Q: How desperate for ideas, how creatively bankrupt, how cowardly does Hollywood have to be to option the video game Space Invaders as a feature film, and do so with a completely straight face?
A: Very.
Someone in the comments for that article mentioned that the only way to make that work would be if you made a movie about the making of such a thing into a movie — a Hollywood farce.
See, there, you could have some fun. Get Paul Giamatti as the screenwriter and novelist who's paid piles of money to write this miserable thing, and make the film-within-a-film a gloriously stupid piece of tinfoil-wrapped-cardboard kitsch. And use YMO's "The Invaders / Firecracker" as the themesong. And have Michel Gondry direct.
I bet you right there we have more real ideas than we're going to find in the finished film, assuming this piece of refried lard ever makes it to screens.
You know, back when I was about eight years old, this would have been the coolest idea ever. I'm thirty-eight now. It stopped being cool around the same time Raul Julia appeared in Street Fighter.
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I'm not sure if you're saying that video game movies aren't cool or not. Obviously there are many that aren't, but I don't think adapting a movie from a game is any different from a book or show - some work, some don't.
This one? It don't.
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Hence my notes about how the only sane way to adapt something this none-dimensional would be to comment on the whole thing as part of the adaptation.
Or, heck, make a dramatic film about the making of the game and its influence on the world. In Japan, the game caused a national shortage of ¥100 coins. Pachinko parlors were ripped out and converted to wall-to-wall Space Invaders overnight. A great movie could be made about that kind of mania.
And chances are we'll never see it.
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sure, but those are movies about a game, rather than a movie adapted from a video game. Yes, the only way to make a Space Invaders movie would be to make it *about* it. It's a minor semantic difference, but worth noting.
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Actually, I think the better way to go would be to embrace the paucity of specificity and depth in the core concept: There are invaders, see, and they're from space.
Only instead a single all-powerful mothership (V, Independence Day, etc), they're a horde of small, weak things, easily dispatched individually, but taken en masse...
A cometary fragment, perhaps, is going to almost miss the Earth. Unbeknownst to any until the last few hours bring the fragment close enough to get really good spectrometer readings off of it, though, is that the fragment is teeming with life: the degenerate, savage kind of life you need for a good Lennington vs the Ants conflict.
Heck, maybe that's the soul of it right there: Some kind of larval form of an interstellar insect-equivalent. The mature critter burrows into a KBO and lays eggs, disturbing it and sending it tumbling sunward to become a comet. As it travels, the larvae reproduce (so it's a true two-stage life-form, like some wasps) until the cometary body is overrun w/them. As the comet nears the star, it begins venting, and the little buggers are blasted off into space. Some will find a (comparatively) warm planetary body to pupate on before returning to the stars.
Except this time, they're coming close to a planetary body, and MILLIONS, if not BILLIONS of the things will be raining down. If we don't kill them all, the huge number of them will devour the entire biosphere! They are... SPACE INVADERS!
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You know ... Yes, I can see this as being a workable concept. But I also know they're far more likely to take the concept and just bollix it up into something not one-tenth as interesting.
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