Game movies
Jul. 28th, 2011 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomSo apparently they're making a movie based on the game Battleship? The movie is apparently about space aliens engaging humanity in a naval battle where neither side knows exactly where the enemy ships are.
And it occurs to me, the space of board-game movies seems like a largely untapped one, doesn't it? There's Clue of course, which while not necessarily a good movie is at least an awesome movie. But consider the following:
Monopoly could very easily be a David Mamet–style drama about cutthroat real-estate investors in Atlantic City.
Candy Land would be an unutterably terrible computer-animated film for six-year-olds that's a blatant ripoff of Strawberry Shortcake except without the depth of character and plot.
Mastermind is a psychological-suspense spy thriller in which an enemy spymaster captures several American agents and only communicates with them through mysterious patterns of flashing lights in their cell.
Sorry! is an ontological mystery—twelve people from all walks of life find themselves trapped in a featureless labyrinth (where the floors occasionally turn into slides with no warning) with no memory of how they got there, and have to work together to figure out where they are and how to get out. (Spoiler: it's Purgatory!)
Trivial Pursuit would be a documentary-style competition movie about the no-holds-barred world of quiz bowl.
And those are just classic traditional games. We can get even more variety in plots by looking at German-style designer games.
Ghost Stories: This game is practically a horror movie already: a team of four monks defend an ancient Chinese city from the ghosts and monsters that plague it every night. Shadows Over Camelot is similarly easy to adapt.
Ticket to Ride is a comic adventure film set in the 1890s in which an eccentric railroad investor makes five hobos the following offer: whichever of them can ride the rails from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in the shortest amount of time will win fabulous wealth. (Seriously, I'd go see this movie.)
Basari: An Indiana Jones–style adventure archeologist finds that bandits have made off with a cache of priceless gems found in an Egyptian tomb, and must track them down at the marketplace before the gems have all been sold off.
Carcassonne: Peasants in medieval France discover that the very layout of the countryside around them changes when they're not watching it. As the monks in their cloisters work against time to find out what is going on, the peasants solve the problem the only way they know how: send people out into the countryside to stand around and watch the landscape constantly.
And of course... an adventure film set in the age of exploration in which pioneers voyage across the sea to colonize a newly discovered island, forging a new civilization out of stone, wood, brick, wheat, and sheep.
...What else?
And it occurs to me, the space of board-game movies seems like a largely untapped one, doesn't it? There's Clue of course, which while not necessarily a good movie is at least an awesome movie. But consider the following:
Monopoly could very easily be a David Mamet–style drama about cutthroat real-estate investors in Atlantic City.
Candy Land would be an unutterably terrible computer-animated film for six-year-olds that's a blatant ripoff of Strawberry Shortcake except without the depth of character and plot.
Mastermind is a psychological-suspense spy thriller in which an enemy spymaster captures several American agents and only communicates with them through mysterious patterns of flashing lights in their cell.
Sorry! is an ontological mystery—twelve people from all walks of life find themselves trapped in a featureless labyrinth (where the floors occasionally turn into slides with no warning) with no memory of how they got there, and have to work together to figure out where they are and how to get out. (Spoiler: it's Purgatory!)
Trivial Pursuit would be a documentary-style competition movie about the no-holds-barred world of quiz bowl.
And those are just classic traditional games. We can get even more variety in plots by looking at German-style designer games.
Ghost Stories: This game is practically a horror movie already: a team of four monks defend an ancient Chinese city from the ghosts and monsters that plague it every night. Shadows Over Camelot is similarly easy to adapt.
Ticket to Ride is a comic adventure film set in the 1890s in which an eccentric railroad investor makes five hobos the following offer: whichever of them can ride the rails from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in the shortest amount of time will win fabulous wealth. (Seriously, I'd go see this movie.)
Basari: An Indiana Jones–style adventure archeologist finds that bandits have made off with a cache of priceless gems found in an Egyptian tomb, and must track them down at the marketplace before the gems have all been sold off.
Carcassonne: Peasants in medieval France discover that the very layout of the countryside around them changes when they're not watching it. As the monks in their cloisters work against time to find out what is going on, the peasants solve the problem the only way they know how: send people out into the countryside to stand around and watch the landscape constantly.
And of course... an adventure film set in the age of exploration in which pioneers voyage across the sea to colonize a newly discovered island, forging a new civilization out of stone, wood, brick, wheat, and sheep.
...What else?
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Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 05:46 am (UTC)