BioShock the Movie: Sister, Can You Spare a Mutagen?

Joy of joys, and I mean that in every sense of the double entendre, it looks like BioShock's set to receive the silver screen treatment. Variety reports Universal and director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, and that daffy Home-Alone-with-mice Nathan Lane comedy) are shortly to embark on production of a movie version of Ken Levine's brilliantly disturbing underwater opus with a possible screenplay nod to Sweeney Todd scribe John Logan.

Verbinski claims the mechanical Big Daddies (pictured here) in particular allowed him to see the game as a film.

Variety says Take-Two is getting a ton of scratch up front in what's supposed to be the biggest videogame-to-movie handoff since Universal and Fox passed Microsoft $5 million for Halo in 2005. About the Halo movie... You probably heard it train wrecked a while back and that it's currently with Microsoft looking for a new distributor? The Take-Two cash infusion = designed to prevent that.

"The reason I structured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made," said Take-Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick.

Amen, as long as Universal and Verbinski don't screw it up. And there's plenty of reason to think they might. No one's yet done a decent job translating a video game to film. No one. You can almost make a case for Final Fantasy: Advent Children, but that's a totally niche creature. And let's be honest, it's only been recently that games have started delivering stories written and produced in a way that's (almost) up to filmic and literary snuff quality-wise. Speaking about games as cinematic, anyway. I love games, love them quite appropriately for reasons that have nothing to do with their cinematic qualities, and once I do start thinking about them in filmic terms, have no illusions about their general puerility.

But it doesn't have to be that way, and it's plain as the nose on anyone's face. Like I said yesterday, all it takes to keep a good thing down is a real determination to fund the crappiest directors and screenwriters on the planet. If you want video-games-as-films to languish, keep buying tickets or even just renting Uwe Boll's Resident Evil and Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark sequels. I guarantee you'll get more of the same, just like all of us who went to see Roland Emmerich's Independence Day in droves pretty much ensured there'd be a Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC. Was anyone really surprised by how bad those were? Broom off your nostalgia cobwebs. Now does anyone think Independence Day was really any better?

"Dude. Popcorn flick. Clue. As in get one." Don't I know it. And to be totally fair, don't I know it'd be nice to have a video game movie at least as good as a Roland Emmerich dramedy.

"A man chooses, a slave obeys," opines the game's hyper-capitalist morals-monger. When it comes to writing, casting, filming, and editing this thing, let's hope Verbinski and Universal opt to choose wisely, now would they kindly?

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