Rampage

So next in line for "video game adaptations that may be good but might suck but hopefully not" is a film directed by the man who gave us San Andreas and starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, based off of the arcade game Rampage:

So right away this feels incredibly silly in a way that I cannot tell if it's too cheesy or just cheesy enough. Shit happens that turns random animals into giants and one of them is The Rock's albino gorilla buddy George, the government comes in and George gets fucking pissed, cue title drop and The Rock being The Rock. I'm mildly excited if only because it feels like it might be one of those guilty pleasure movies that's so dumb it's hilarious. I'm kinda leaning towards the "just cheesy enough" angle right now but I'll wait and see.

Oh my god. I remember playing one of the games as a kid.

This definitely looks like a lot of cheesy fun. I want to see this.

I have to say, this trailer gives me more faith in the quality of this film than any other trailer for any other live-action film adaptation of a video game I've ever seen. Like, this trailer promises "a movie". It provides a protagonist, conflict, hook, villain, and plot. This trailer is a "movie trailer". Compare that to the Assassin's Creed trailers, which were "Assassin's Creed in live-action concept footage". That's the trap most video game movie trailers seem to fall into, is that they focus too much on showing off what the souce material looks like in live-action to actually bother with any information about the movie whatsoever as a movie.

It doesn't look great, but I can confidently say that this trailer had enough in it that it looks good. The actors look like they're delivering good performances, the CGI looks good on the animals, the plot seems pretty bare-bones but still present enough to see an interesting conflict here. The little touches here and there tell me that they actually cared and put effort into it, like George's sign language.

Honestly, the fact that the Rock isn't going all out on the ham is a plus for me. In the 2 and a half minutes the trailer had, I actually bought a tangible fond relationship between the Rock and this CGI albino gorilla based solely on the Rock's more subdued acting. This film doesn't feel like a gamble on quality like so many video game movies are, it just feels like it'll be a genuinely good fun popcorn flick.

That being said, here's how I want the movie to end: the monsters grow too large and powerful for conventional weaponry to stop, so the Rock decides the only way to subdue them is to use the genetic growth stuff on himself. Giant Rock and George team up against Lizzie and Ralph (croc and wolf, respectively) and manage to non-lethally defeat them. The movie ends with Giant Rock happy and running a wildlife preserve on an island watching over and caring for George, Lizzie, and Ralph.

If you wanted to, the Rampage game franchise has more than enough installments and more than enough monsters to make a film franchise out of this, if the studio is so inclined.

edited 17th Nov '17 2:16:50 AM by PushoverMediaCritic

I'm sold. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the government guy? Yup. I loved the games, and I will watch this to see how it goes. They certainly threw enough into the trailer to make it look worthwhile.

A Rock and his gorilla.

They actually want to make us care about the big ape. George, not The Rock. If they can, it’ll work.

In the choice between "too silly" and "not silly enough," I feel like it's the latter. Rampage is a straight up parody of monster movie ideas, while this looks a lot more standard, and with stuff like Pacific Rim and the Kong revival and the Godzilla movie giving the genre a slow comeback I feel like a more parody angle would've been a lot more interesting.

That said, it still looks like a good movie, just not what I was hoping for.

I do wonder why the monsters aren't people any more, though. Then again, we don't see where the crocodile comes from: maybe the female lead is Lizzie.

edited 17th Nov '17 9:46:15 AM by KnownUnknown

It wouldn't make much sense for the crocodile to be a transformed person if the other two are outright animals. I do wonder why the creatures are straight up animals, but we'll find out as we go along.

Okay, why the hell nobody told me about this?

Well I can’t complain about this movie looking like a popcorny blockbuster movie considering the initial premise of Rampage being giant monsters fucking up the city. Plus I love the games, which speaking of I can’t believe the origins of the monsters change from humans who mutates into giant beast due to an untested food product by a corrupt buisiness to just animals mutated by some kind of meteor. Well at least it adhere to a cheesy sci fi cliche.

So consider me hype for this movie since this is pretty faithful to the games and incorporated an interesting dynamic between the Rock’s character and George.

Side note, I really hope they make a sequel to Warcraft. That was a video game movie I actually thought was great and worth a re watch.

edited 18th Nov '17 1:02:34 AM by BigK1337

It was great but apparently it was considered a flop.

Honestly, I'm rather torn from what I've seen so far. On the one hand, this actually looks like it'll be a fun ride. It has really solid effects, from what the trailer has shown the performances are pretty good (Jeffery Dean Morgan being the stand out), the friendship between Okoye and George is an interesting idea and the plot is appropriately simple.

On the other hand, I can't help but think that they made it too different from the games, particularly in spirit. As others have noted, the original Rampage games (with the possible exception of the very first Rampage released in 1986) were fun, goofy, over the top, cartoonish parodies of monster movies that reveled in not taking themselves seriously.

So far, the movie seems to be playing itself straight, almost painfully so. The film looks like it could fit right in with the MonsterVerse. An aesthetic that could work, if I got the impression that it was trying to lampoon those movies. However, I got the impression that it was taking itself fairly seriously, and so the movie instead looks like a knockoff of those movies.

Well, to be fair, few if any of the other game movies managed to both be good and match their actual games. I'd rather have something with similarities and bearing the name, but good, than something that manages to match the tone of the game but come out completely rubbish otherwise.

