Video games’ influence on film levels up
‘1917’ and ‘Parasite’ prove medium’s vocabulary translates well to movies
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 First World War quest film “1917” — show the ascendancy of interactive entertainment.
The unconventionally thrilling structure of “Parasite,” for instance, unfolds at times in a way that would be familiar to gamers 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.
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 stealthlike game mechanics to pull off risky moves to avoid detection. The house itself becomes a series of game levels, with its most troubling complication locked away in a dungeonlike 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.
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.
Mendes has said that an influence came from watching his children play the westernthemed 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.
“1917” possesses an acute awareness of our eye movement. 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.
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.
In “Parasite,” the contrast behind the film’s two homes — those of the poverty-stricken Kims and the extravagant Parks — conveys more than just class divides. The world of the Kims is perilous and fragile while the minimalism of the Parks hints at something not just unattainable but oppressive, so much so that shortly after the Kims plant a flag, they are sent rushing back to start in a more desperate state. Tonal shifts in each are telegraphed by the environment.
In “1917,” tension comes from Blake noticing the rats have gotten bigger. That the objects obstructing our leads have become larger or more plentiful is an obvious video-game tell that challenges are about to ramp up.
Combat, too, is framed as if the viewer is a player. The larger war theatre is framed either from a distance or as something that happens around our leads rather than to them. When Schofield runs amid a destroyed French village and aims to avoid detection largely in the black of night, “1917” shifts in tone to that of a survival horror game.
Schofield here doesn’t use a bullet to take out an enemy, but instead sneaks around walls as if he’s in the popular Sony game “The Last of Us,” needing to subdue his foes with strategic, silent kills. Bong, too, applies similar covert tactics, at one point placing three-fourths of the Kims underneath a layered coffee table just out of the gaze of Dong-ik (Lee Sun Kyun) and Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo Jeong). As the Kims — Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), his sister, Ki-jung (Park So Dam) and father Ki-taek (Song Kang Ho) — slither away, light from a window is framed as if touching it would set off unseen alarms.
Both films show that the vocabulary of video games is no longer relegated just to games.