The Abnormal Potential of The Division Movie
At the time of writing this, The Division video game series is set to receive the Hollywood treatment and become a major motion picture produced by Netflix. The script is being written by Rafe Judkins, whose writing credits include Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the upcoming Uncharted movie, and the upcoming Wheel of Time series (the man really likes his adaptations). Directing the film is David Leitch, whose directing credits include Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw, as well as co-directing the first John Wick (in other words, the man knows action). Finally, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain set to star, the film has nothing but heavy hitters on both sides of the camera.
The Games-to-Film Curse
While the curse has seen a small decline in recent years with movies like Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, it is still far from broken.
In scouring the internet for what many believe to be the reasons for bad video game adaptations, what I found was actually kind of annoying. One of the theories that kept coming up was that storylines in video games are too simplistic for a film. Now this is just offensive. Some of the greatest storytelling moments of the past 20 years came from video games, and I won’t even get in to Metal Gear Solid, which arguably has one of the most complex storylines ever conceived.
The primary theory I kept coming across is the fact video games are interactive and movies are not. Now this may hinder the movie if you’re comparing the final product to the source material, but it’s not what prevents it from being a good movie. While a game’s story is reliant on gameplay, they are also mutually exclusive; a game can have great gameplay with a bad story, but on the flipside, it doesn’t matter how good the story is if the game itself is unplayable. Most of what makes for a good video game adaptation are the things have nothing to do with the gameplay. The story; the acting; the dialogue; the cinematography; the music. You know, the things that actually make for a good movie.
When looking at games like The Last of Us, Uncharted, Mass Effect, and the aforementioned Metal Gear Solid, the story is the driving force. While they’re complimented with good gameplay, the gameplay itself is more of a tool to help you experience the story. Even when ignoring the gameplay, the cutscenes alone are often more cinematic than most movies. How many times have you seen a cutscene in a game and said “omg, if this were a movie it’d be awesome”? In that vein, when it comes to adapting these types of games, I feel that the filmmaker’s heart is in the right place, but their focus is in the wrong place. They should focus more on capturing the cinematic experience of these games rather than the gameplay experience, while keeping in mind the difference in medium; what makes a game fun is not what makes a movie fun.
To summarize, when a video game movie ends up being bad, it has nothing to do with the game… it’s just a bad movie.
So where does The Division fit into all this?
The problem with the game
Quite simply, The Division has horrible story telling. It’s not a bad story, it’s just badly told. Accomplished primarily through ECHO recordings, radio communications, and phone messages that are often playing while you are otherwise engaged and focused more not dying, the story is conveyed in a way that is both nonintuitive and inconvenient.
The biggest problem with this method of storytelling is that the various pieces of information can be obtained in any order, at any time. You will often find yourself following a small side story that you had a hard time understanding because its parts were told out of order or without context. Even with context, it could take you literal days or weeks to find the next entry in the story, by which time you’ve probably forgotten what’s going on. Furthermore, during that gap of days or weeks, you could accidentally start another, completely unrelated story in the middle of it, only adding to the confusion.
When it comes to the game’s more traditional storytelling methods, there is extremely little in the way of cutscenes, and NPC interaction is pretty much nonexistent outside of combat. The games also feature a silent protagonist which only furthers the disconnect between the audience and the narrative. If a game is going to give us a character with no voice or emotional investment in the story, then we come to the subconscious conclusion that the story must not matter, and don’t pay very much attention to it. (There are a few exceptions that can be argued, but most of those games got sequels where the protagonist was given a voice, and the game was much better for it.)
If you really want to understand the narrative of The Division, I recommend the YouTube channel NGN. They have several videos explaining the story and lore of The Division.
How the film can benefit
It’s usually a bad move for a movie to repeat the same story as the game its adapting. Instead it’s better to tell a completely new story set within the same world, such as a prequel, a sequel, or a side story that’s happening concurrently.
But The Division is in a unique situation where it may be able to get away with this and capitalize on the inconsistent and unclear storytelling of the games, taking the opportunity to tell the same story in a more coherent fashion.
Now you could take any game with a decent amount of lore and go on about all different possibilities for a film, and The Division is no different. There are several aspects of the world and story that the games have yet to dive into that could easily make for an intriguing movie.
What happened to the first wave?
The quarantine of the Dark Zones.
How the leaders of the various factions rose to power.
How certain agents went rogue.
The rise of the Black Tusk.
Basically, The Division has the benefit of not being bound by the same limitations as other video game adaptations. With both the strength of its lore and the weakness of its storytelling, the games are able to offer the film an unusual amount of potential that most video game adaptations don’t have.
