Sony’s ‘Until Dawn’ movie looks nothing like a video game

14
Jan 25
By | Other

Imagine you are in charge of making a video game movie adaptation. Let’s say you were going to redo it The last of us. But instead of having Joel and Ellie, you chose completely new characters. And instead of the movie being set in a mushroom-based zombie apocalypse, you decided to feature a climate apocalypse. Everything that made the game what it was was now different, and the result was just a generic looking disaster movie.

That’s pretty much the vibe I’m getting from the Sony First Look Until Dawn adaptation, based on one of my favorite horror video games. There are still teenagers, just different teenagers, and they still show up in a mysterious house, only it’s not winterized and looks completely different and much less menacing. No wendigo as far as I can tell. If only you had seen the following wordless footage until dawn I doubt you would even know it was an adaptation of that video game.

Here’s the video:

One saving grace here is the casting of Peter Stormare-aka Black Ops 6 “The Replacer”—but even Stormare (who was the voice of Dr. Hill in the game) can’t make this exciting.

As a horror movie, separate from the game, it’s a pretty cool concept. The description of the film is, at least, somewhat interesting. In some ways, it actually sounds more like a game than a movie. Basically, every night the characters are killed by a new terrifying threat—in what sounds like a movie that will bounce around different horror movie genres—and every new day they’re brought back to life to try again. Here is the summary:

“One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head to the remote valley where she disappeared in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and gruesomely murdered one by one…only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they are forced to relive the nightmare again and again – only each time the murderous threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. With hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.”

Basically it is Groundhog Day with adolescence and a horror twist.

(Notice how much more spooky and dangerous the Washington House looks in the game than the house in the image at the top of this post).

The strangest thing about all this, however, is the fact that Until Dawn is being adapted into a film in the first place. It is absurd in the same way Unexplored the movie is absurd. Unexplored was essentially Naughty Dog’s attempt to capture the grisly adventures of Indiana Jones in a video game (Harrison Ford even did an ad for Unexplored 3). Adapting these games into a movie is pointless since you already have it Indiana Jones the movies.

Until Dawn is an interactive narrative experience designed to make players feel like they are in a horror movie. That’s the whole point of the game! Turning a game that’s designed to feel like being in a horror movie into a horror movie kind of defeats the point! It even had big name stars like Rami Malek in it, which only added to the feeling that this was a movie game. It’s even dumber than one Unexplored adaptation. It’s like saying “We’re going to adapt this chess video game into a board game!” I suppose that’s the point of making these big changes to the game’s story, but if you’re going to make such big changes, it also defeats the point of an adaptation.

Oh good. I hope it’s good, but I have some serious doubts.

Sony recently announced a whole line of game-to-film adaptations that you can read about here. New trailer for The last of us Season 2 is also out and well worth checking out.

What do you think about this? Until Dawn fit at first glance? Let me know TwitterInstagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Subscribe to my newsletter for more reviews and comments on entertainment and culture.

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