As Street Fighter 4 is on the verge of being released on home consoles everywhere very soon, I've decided to have a second look at the horrendous Street Fighter movie due out near the end of the month in the U.S.
After checking out the movie blog i found myself even more disappointed. As "camp" as Bison's (or Vega depending on area) uniform is or as ridiculous as Balrog's (or Bison)boxing costume is...i want to see it. As a fan of the video game, I'm not there for realism (a such) I want to see M Bison with no pupils and Chun Li turn UPSIDE DOWN, DO THE SPLITS, HOVER IN MID AIR AND KICK PEOPLE!
For me and many fans I don't think it's too much to ask. Reason why? Comic Books are beginning to be taken seriously. Although the market is being saturated with graphic novel after graphic novel, 2008 was pretty much own by one film: The Dark Knight. A film which managed to keep the tone and spirit of the comics, have a hero doing outrageous things without looking stupid as well as break box office records and garner a shed load of critical and commercial acclaim.
I still believe this can be done for the video game film, with adaptations such as Hitman and Silent Hill displaying that the cross over could happen but at a snails pace. But not when the filmmakers show so much disregard for the fans they say the make the film for. True I have only seen the Trailer and read the blog (with it's feeble excuse of why your favorite characters are missing) and there's still the matter of me actually seeing the whole movie.
But a trailer is supposed to draw you into putting your hard earned cash down into watching a movie and by creating a film that has no feel of a street fighter game in any sense of the word (oh there's a hint of a fireball near the end of the trailer) will only cause those in two minds to most probably steal the film illegally.
Reading an issue Sight and Sound today had a review for Transporter 3, the magazine stated that with all the Bournes, Bonds and Batman striving for realism, Transporter becomes strangely endearing. I found myself thinking about Transformers and realizing that Micheal Bay's toy movie manage to do a similar thing with a lot of people. Although I hated it, I still respected Bay's cynically clever abuse of childhood nostalgia which gave the movie alot of it's praise. Maybe if the filmmakers looked more towards the absurd and the loony aspect of a Fighting Tournament people would warm towards it a lot more.*
* After more research I found out that the filmmakers are basing the film on the street fight alpha series. If your scratching your head and asking yourself "wha?" It's a series of SF games which came out after SF2 but is based on events which happened before it. While this may explain away some of my incessant moaning, it doesn't give good reason to why the drastic change of tone.
