A reminder for the few that still remember that the movie even exists, Ratchet & Clank was an outright bore at best and a slightly awkward, bland, pedestrian, and derivative kids flick indicative of everything wrong with marketing demographic driven filmmaking at worst. That the movie ended up being bad has now been long documented.
The primary question remains however; Could Ratchet & Clank have made a good movie?
Let's deconstruct the story elements of the original Ratchet & Clank.
A Scrappy young prodigious engineer growing up on a backwater planet has dreams of leaving home and exploring what the rest of the galaxy has to offer. Opportunity comes knocking at his door when he finds defective robot in need of a pilot that can help him stop a corporate conspiracy putting innocent people and entire planets at risk in the name of profit.
Using the needs of somebody seeking a Galactic savior, our protagonist chases his dreams to travel abroad, butting heads with his new partner on priorities, teaching him about where naiveté can lead and learning himself what the consequences of forsaking altruism are.
The story of "Ratchet & Clank" is based on a lot of fundamentals of storytelling that are not necessarily groundbreaking but when done well, they work strongly primarily because they're so basic. Ratchet's character arc is something of a relatable hero's journey. Few of us pursue courses in life aiming to change the world and fewer of us do so by sacrificing what we want out of life by choice. Ratchet is no exception.
He's brash, self serving, a bit arrogant, and takes some of his better fortunes for granted but is intuitive, thinks outside of the box and carries a healthy sense of cynicism that prevents him from being taken advantage of. This makes him an excellent foil for the generous, empathic, and well meaning but severely naïve Clank, laying the foundation for excellent buddy comedy tensions.
Using the needs of somebody seeking a Galactic savior, our protagonist chases his dreams to travel abroad, butting heads with his new partner on priorities, teaching him about where naiveté can lead and learning himself what the consequences of forsaking altruism are.
The story of "Ratchet & Clank" is based on a lot of fundamentals of storytelling that are not necessarily groundbreaking but when done well, they work strongly primarily because they're so basic. Ratchet's character arc is something of a relatable hero's journey. Few of us pursue courses in life aiming to change the world and fewer of us do so by sacrificing what we want out of life by choice. Ratchet is no exception.
He's brash, self serving, a bit arrogant, and takes some of his better fortunes for granted but is intuitive, thinks outside of the box and carries a healthy sense of cynicism that prevents him from being taken advantage of. This makes him an excellent foil for the generous, empathic, and well meaning but severely naïve Clank, laying the foundation for excellent buddy comedy tensions.
The two must fight to overcome their differences in order to overthrow Chairman Dreck, a corporate executive stomping on the planets of others for short cuts to serve his own people with a new homeworld, which he intends to manipulate into pollution and overpopulation, requiring the process of constructing a new planet to begin all over again. Another means by which he does this is by manipulating a trusted public figurehead for personal protection.
Not even factoring what the individual planets bring to the table, this is a story built atop dynamic character interactions and development, satire on corporate responsibility, the societal purposes of pessimism and altruism and how the two can work in tandem to achieve greater good, corruption and redemption, and all of this is wrapped up in a package paying homage to aesthetics of classical high concept twentieth century science fiction.
Even ignoring developments of later games in the series, “Ratchet & Clank” had just about everything that it needed to pull off being a solid film. So why didn’t it?
While all of the aforementioned elements that could have made a “Ratchet & Clank” movie entertaining are undeniably easy to spot if any even moderate level of attention is paid to the first game, none of these aspects are what made the game famous.
This is a series of action based platformers that is famous primarily for its inventive weaponry including rifle sized nuclear grenade launchers, lasers that turn enemies into sheep and a disco grenade that can somehow make stationary non-sapient turrets dance.
Above all else, “Ratchet & Clank” is a platformer noted for having a sly sense of humor but lauded for solid platforming, fun combat, visually inventive destruction, and elaborate settings and setpieces that combine variations of all of the above. Rarely is its story elements particularly praised because they’re presented limply and out of focus, existing primarily as a means of connecting chunks of fun gameplay from point to point.
