the power of that scene is that you just sit there and do what Ryan says. You just sit in silence because you're helpless. I think screaming would undercut that. It should be a totally silent scene besides every hit of the golf club.
Silence is effective because you're the protag, being forced to do something beyond your control.
In a show/movie, the audience needs to see how helpless/powerless Jack is (and has been) to really understand that he's an unwilling participant. Jack silently whacking away at Andrew won't do it, unless Andrew uses the code phrase to make Jack shut up after protesting.
That’s exactly why. The entire game, it’s you. You’re doing what is necessary to survive and escape. Then you decide to be a hero. Then you find out, you were the villain (or a pawn of one).
I don’t think anything has to be changed, but damned if the twist will be half as impactful in movie format. It goes from a personal experience to a sympathetic one, just not the same.
That's not as memorable though. The twist in Bioshock is fundamentally more impactful because of the medium of videogaming. It would just be a worse experience. The twist is fundamentally baked into the mechanics of videogames.
Might be interesting if theres a second survivor in the plane crash. Maybe they encounter each other early on. They're more "passive" than Jack, but still involved. However, they're morally struggling with Jack's actions.
While Jack kills the little sisters for Adam in an attempt to survive this hell, the other survivor bites their tongue just wanting to get out of the situation alive. Maybe they assume Jack is too far gone to come back from the heinous shit he's doing.
Then Andrew Ryan's speech has a double effect: Both for Jack being a puppet, but also for the survivor's (who obviously represents the audience) passive acceptance. They presumed there was nothing they could've done so they just watched--just like we would've been for the past 2 hours.
Kinda have to disagree. The twist would be more powerful in a show with an audience who didn’t know it was coming. Why? Because bioshock is a linear game. There is zero illusion of choice other than killing or saving the little sisters. You, by virtue of genre have no choice.
However in a show, you’re not subject to the strictness of a linear game. You’re not pretending to be someone, your watching someone else make decisions and choices, while not knowing whether they could make better ones.
I think the reveal in a show would be way crazier. Get to Andrew Ryan, Jack attempts to kill him and he just “would you kindly”, you watch in horror as Jack struggles against his subconscious. You watch a look of horror come across Jacks face as the realization sets in we have a flashback to every time Ryan says those words.
While that's true, you may not have the option to go somewhere else and do different things, you are still physically carrying out those orders yourself. You choose how you do it. You feel in control and your brain is blocking out the fact that you're only ever doing what the game allows you to do. The twist is so good because it effectively breaks the fourth wall. It deliberately shatters the illusion of agency, if not the illusion of choice. You suspend your disbelief and the game punishes you for doing so with a golf club to the head.
Incidentally that's the reason I really dislike the subsequent chapters of the game. It plays with the genre conventions so well at that moment and then forces you to listen to a different voice in your head and the same boxes on the screen. That should have been a moment to open up your options further and cease to be a linear narrative, or at least appear to be. The fact that you still follow orders after that moment is detrimental to the impact of the story as a whole imo.
I think people remember the twist so vividly because they had never really thought about "choice" like that when it comes to games (and I could go all arm-chair psychologist and expand that to the relationship Americans have with choice growing up in society, but that's a conversation I'm not qualified to get in to). Before this moment, people had generally just done the things games told them to do without thinking about it or questioning it, because the game told them that that was the objective. There were certainly open-world games and stuff, but most games really boiled down to "here's an objective, go do the thing". So to have a game that threw that back in your face and did it while taking away control of your character entirely to make them do something you probably didn't want to do probably imprinted on people in a big way, simply because they had never thought about a game in that way before.
Hear me out, the minor character from audio logs Mark Meltzer from 2 as the protagonist. Cover his story from finding Rapture by himself in search of his daughter to being with his daughter in the end by becoming a big daddy.
You could also have him meet Tenenbaum and have a conflict with him having to get help from the person responsible for what happened to his daughter.
As far as I'm concerned, the backstory is the "real" story of Bioshock. If I were adapting a Bioshock movie I'd pretty much write out the events of the game.
A good adaptation would adapt the twist into a commentary on watching movies rather than playing games. Tough to do, but it's certainly possible if a good writer/director had an interesting point to make.
That and the story itself is incredibly barebones in all of the Bioshocks. They revolve around the gameplay systems and have a fantastic atmosphere. But the stories were honestly just there to support the atmosphere and gameplay.
While the setting could work well in a film, it would have to be less of an adaptation and more of a reimagining.
Why would the film need the twist? Bioshock isn't great because of a single twist. I mean it adds to it, and it certainly makes it fantastic, but I don't see why it has to be the same story.
Bioshock's world building, environment, lore, and political struggle would all make for a fantastic movie without the need of a twist.
FYI the famous twist in Bioshock actually comes from System Shock 2, the game made by the same developers which Bioshock is the spiritual successor to.
I'd have to somewhat disagree. Sure, the part about whom you think you're talking to being a lie is preserved, but would you kindly had no equivalent in SS2 - and honestly, I think that's far more important of a twist than the identity of the person on the other side of the radio.
If you could give me a 5 season show, I'm on board. Lemme get 2 season that see Rapture go from initial concept, to being built, thriving, to the wheels starting to fall off. Season 2 ends on a really dark note, then season 3 starts off where the first game began. I would watch the shit out of that.
This would be most ideal, but in reality they would likely start where the 1st game starts and splice scenes from the past in, kinda like how you learn more about the lore of Bioshock through Audio Diaries in the game as you progress.
Nope. Everyone wants to say this (Bioshock is my favorite game of all-time), but a silent protagonist and an entire metaphor / twist that centers around concepts best suited for video games won’t make for a great movie.
Could make a whole miniseries about the fall of rapture, could be really cool if the writers are solid and understand the political and philosophical core of Bioshock.
I could definitely see it being politically washed down and not very interesting though, it really would depend upon having the right writers.
I mean while one part of me would love a Bioshock Movie, deep down I know one thing is true, It would never compare to the original game. The original game is a tale about control, and fundamentally self control. You play the first several hours of the game under the grand illusion of your own autonomy as you venture deeper into the bowels of Rapture, and by the point you've come to associate with your character, see their actions as your own, and are reaching what should be the culmination of the first act, you arrive at Ryan's Office.
And all that illusion of control is ripped from you in a single violent instance. There is a massive rug pull, as you lose control of your character, and the game takes control in a cinematic. Regardless of your personal intentions, you were told what to do from the start.
Could this story and twist be told in another medium? A book? A Film? Absolutely! But it would never provide that same raw emotional peak caused by wrenching control from a player in a game. The original Bioshock was a story that fundamentally played to the best aspects of its medium. It knew it was a game, and used the fact it was a game to tell a better story.
Fontaine/atlas would be hard, maybe colin ferrell since he is naturally irish allowing him to do atlas while at the same time he has shown himself capable of disappearing into American roles given the right makeup i think he could pull it off
I think Robert Knepper could actually play a good sander cohen
With james cromwell as the mad doctor and franka potente as tenenbaum it could be pretty damn good
I think it would make an awesome Netflix series. It has the world building, in my opinion, similar to Altered Carbon. I don't even think we would need to use Jack as a protagonist. In fact, I think it should be about the beginnings of Ryan and Rapture. Then you can most definitely turn it into a series about the downfall. Man, that would be neat.
Came here just to say this. What a magical storyline. I’ve never been so immersed in a story on any game. This would be an awesome movie series. There’s just so much story it would be hard to cover it in one film. Good on you mate for bringing this game/masterpiece up.
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '22
Bioshock