These two games mark the recent and contrasting efforts of two movie franchises to make the leap from the cinematic to interactive realm. While it is notably easier to communicate the transition from a cinematic experience into an interactive one, as opposed to the other way round, these two adverts illustrate different approaches to the task with varied success.
This advert, promoting the videogame spin-off of the up-coming Disney Pixar movie Wall-E, displays how taking a confident approach to games based on movies can pay dividends. Pixar have always, by their very nature, shown an affinity and awareness of technology and thus exhume a huge amount of confidence in all their ventures into videogames. This advert, bar the initial premise as delivered by the voice over, owes very little to the film. It wants to show off the game play, the mechanics and graphics. The advert displays its independence from the movie as a product and as an offering.
If you were not aware of Wall-E the movie then you could be for forgiven for thinking that the game was an original IP, in a similar vein to Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank. Of course, this game looks like nothing new and we must not forget that this isn’t an original IP. This isn’t a game that is going to shake the world to its foundations but it is solid and confident enough to hold its own and capitalise on the success of the latest Pixar movie as long as it needs to.
This is by contrast to Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy which, while wanting to be a unique and distinct drama in its own right, owes more to cinematic convention and standard than it perhaps wishes. The biggest mistake this advert makes is the use of the clichéd voice over; while present in the Wall-E ad it is counter-balanced by in-game footage. However, no such balance exists in the Bourne ad, as all the of action in the first half of advert is pre-rendered CGI (something not noted on this version of the ad but is present on TV showings).
There has been, throughout this entire generation, a great deal of suspicion surrounding the use of pre-rendered footage that gives no insight into the game itself at all. From the outset, this doesn’t look like a movie IP making the transition into games but simply a cinematic clone trading off the favourable audience memories of the Bourne films. Though, as cynical and uninspiring as it is, maybe that’s exactly what they want. All it means is those seriously interested in the gritty, dramatic potential of games may have to look elsewhere for any genre defining brilliance. Which wouldn’t matter, had it not been for the game’s director Emmanuel Valdez claiming that “We’re creating a video game based on a deconstruction of the character from action hero to game hero. We ultimately believe gamers will discover as a distinctively original licensed action game.”
While this advert is from the US it has been shown, in this format in the UK. Again the voice over lets it down, when cloning cinematic style it is hugely important to recognise the cultural conventions and sensitivities of each region that adverts are shown in. British audiences potentially could find this very American style of trailer production alienating and off-putting.
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