Aspects of the franchise’s storytelling aren’t particularly well fleshed out at all and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that in the medium that the property was designed for. “Ratchet & Clank” is, first and foremost, a video game and it is of a certain class of video game which seeks interactive stimulation and entertainment above any kind of storytelling it may be fortunate enough to pull off along the way.
The thin plots and basic characterizations are perfectly suited to what this property aims to achieve… as a video game. That’s not where the focus should have been on film.
In a non-interactive medium, all of the conventions of gameplay that made this property famous are nothing but window dressing. They can be unique and effective if properly utilized but an entire story should not have been built around them and this is where “Ratchet & Clank,” and a great majority of video game movies fail miserably.
Concepts that could have lent themselves to a passable narrative have been done several times over in children’s movies, making the missed opportunities here all the more unforgiveable.
A film about a nonhuman young talent coming of age in time to stop a society endangering conspiracy by traveling to diverse locales, working and growing closer to an ideological opposite to save a world of nonhumans and open their eyes to what life is really like if they’re unwilling to branch out their own viewpoints? Sounds to me like we got a far better “Ratchet & Clank” movie a mere month and a half before this wasted heap’s release in the form of the spectacular “Zootopia.”
Our protagonist entangles himself in a corporate sponsored danger to escape the monotony of his dull life to do something greater only to realize how much his home means to him and indulging himself shouldn’t come at the expense of innocent people? Maybe we should pass this series off to Pixar and consider “The Incredibles” part of a demo reel.
I could go on but by now, the point is clear. “Ratchet & Clank” didn’t even have to be a fraction as great as the movies listed above but in chasing successful marketability by aiming to be a hodgepodge of the series’ most popular modern elements, it misses the mark on being a competently engaging feature by forgetting to make us care about it at its core and failing to show us why those features were so cool to begin with. It’s impossible to make 14 years of development and evolution look impressive if all you do is focus on what the series is now without context on where it came from.
What works in video games isn’t always a selling point for film. That doesn’t mean that the property is incapable of producing a good feature but it does mean care and detail has to go into if from a perspective of storytelling above all else, which has thus far been the kryptonite of video game movies.
“Doom” could have been a creepy claustrophobic action horror flick playing on the paranoia of its cast and scenario similarly to “Aliens” or “The Thing.” Instead, it hamfisted a first person action setpiece as a capper to a string of schlocky nonsensical action beats with thin characters and laughable acting.
“Max Payne” wastes a decently cast Mark Wahlberg with a dull screenplay concerned with spouting off its own self serious dialogue to a tacky aesthetic that embarrassingly attempts to copy the same film noir storylines its source material was clever enough to subtly parody when it’s not trying to get by on its terrible action sequences, failing to create a slyly self aware yet reverent neo noir action flick done better by 2014’s “John Wick.”
And the less said about whatever the “Resident Evil” films have mutated into the better.
Video game movies have been missing the mark on proper cinematic storytelling for quite some time but up until now, they’ve languished into studio commercial projects with no aim of even remotely resembling their source material.
While the miscalculation of storytelling that makes “Ratchet & Clank” a failure is no exception to the rule of people taking these properties on with no semblance of proper filmmaking, its fundamental dedication to the source material only makes its failure hit harder, as the final product actually shares substantial resemblance to the franchise that it represents.
This shift in paradigm, though theoretically benevolent in intention, belies a potentially insidious trend that I believe may do video game movies more harm than good in the long run.
Not even factoring what the individual planets bring to the table, this is a story built atop dynamic character interactions and development, satire on corporate responsibility, the societal purposes of pessimism and altruism and how the two can work in tandem to achieve greater good, corruption and redemption, and all of this is wrapped up in a package paying homage to aesthetics of classical high concept twentieth century science fiction.
Even ignoring developments of later games in the series, “Ratchet & Clank” had just about everything that it needed to pull off being a solid film. So why didn’t it?
While all of the aforementioned elements that could have made a “Ratchet & Clank” movie entertaining are undeniably easy to spot if any even moderate level of attention is paid to the first game, none of these aspects are what made the game famous.
