Current mood:

excited

Mega Man Movie!






This movie is not a hoax or if it is it is an incredibly elaborate hoax. It's a not-for-profit fan movie but everyone who has seen the trailer has been impressed. Heck most people think that it beats the live action movie trailer and that's a big-budget 20th Century Fox flick.

Obviously I only have the official movie website and the trailer to go on but everything that I see and hear is great. The director feels that the various video-game movies that have come out in the past have not been faithful to the stories or characters of the game and his main purpose with making Mega Man is to to make a movie that is faithful to the storyline of the first game and Mega Man's character. The soundtrack on the trailer is pretty good. I thought a few times that they were ripping off the Batman Begins soundtrack but there are enough differences to make it a separate piece of music and besides if you're going to be inspired by anything for an origin flick you could do a lot worse that Batman Begins. The acting and characterization of Mega Man, Dr Light, and Roll all appears to be pretty good. My only fear on that score is Dr Wily who appears to be playing things way to over the top and his accent really grates since it seems like he can't do anything but shout when he's using it. The effects look decent and while the robot masters appear a little silly, they look no worse than a lot of what you get on live-action Japanese TV. In fact the whole level of production value for the film appears to be around the level of Japanese television so while it won't look spectacular by Hollywood standards it looks like it'll be good enough to watch.

So there's no guarantee that this movie will be good or bad. It may be fantastic or it may be so cringe-worthy that if Mystery Science Theater 3000 were still on the air, they'd pick it up and lampoon it in a second. However, I know that I haven't been this excited about a new movie since...well I guess The Dark Knight but before that it probably was Fellowship of the Ring and before that The Phantom Menace. I am just so excited about the idea of this movie and if it's a success it'll be fantastic.

I've wondered about the other iconic superhero characters and how they'd fare for this treatment. Super Mario Bros poses problems and while I never saw the movie that was made years ago I understand their problem. A faithful adaptation of the video game would be a hard sell. Mario (who isn't from Brooklyn in the early games) is a plumber who warps through a system of pipes in a "mushroom kingdom" where King Koopa has deposed Princess Toadstool and turned the populace into stone? Oh and Mario kills his enemies by jumping on them? Yeah...

Legend of Zelda has possibilities but you'd have to invent lots of characters and the fact that he has to assemble 8 Triforce pieces before rescuing Zelda would get tedious. They could put in Impa from the instruction manual and give the fairies some personality but Hyrule would have to have much more of a surviving populace to make this a viable movie. Perhaps they could get around the Triforce problem by taking out the part about it being split and just having him go through one very large labyrinth to get to the Triforce. Otherwise this could be a series of fan-made episodes to get around the tedium.

Metroid suffers from the problem of having no supporting cast and if you add one then you demean Samus. Not sure a faithful Metroid flick is even possible.

I think that a decent set of movies could be made from the Dragon Warrior franchise but that would require a huge budget to realize all of the towns and magic effects that would be necessary.

Anyhow I'm sure people can think of other games and ways to make them work but Mega Man is a good pick since it has a simple enough framework of a plot and is straightforward enough to realize as a 1.5 hour movie.

I ask everyone (even if you never played Mega Man) to view the trailer here. Leave a comment to let me know what you think. The official movie website is here and it does have a higher quality version of the trailer but I posted the YouTube link first because the movie website keeps on going down due to so many hits exceeding the allotted bandwidth.

Oh and if you want to see an awesome looking trailer for something that is a hoax movie then you can view the Legend of Zelda movie trailer here.

In other news, my awesome wife is awesome for making this and other awesome icons for me. (She typed this part for me.)

More on my personal life hopefully today or tomorrow which will be dictated by when Beth allows me back on the computer. :-)