(Page 1 of 3)

This week's announcement confirming a movie treatment of last year's hit shooter BioShock has, once again, raised the hopes of gamers that their hobby might finally get a film adaptation as compelling as the source material. After all, BioShock has strong visuals, good writing and a story with a twist. But director Gore Verbinski will have a lot of challenges, challenges that underline the difficulties in the game-to-movie transition.

Rapture Is the Star

Verbinski's experience on the spectacle-filled Pirates of the Caribbean movies should come in handy here, because the real draw of BioShock is the underwater city that has fallen apart. The more that the director and screenwriter focus on Rapture, however, the more likely it is that there will be major deviations from the game's plot and message. BioShock could become a modern-day Atlantis story, more about how the great city sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

Though the player controls the action, the story of BioShock is about ambition and hubris, how single-minded adherence to individualistic pursuit of excellence brought down an entire city. The decaying buildings, the haunting period music, the dark corners and the blinking lights ... everything is a reminder of a dream that has died.

So, there will be a strong desire to add a before to the after, to spend a lot of time on backstory about the Rapture that was. In fact, you could make the movie about the collapse of the Ryan dream and not about one guy running around killing in a city gone mad. This, however, is not the story of BioShock.

If you spend a half hour or so on the founding of the city and flash forward to the opening plane crash, then you lose the sense of discovery that powers the game narrative. Could you change the story from one of discovering the mysteries of Rapture to the rediscovery of a lost city? Can you turn the protagonist into a journalist trying to find out what happened to the Shining City on a Seabed?

And while we're on the subject...

Who Are the Characters?

BioShock as a game has one actor for most of the story. A single survivor of a plane crash is given missions and advice from a mysterious interlocutor. You control a guy with guns and lightning bolts getting instructions over a radio. The explanation of what he is seeing comes entirely through recorded diary entries and the occasional really big enemy to kill. There are no sane one-on-one encounters until the big turning point.

Can you establish the cast of BioShock and still keep it as a game about shooting things and setting them on fire without increasing the number of people doing the gunplay and arson? This would take it down the path of the Doom movie, which was not about one super-marine, but a squad of them. BioShock, though, has a moment that is, essentially, about individual choice. Will that be as powerful if you have an entire planeload of people running around Rapture?

Then you have the iconic figures of the game -- Little Sisters and Big Daddies. The choice of whether or not to harvest ADAM from the Little Sisters can only really handled in film by a dialogue. Internal soliloquies don't work quite as well, I fear, but that means adding a second person at least. In the game, Big Daddies are a constant fear, but can't simply become a movie monster and maintain their mythological power. You only have two hours in a movie (or maybe three if the last two bloated Pirates of the Caribbean movies are any indication) so you have to decide when and why you deploy your Little Sisters and Big Daddies. The protective relationship between the two is central to its creepiness, but it wouldn't take much for a screenwriter to warp that into an exploitative relationship that adds further motivation for the