Please don’t let the Deus Ex movie be another Doom (seriously)
Last year CBS acquired the screen rights to make Deus Ex: Human Revolution into a movie. The film will be a semi-collaborative effort between the CBS and Eidos Montreal, the developers behind Deus Ex. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh no, not another video game movie! Have you SEEN Super Mario Bros? Max Pain? Doom?!” Trust me, I’m right there with you, but maybe, just maybe there is some hope for a Deus Ex movie. In a recent interview with CraveOnline, director Scott Derrickson (Sinister 2012) and co-writer C. Robert Cargill had some reassuring words to say.
“The chief philosophy is we’re not making a videogame movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie,” Cargill says. “We’ve taken a look at what’s worked in videogames and what hasn’t, and really what we’ve broken down is what we think the audience really wants and [what] the audience that loves Deus Ex is going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie.”
New Storyline for the Deus Ex movie?
In the interview, Cargill goes on to state something interesting about the film: “It’s not a rehashing of the game. What [viewers] want to see are elements of the game that they love, but they want to see things that they hadn’t quite seen in the game, that the game didn’t allow them to see.”
This raises some interesting questions. If this is not a rehashing of the game’s story, then what is it? Is this going to be a whole new storyline using the IP? Will the Deus Ex movie be an expansion of the world of Human Revolution? Or something else?
So far, we know that Adam Jensen’s character will be tweaked to be a SWAT officer instead of a corporate security consultant. Really though, we don’t know much else about what’s been changed.
Cyberpunk: High Tech, Low Life
“But really, at its core, we just keep telling each other, ‘We’re not making a video game movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie.’” Cargill says, “Scott and I are such big cyberpunk fans from way back in the day that that just really charges us up. Because that’s what’s so great about Deus Ex to begin with, is it really gets cyberpunk. Eidos Montreal really understood the nature of cyberpunk and made ‘the’ cyberpunk game, and it is just fantastic, and we’ve just had a great time adapting it.”
This sounds promising: the goal is a cyberpunk movie, not a video game movie. Maybe I’m just being an optimistic film nerd, but I think that this a good omen that the production team is actually taking a careful interest in what cyberpunk actually means. It sounds like there is a strong dialogue that is actually considering things like genre tropes and context.
Some fans are still skeptical though because of the production team. Cargill and Derrickson are most well known for their recent horror flick, Sinister, which has received pretty mixed audience reactions.
Usually we don’t talk film here, but are you hopeful for a Deus Ex movie adaptation? How do you feel about trusting a Deus Ex movie made by the guys who made Sinister? Is it even possible to make a good video game movie in the first place? Let us know in the comments below!
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