Elysium Trailer Highlights How Gaming Language Can Translate To Film

Friday, 12th April 2013
Posted in Industry
Tags: elysium, mass effect, neil blomkamp, opinion, trailer, video game movies

Written by: R Bryant Francis

In case you missed it, the trailer for District 9 director Neil Blomkamp’s new film Elysium launched earlier this week. If you were paying close attention, you might have thought some of it looked a little familiar.

While robots, power armor, hovercraft and spaceships are all classic tropes of science fiction, Blomkamp’s latest outing bears a strong visual resemblance to Mass Effect. The drones you see in the trailer bear a similar look to some of the robotic enemies used by Cerberus and other organizations, Elysium itself looks somewhat like the Citadel, and some of the gunfire is stylisticly similar to the special powers and ammo used in Mass Effect’s gunplay.

Though Blomkamp hasn’t directly commented one way or the other on if video games have influenced his production design, given his history with video game-based films, (he’d still like to direct that Halo movie, by the way), it’s not inconceivable that he and his team were inspired by elements of Mass Effect as they moved through production.

In fact, if you look at Blomkamp’s current work to date, you can see evidence that he might be the biggest working director who understands how to translate gaming elements to big screen narratives.

Obviously, film and video games are stylisticly different mediums and experiences–but if video games can borrow so much from film, it stands to reason that film can borrow just as much from video games, even while not acting as direct adaptation. Blomkamp’s demonstrated the potential for this through his work on the Halo 3: Landfall shorts, District 9, and some of the elements comprising the upcoming Elysium. He does this by embodying two concepts—the concept of rules, and the concept of aesthetics.

Elysium meets Mass Effect?

I’ll start with aesthetics since that’s a little more surface level. The process of borrowing from video game aesthetics can be simply defined as taking elements that are visuallyssociateda with video games and literally translating them into film or other non-immersive media. Classically, this can be as easy as putting “8 bit objects” into the world that the characters inhabit, (like Scott Pilgrim Versus The World), but as gaming’s aesthetics have evolved, so too have the techniques that filmmakers use. These aesthetics can now include camera placement, weapons, figures and other objects born of video game design, and nontraditional sound design.

Blomkamp’s District 9 focused on borrowing two of these aesthetics—the camerawork and “objects.” The film’s basic camera aesthetic was attached to the idea that the film was a documentary, meaning the camera was supposed to feel like it was physically located within the scene at all times. This isn’t necessarily a technique borrowed from games, but some of the film’s later camerawork felt eerily reminiscent of a first-person shooter, because of specifically where the cameras were placed during some of the action sequences: On the guns.

If you break down the raw elements of a first-person shooter, one of the most basic aspects is the in-game camera’s relationship with the gun. It’s rarely realistic to what holding a gun would actually feel like, but its positioning feels authentic to wielding a firearm, whether it’s on the bottom corner of the screen or dead center to aim down the reticule. So even though District 9 only has a few shots that draw on this aesthetic, gamers watching the film are still likely to have a neurological response that reminds them of video games due to the geographical locating of the camera.

In terms of objects, District 9 borrows the Gravity Gun, an object that doesn’t necessarily need to be in the world of District 9, and yet every time I’ve watched the film with other gamers, the second Wikus blasts some of the mercenaries with the dead pig he sucked up, at least one person shouts “Gravity Gun!” in recognition.

The Gravity Gun was originally borne of Half Life 2′s physics manipulation element of its gameplay, and was able to be integrated with the game due to the preexisting science fiction elements. District 9 comes from the other direction, using the Gravity Gun to help telegraph the Prawns’ antigravity technology that encompass the film’s climax. If either of these individual elements arbitrarily existed in District 9, I’d hestiate to label them as being borne of video games, but their combination signals an intent to communicate with those familiar with gaming language.

Then there’s the concept of “rules,” which a more intrinsic gaming element that District 9 and the upcoming Elysium use to justify their narratives. Films obviously have arbitrary stakes all the time–time limits, power upgrades and downgrades, and other techniques have been part of basic plot structure for years, but since “rules” are one of the core elements of gaming, their integration into two of Blomkamp’s films, in combination with the gaming Aesthetic, can’t be ignored.

The rules of District 9 are that Wikus has been infected with a Prawn pathogen that will slowly turn him into one of the aliens, which sets a time limit on his life if he ever wants to be a human again. This also empowers him with the ability to use Prawn technology. In Elysium, Matt Damon’s character is afflicted with a fatal cancer, and he gets the super-suit so he can break in and get the cure. These both can be viewed as rule-based narratives, where the characters face extremely literal obstacles that directly enhance and hamper their efforts.

Even the most basic video game tends to have a rule based narrative, from Super Mario right up to role playing games. The concept of arbitrary limits and specific agency is a fundamental language to video games, but isn’t necessarily required from films. So when films like District 9 borrow both Intrisic and Extrinsic elements of gaming, we can begin to see how their creators, like Blomkamp, transition that language from one screen to another.

Recent Posts

Pages