As you may know, Take2 is being bombarded by requests from Hollywood studios, agents and producers to sell the rights to Bioshock so it can be turned into a movie. Take2 is currently holding back and perhaps waiting for a perfect bid, but do we really want a Bioshock movie? Your first thought may be: “YES! God yes!” But let’s take a look at what we can expect.



The main reason why Bioshock is getting such attention is the way they provide solid gameplay with an immersive, evolving storyline. Evolving in the sense that as the player progresses, he/she becomes more powerful as a character in the world, but at the same time the story is written with exactly that in mind. Which, as those of you who already finished the game may or may not agree, works well in this storyline. The player gets stronger, understands more about the world, and then faces an adversary that is both part of that world and acts like a Boss character which he could never have beaten at the start. Would you really be able to change from crashed lad into a plasmid wielding maestro that easily dispatches the "powerful" master of the realm?

Maybe it's just as unrealistic to do it in the scope of 6-10 hours, but since we expect that of games, it just feels right and we don't worry about it. Hell, we don't expect a Chrono Trigger movie to work with a character that knows nothing in the first 15 minutes, while after 2 hours you'd seem him having a party of badasses that cast insanely powerfull spells to save the world. Games just provide us with the setting where these kinds of things work, while we generally expect more realistic or believable(or something that we can relate to more) elements in our movies. Which is probably why we didn't see Gandalf casting Firaga all over the place in the theatrical cut of LOTR: ROTK.



Another strong point of the Bioshock story as a game experience is Andrew Ryan. This character seems to be in total control of the world you crash into, which makes him an archetypical Final Boss type of character. He continuously attempts to thwart your attempts of getting ahead in the game (or life?), while resting on his laurels and talking down to you from his Ivory Tower. The kind of thing that Ryan himself perhaps strived to eliminate from his utopia of Rapture: to create a world where all Men are equal and have unlimited boundaries and resources for reaching their full potential without an overarching system or person to impose his/her will on Man. This irony of the Creator being destroyed by the fundamental flaws of his Creation is nothing new, but more importantly: it's something that works best in books. More generally: the type of media where the consumer takes his time to get acquainted, to get immersed with all the aspects of the conflict, ultimately leading to an engrossing and sometimes even learning experience.



If you've ever read a book that was later turned into a movie, you'll recognize this easily; how much did you miss in the LOTR movies that you thought was absolutely a terrible decision to leave out of the movies? How much were the Bourne movies different from the books? And would you really have wanted a Godfather movie that was exactly like the book, instead of the masterpiece of cinema that it ended up like? More importantly: how many action movies do you know that did the source material justice? Because you know, Bioshock is a game, so the movie will definitely try to be an Action movie.

The kind of writing as we encounter in Bioshock often fails hard in movies. Mostly because movies are often cut into 3 acts, with limited time for character development for each character, the decision on choosing one or multiple perspectives and the inability to portray all the aspects that were supposed to come together in something that is greater than the sum of its parts. There just isn’t enough time to explain all elements to as wide an audience as possible and still have it work. Even if Atonement did a great job of doing the near impossible in creating a working movie from the meandering novel, that movie will never reach the kind of audience that Hollywood will want for the Bioshock movie.



In fact, usually these types of movies that do revolve around the same kind of premise only work when they choose one perspective and follow it for 2 hours. An example where it works is Terminator 2: it follows a small group of characters that seem to just do their own thing, while having them act as archetypes of the human capacity for survival, love, change and destruction at the same time as drawing on feelings of uncertainty for what could or might happen. An example where it didn’t work is Chronicles of Riddick. It tried to establish a Star Wars-like universe while lacking the characters that made the true Trilogy so popular. Thus, it failed horribly on a wide scale, even if I personally really liked that movie and didn’t care about the problems it had.



Which brings us to Bioshock the movie. Who are you supposed to follow in such a movie? The player-character that doesn’t say anything? This would get tiresome unless he would find some hot-looking woman to travel with him, to talk with him and the audience about what happened in Rapture, to maybe share an emotional moment or to die in the final act. But that would rape the whole aspect of Bioshock being Bioshock, wouldn’t it?

Or should they follow both the player, Andrew Ryan, Atlas and Tennenbaum? Each getting some minutes of screentime, talking to subordinates (which ones?) or having monologues for the camera, talking about what they want to do and why the player is being so pesky? Or why he could be a savior? That is the kind of stuff that creates horrors like Eragon or In The Name of the King: longwinded story exposition with little feeling for anything at all. For us gamers, Bioshock the movie could be even more terrible than those movies if it ended up with a shooting script like:

The PLAYER is seen RUNNING FOR HIS LIFE on a camera display monitor. One of many. ANDREW RYAN stands in front of them, watching the PLAYER run from the SUBMARINE that was just destroyed.

ANDREW RYAN is talking to himself:
“This little insect! How dare he even try? Does he not see that it is futile to resist? Does he not understand that this is a world without Gods? There is only room for MEN here, MEN and… ME. Hahahaha!”

ANDREW RYAN laughs hysterically as fluorescent light flickers overhead. A few SPLICERS cower as he laughs, seemingly afraid of some unknown power.

ANDREW RYAN:
“Still, there is remarkable persistence in this man’s actions. Something familiar… Yet, I sensed the same thing in that bastard Fontaine when he arrived.”

ANDREW RYAN slams the control panel in sudden rage.

ANDREW RYAN:
“No, I will not make the same mistake again. This small man will fall, for there is no room for small men in MY world.” *laughs hysterically as the camera pans out, back into a corner of the room while fading to black*…

Look, there’s a reason this stuff wasn’t in the game. The game worked because you, the player, slowly uncovered the truth about Rapture and YOU unraveled the story. Not because some cutscene pushed it into your face. There is just no way of translating this to the silver screen without changing perspective, adding characters or falling into cinema clichés for a Bioshock movie. You know it’s not going to be written by Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman. And you know you can’t have a Doom FPS perspective for 2 hours either. And you also know that while Rapture felt like an essential character in itself in the game, it will just be a sum of lame CGI and props in the movie. Therefore, it’s just a bad idea, period.

There is no good idea here to talk about, even if you want to see a Bioshock movie regardless of how it turns out. You would think that Bioshock, being a story-driven game, would make a perfect choice to turn into a movie. But it’s exactly the story-driven nature that makes it a bad choice to turn into a movie. Any Big Daddy fight will be a copy of the Troll fight from The Fellowship of the Ring. Any confrontation with Andrew Ryan will be a ripoff of some lame 007 third act standoff where Ryan will just hold evil monologues before acting out what happened in the game. Any revelation of the Player’s own origins will fall flat because it will be hard to care for the Player (especially if he will be Nicholas Cage). Not that you can’t work around clichés, I just don’t see it working.

In short: for a Bioshock movie to work as a movie, a lot of creative license will have to be taken for it to work. So much that it might be a movie based on a videogame, but ultimately will fail to deliver in bringing Bioshock to the big screen. Any attempt will fail at that, so ask yourself this: do you really want to see a movie based on Bioshock? Or would you rather cherish the experience of playing the game without having it raped, mangled or *maybe* turned into a just-average movie that you’ve seen before…


…and I didn’t even mention the radio diaries.