With the Mortal Kombat movie premiering in a few weeks, we decided to take a look at our favorite video game movies. And also some video game movies that left something to be desired.
This Slack discussion by JeffreyHarris, Jack Boreham, Limarc Ambalina, Nicolas Ng, and I occurred in slogging's official #gaming channel, and has been edited for readability.
What is your favorite video game movie?
Since it technically counts, I guess I will have to go with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. At the time it was a genuine sequel to Final Fantasy VII. It's far from perfect, but it had great CG animation and action scenes for its time. It brought back all the classic and iconic characters from FFVII and gave them a nice epilogue of sorts. Also, it had tremendous music and a great message.
Mine would be detective Pikachu. It helped realize Pokemon in full real-life 3D. Although the Pokemon looked creepy at times (Lickitung gave me nightmares for days), I admire its ambition, and it was a great movie that has broad-reaching implications for the Pokemon universe.
I second Jack Boreham's answer. In fact, I wrote an entire blog post about it:
https://blog.gaijinpot.com/detective-pikachu-pokemon-fans-in-japan-can-see-it-now/
I absolutely love this movie and it is a shining example of live action video game movies done right (unlike Dragon Ball Evolution). Also I know this is a bit of a cop-out but Pokémon: The First Movie is also one of my favorites. It brings about endless nostalgia for me.
https://blog.gaijinpot.com/detective-pikachu-pokemon-fans-in-japan-can-see-it-now/
I absolutely love this movie and it is a shining example of live action video game movies done right (unlike Dragon Ball Evolution). Also I know this is a bit of a cop-out but Pokémon: The First Movie is also one of my favorites. It brings about endless nostalgia for me.
I still have yet to see Detective Pikachu! It’s definitely on my watch list though and I’m excited to watch it
I need to hop on the Detective Pikachu train as well. Mostly because it looked amazing and was a good movie in its own right. There isn't much competition, though. Unless you count John Wick given that he was in PAYDAY 2
My pick would have to be the first Mortal Kombat movie. It's campy and fun, and even though it does a lot of things different than the games, it's still great.
How about worst game movies?
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation would definitely be up there for me as one of the worst game movies. While the first Mortal Kombat movie was campy 90’s fun, the second movie was the worst aspects of 90’s campy movies.
Super Mario Bros. Terrible movie. The acting was awful. It was live-action, so it looked weird, and the story was abysmal. They couldn't have made a worse super Mario movie. Nintendo soon learnt to be a lot more careful with their precious IP.