So, there was a review of
Alone In The Dark in the
university paper.
The review itself is rather
par for the course, but the opening kinda bothered me. I should probably know better after
what happened last time, but I sent off a
letter to the editor:
While I have no issue with Brian Kirshman's opinion of
Uwe Boll's latest cinematic abortion, a few of his jabs show a lack of understanding of both the video game and movie industries.
The game Alone In The Dark bears almost no resemblance to the movie, and it's unfair to make jabs at
Atari for the state of the latter. As it is, AitD is well understood in the gaming industry to have begun the "
survival horror" genre, and many well-known later games (such as the
Resident Evil and
Silent Hill series) owe much to it. Furthermore, what any of this has to do with the various consoles Atari made before becoming a full-time software company is beyond me.
What Kirshman (and, to be fair, many other people) fails to realize is that when a writer or company sells the movie rights to a work, they effectively sign away any creative control over any movie which may result. Rarely are there exceptions to this, because rarely will a movie studio bother to buy rights to the property if they're constrained to little details like having to follow the original work's storyline.
The real
villain here is not Atari, but Uwe Boll and
Lions Gate Films, which continues to give him these licenses despite widespread critical and consumer failure. He already has two more licenses -
Bloodrayne (the
trailer of which is so bad I can't imagine anybody getting interested in it) and
Far Cry. I can only hope that Alone In The Dark takes such a loss for the studio that they stop giving him video game licenses to rape. The genre has enough awful entries without his help.