Video games influence even the making of big Hollywood films
HOLLYWOOD: A video game has yet to win an Academy Award, but that doesn’t mean the influence of the interactive medium wasn’t felt at this year’s Oscars. Consider that two of the awards season’s most talked-about films — Oscar’s big winner “Parasite” and the World War I quest film “1917” — show the ascendancy of interactive entertainment.
That is no slight.
While “1917” has occasionally been derided as a video game, largely due to its free-flowing, often third-person camera, the rise of games as a cultural force is also having a more subtle narrative impact as generations weaned on interactive entertainment begin to more regularly mould our content, either by creating it or by choosing what to consume.
The unconventionally thrilling structure of “Parasite,” for instance, unfolds at times in a way that would be familiar to players as they observe the Kims, the film’s hardscrabble family of four, piece together their moves as if plotting a game. Those moves are constantly thwarted when the film places the Kims in a house with hidden passageways in need of constant exploration.
“Parasite” director and writer Bong Joon Ho has spoken of how he requested a detailed 3D model of the upper-class home where much of the second half of the film takes place. “It was like playing a video game where I could roam around the house through my computer,” Bong said in a discussion late last year at the New York Film Festival.
The Sam Mendes film “1917,” meanwhile, is more astutely aware that boundaries across pop mediums are forever blurring. Much has been written of how this tale of an early 20th century war uses digital trickery to feel as if it is one long tracking shot. But no doubt at least part of the reason the techniques employed by Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have resonated at the box office is because “1917” mimics the way we watch when we play. In such a climate it’s understandable that games would gradually start to hold sway over our so-called prestige narratives. Game-like tools have already made themselves known at the Academy Awards — Alejandro G. Inarritu’s virtual reality exhibition “Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible)” was awarded a special Oscar in 2017 — but it’s easier than ever to spot the game impact among recent films.
It’s present in the technology behind Disney’s digitally animated “The Lion King.” Video game engines and virtual reality were key in its making. And the basic structure of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” feels ripped from the most simplistic of games. It’s a nearly 2 1/2-hour film strung together by a series of to-do lists instructing characters to find one item and then find another, thus following an overused narrative format that video games have already started to move away from. Along the way we encounter mini-boss battles leading up to the biggest boss battle at the end. Even when seen on a giant screen rather than Youtube link, “Skywalker” appears very much fun to play.
The level-design-like approach to parts of “Parasite” — each floor of the Park house reveals new challenges — generates great tension in forcing some of the film’s characters to adopt stealth-like game mechanics to pull of risky moves to avoid detection. The characters must either fight — or crawl — their way around. The house itself becomes a series of game levels, with its most troubling complication locked away in a dungeon-like basement.
But “1917” is where games and film are most in harmony. In fact, “1917” falls back so often on game design elements that one’s enjoyment of it — or lack thereof — may hinge in part on experience with narratives told largely from a first- or thirdperson point of view.
While often claustrophobic, “1917” dispenses with a choppy, documentary-like feel. Mendes appears less interested with the rawness of war and more intently focused on the endless forward momentum, emotionally and physically, of those trapped in its grips. In turn, “1917” is a film, in gamelike fashion, in which the journey — Lance Cpl. Schofield (George Mackay) and Lance Cpl. Blake (Dean-charles Chapman) are set off on a mission to prevent a British battalion from walking into a German trap — matters more than its conclusion.
The film makes this clear early. “Some men just want the fight,” warns a stoically virtuous military captain (Mark Strong), a clever move that sets up the idea that not all orders are heeded and tempers our expectation for the film’s outcome. It also cements the audience’s attachment at this point to the survival instincts of its main character. This, too, is a narrative conceit well-suited to today’s game-raised audiences: “1917” is less concerned with beginnings or endings and more fixed on crafting a moment within a world audiences can see and feel themselves in, and thus we soar and glide intimately around Schofield and Blake as if we are controlling the camera.
That sensibility was no accident. In fact, Mendes has noted in interviews that it was very much intended. The director has said that an influence came from watching his children play the Western-themed game “Red Dead Redemption.” The intimately cropped third-person presentation of many games allows the participant — or, in this case, the viewer — to more easily graft an emotional connection with the protagonist.
Mendes called the sensation “hypnotic” in Variety. And as he relayed to the Financial Times, “We experience life as one continuous shot. It’s editing that’s the gimmick. This allows you a much more sophisticated degree of storytelling. Making a movie always asks the question: Is this really the only way to tell this story? You often find yourself defaulting to standard ways of covering a scene and never challenging it.”
Gamedevelopershadalreadybeenexperimenting with vantage points that presented minimal or invisible edits. The 2018 Sony game “God of War,” which aimed to explore newfound themes of vulnerability amid a mythological series often focused on violence and revenge, was painstakingly designed as a single take. “You’re gonna get a sense of immediacy and connection to these characters, an unrelenting feel to the adventure that you can’t get in any other way,” director Cory Barlog told Polygon.
“1917” possesses an acute awareness of our eye movement. The camera seems to drift where we will it to, as Mendes and co-writer Krysty Wilson-cairns laid out a story that is told as much through its sets as it is its dialogue and action. When Schofield or Blake are walking over uncompromising terrain, traversing trenches, trying to avoid a stumble into mud or balance on a fallen bridge, the camera moves either just above shoulder height or ever so slightly to the left or right, giving us a vantage point that, while cropped, isn’t oppressively so. The sense is that the field of view of the characters is also ours.
Agamewillrewardthosewholingerandexplore, revealing its story via the details that dot its setting, and both “Parasite” and “1917” award those who go looking for plot amid its ambience. In “1917” we spend little time with characters other than Schofield or Blake. Most of those who populate “1917” are essentially NPCS, or non-player characters, who serve to either offer brief narrative pushes or background detail and then disappear.