This is a series of action based platformers that is famous primarily for its inventive weaponry including rifle sized nuclear grenade launchers, lasers that turn enemies into sheep and a disco grenade that can somehow make stationary non-sapient turrets dance.
Above all else, “Ratchet & Clank” is a platformer noted for having a sly sense of humor but lauded for solid platforming, fun combat, visually inventive destruction, and elaborate settings and setpieces that combine variations of all of the above. Rarely is its story elements particularly praised because they’re presented limply and out of focus, existing primarily as a means of connecting chunks of fun gameplay from point to point.
Aspects of the franchise’s storytelling aren’t particularly well fleshed out at all and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that in the medium that the property was designed for. “Ratchet & Clank” is, first and foremost, a video game and it is of a certain class of video game which seeks interactive stimulation and entertainment above any kind of storytelling it may be fortunate enough to pull off along the way.
The thin plots and basic characterizations are perfectly suited to what this property aims to achieve… as a video game. That’s not where the focus should have been on film.
In a non-interactive medium, all of the conventions of gameplay that made this property famous are nothing but window dressing. They can be unique and effective if properly utilized but an entire story should not have been built around them and this is where “Ratchet & Clank,” and a great majority of video game movies fail miserably.
Concepts that could have lent themselves to a passable narrative have been done several times over in children’s movies, making the missed opportunities here all the more unforgiveable.
A film about a nonhuman young talent coming of age in time to stop a society endangering conspiracy by traveling to diverse locales, working and growing closer to an ideological opposite to save a world of nonhumans and open their eyes to what life is really like if they’re unwilling to branch out their own viewpoints? Sounds to me like we got a far better “Ratchet & Clank” movie a mere month and a half before this wasted heap’s release in the form of the spectacular “Zootopia.”
Our protagonist entangles himself in a corporate sponsored danger to escape the monotony of his dull life to do something greater only to realize how much his home means to him and indulging himself shouldn’t come at the expense of innocent people? Maybe we should pass this series off to Pixar and consider “The Incredibles” part of a demo reel.
I could go on but by now, the point is clear. “Ratchet & Clank” didn’t even have to be a fraction as great as the movies listed above but in chasing successful marketability by aiming to be a hodgepodge of the series’ most popular modern elements, it misses the mark on being a competently engaging feature by forgetting to make us care about it at its core and failing to show us why those features were so cool to begin with. It’s impossible to make 14 years of development and evolution look impressive if all you do is focus on what the series is now without context on where it came from.
What works in video games isn’t always a selling point for film. That doesn’t mean that the property is incapable of producing a good feature but it does mean care and detail has to go into if from a perspective of storytelling above all else, which has thus far been the kryptonite of video game movies.
“Doom” could have been a creepy claustrophobic action horror flick playing on the paranoia of its cast and scenario similarly to “Aliens” or “The Thing.” Instead, it hamfisted a first person action setpiece as a capper to a string of schlocky nonsensical action beats with thin characters and laughable acting.
“Max Payne” wastes a decently cast Mark Wahlberg with a dull screenplay concerned with spouting off its own self serious dialogue to a tacky aesthetic that embarrassingly attempts to copy the same film noir storylines its source material was clever enough to subtly parody when it’s not trying to get by on its terrible action sequences, failing to create a slyly self aware yet reverent neo noir action flick done better by 2014’s “John Wick.”
And the less said about whatever the “Resident Evil” films have mutated into the better.
Video game movies have been missing the mark on proper cinematic storytelling for quite some time but up until now, they’ve languished into studio commercial projects with no aim of even remotely resembling their source material.
While the miscalculation of storytelling that makes “Ratchet & Clank” a failure is no exception to the rule of people taking these properties on with no semblance of proper filmmaking, its fundamental dedication to the source material only makes its failure hit harder, as the final product actually shares substantial resemblance to the franchise that it represents.
This shift in paradigm, though theoretically benevolent in intention, belies a potentially insidious trend that I believe may do video game movies more harm than good in the long run.
Next Time on "Tools of Construction": Films for the fans or Films for the people?
No comments:
Post a Comment