Okay, how about we start with the fact the monsters of rampage were monsters. They didn't just fight the military, they flattened cities, they ate people. They were a product of corruption and greed that everyone else was paying the price for.

If you're trying to make the monsters sympathetic, you're missing the point. At best, some of the games had worse opponents for them to fight.

It's like the Doom movie, which I don't even think was that bad, but somehow managed to miss the entire point of Doom. Scientist develop a teleportation device, not realizing that its transporting people through hell. Demons take notice and invade, space marine fights back and kills them. It's so simple I didn't think it would be possible to mess up. Sure, you could shoot it terribly, have poor dialog, poor choreography, terrible actors, bad special effects, but the basic concept, it shouldn't be possible to get wrong.

If you wanted Resident Evil In Space, why not just make Resident Evil In Space? Why pay for the license of a property you have no interest in adapting?

Because they wanted to use the name to build interest and there were already Resident Evil movies out? People have been pretty anti-corporate since the nineties, so setting things up for the corporation in the movie to be unrepentant mad scientists building murder monsters was a slam dunk in the studio's eyes.

ETA: Besides, the Rampage games centered on the monsters. Monsters destroying cities, like you said. I can't see an unmitigated rampage through a city coming off very well in this day and age of mass shootings every week and terror bombs striking on a fairly regular basis. Setting up two monsters as actual monsters and a third as an ally makes sense makes sense nowadays.

edited 19th Nov '17 12:41:48 PM by Journeyman

I get it, to a certain extent. Using the name of a known property to get a project started. I mentioned on the "Superheroes" thread that I'd totally use one of DC or Marvel's characters to launch an attempted superhero franchise. But since I'm not particularly interested in writing about many or really any of their characters, once I got needed momentum I'd totally go Divorced Installment, to the point not only is the story In Name Only, it actually has a different name.

Now that you've got '"A Man And His Gorilla Monster", which is by rights what this movie should be called, why not just call it "A Man And His Gorilla Monster"? It damn sure aint Rampage, not anymore than "Doom" was Doom. It's false advertising. And I'm pretty sure if you just released "The Rock And His Gorilla Monster" people would still watch it. Maybe they didn't know ahead of time when they were pitching "Rampage In Name Only" that they'd get The Rock, but did they really get him too late to change the title?

Really not sure if I'm excited or not. But I do want to see it.

And of course Jeffrey Morgan does the Negan Lean. Ha.

Without somebody tracing back the production steps on this, it's hard to know exactly how it all fell out. Could be that it really started out as a faithful adaptation and somewhere along the way some executive pointed out all the terror and shootings going on nowadays and said, "nobody's going to want that as a movie." IIRC one of the sprites for the people who became monsters was tall, dark, and handsome in sprite form, and that might have been where the Rock originally fit in, before we got this movie. Personally, I like it just fine as is. We've got a gorilla, a wolf, and a lizard/crocodile monster. At least two of the three are going on rampages. Rampage title.

Yeah, it's not like Rampage had the deepest lore to go off of. Is there really much of a difference between humans drinking evil soda that turns them into giant monsters and animals breathing in evil manmade gas from a canister that turns them into giant monsters? It's still a gorilla, wolf, and lizard attacking a city, which is the furthest extent of the game the layman knows or cares about.

Besides, it's not like it's going to be completely dairy-free, there's still going to be some cheese.

Bumping this thread because a new poster has been released◊.

Sold!

Pitch of the movie after that poster: A humongous beast causing chaos and destruction. And also a gorilla.

Honestly, I completely expect this movie to be a disaster or, at best, a mediocre summer blockbuster drowned out by the competition. But I'm still going to see it. Because it's Rampage and I thought that game was awesome when I was a kid.

But I also said the same thing about Jumanji: Enter the Jungle, minus the part about going to see it anyway, so who knows? "That looks really dumb. It sounds really dumb. How is this even a Jumanji revival? These trailer jokes look terrible. It scored WHAT on Rotten Tomatoes?!"

So hey, maybe I'll be surprised.

I actually saw the poster for this while my BFF and I were taking her wife to a birthday celebration movie. As we sat down, I joked with my pal that it's either a generically-titled action flick OR maybe it's an awkwardly timed film resurrection for a classic NES title that nobody but me remembers and no one would ever sign off on a film treatment for.

Then the movie we were watching actually had a trailer for it and my jaw hit the floor. That awkward moment where you thought you were joking.

edited 27th Mar '18 7:23:36 AM by TobiasDrake

To be fair, we know by now that The Rock can act. Even if the rest of the movie utterly sucks, he will probably be the high point. Like Ewan Mc Gregor in the Star Wars Prequels.

The Rock is at the point where he makes good movies great (Moana) and mediocre movies at least fun. A far cry from Doom.

Yup. It takes time to foster talent. He always had the seed of it. He just had to grow into his roles.

Now he can do a lot of different roles instead of just the tough guy.

I am wondering if Dave Bautista might follow a similar trajectory-he is really just a neophyte right now despite being nearly 50, but he has shown some good range with Drax. Unfortunately, he otherwise seems to be getting typecast as a mostly mute muscle-hulk, so hard to say.