f13.net

They announced at the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit that's going on right now that they'll be collaborating on a game and movies together.

http://techzwn.com/2013/02/half-life-portal-films-announced-by-j-j-abrams-and-valve/

Where does Abrams find the time to do all this stuff? Half Life, Star Trek, Star Wars, a couple of TV shows on top. My life seems empty.

Anyway, Yay!? I'm not sure a portal movie will be easy to do at all though, given the general lack of backstory, narrative or any characterization. At least the normal methods.

Portal would be hard in that there's only one character against one other voice-only character for the entire thing. But I kinda thought I am Legend the movie worked. Needs a really strong female lead and the world itself needs to be treated as a character.

Half-Life would be curious. Dystopian future with mysterious alien-like stuff and government coverups, kinda passe right now, no?

Portal would be good as a very low key, indie style film. Nothing on a star trek type scale, very much a horror movie in theme.

The story of everyone dying or escaping at aperture and the rise of glados could be a decent story. Portal 1 and beyond, I don't see.

If you accept the assumption that portal and half life exist in parallel it gets even harder.

Also, J Coulton soundtrack!

So we'll get Halflif: Lensflare and Portal: Lensflare?

Awesome.

Ok, I think the lense flare jokes have reached the end of their shelf life.

It's not impossible to envision a Portal film, it could be a film very similar to 2001, Moon, or Buried; it would be interesting to see a woman in the role of the person trapped in a claustrophobic environment. I doubt it would be a summer blockbuster, but I could see the outline of a great film in there.

I used to say that videogames were show business for geeks.  Now, I guess it's all just show business.

--Dave

I hope they scrap the idea personally.  Half Life and Portal are masterpieces designed for gaming media.  I see no reason to move their stories to the big screen.

It's been that way for a good long while.  Where the fuck have you been ?

Sure, in 1991.

Frank Darabont already did a film about Half-Life - it was called "The Mist".  I quite liked it.

Edit: a quick google shows I am not alone in thinking this.

No.  It pretty much was a film about what happened after a resonance cascade.

If it hadn't been for the awful, awful fucking ending, it would have been a good film.

I liked the ending.

But personally, rather than a Portal or Half-Life movie, I'd rather just see Half Life 2, EPISODE FUCKING THREE.

Comma Goddamnit.

Can I get an Amen?

I'm over Episode 3.  Episode 2 was dumb.

I quite liked episode 2.

But yeah, christ, Abrams has cemented himself as the gold standard nerd director at this point.  Not sure how he's going to balance all of these projects.

There's a lot of assumption going on about this whole story but there really isn't any news. Despite what the geek press are saying, this isn't an announcement at all. Sure it's the closest Newell has come to saying he'd grant the rights to make a Half-Life movie (and given that Abrams, Del Toro and Duncan Jones amongst others are all massive fans of the series, he knows he'll get a director who isn't Uwe Boll) but at best it's a pre-pre-production statement. It's "wouldn't it be cool if we made a Half-Life/Portal movie!"  There's no production company attached, no budget, no shooting schedule, no script - and even if Abrams stuck to his word and got someone to write it, that doesn't mean anything either because Newell could still turn around and say "Yeah, you know what - this isn't going to happen."

Even if it does happen (and I will be first in the queue for a ticket!), I reckon Abrams would produce and get someone like Matt Reeves or Drew Goddard on board to direct.

Producing takes a lot of work too. Mostly likely he'll just be one of the Executive Producers.

When Abrams said the project status of any Portal / HL movie is that "they'll get a writer on it", it really means it probably won't happen. Which is a good thing, since the movies would be terrible because the sources are terrible to make a movie out of.

No they're not. Well, Portal, perhaps but Half-Life could totally be done. Half-Life 1 is Die Hard in a science lab with aliens instead of terrorists. It has the perfect structure for a movie - first act set-up with the resonance cascade, a second act filled with jeopardy, betrayals and escalating threat and a final act on Xen that might just work in a movie even though it didn't work so well in the game.

Half-Life 2 is obviously a film about a dystopian future but is also a war film and is an easy sell really in this age of insurgents, occupying forces, social control and cultural imperialism. Three act structure also in place - but personally I'd make Gordon less reactive and certainly make his motivation of assaulting the Citadel less about rescuing Alyx and more about stopping Dr Breen.

Yes, I have spent far too much time thinking about this over the years.  :grin:

And I'd think portal would be somewhat like a new version of the cube, which I thought was a brilliant movie. vOv

Yes.

But only if they got J.K. Simmons back as CAVE JOHNSON!!!!

I think we are talking about Portal, not Portal 2: The Lengthening.

That would be a shame. As good as Portal 1 is, Cave Johnson makes everything better. Almost like bacon in voice form.

I'm torn.  Would cut into GladOS time.

When I grow up I'm going to make a System Shock movie.

Yes.

(http://soshable.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/shut-up-and-take-my-money.jpg)

I think you could make a pretty decent movie by taking the basic structure of Portal 1, eliminating all the puzzle repetition, and using some of the background material exposed in Portal 2 to flesh out the second half where Chell is running around "behind the scenes".  There's no reason that you couldn't have Chell stumble across the old Cave Johnson labs during that segment.

It just isn't the right kind of narrative for cinema. As much as people complain about games trying to look like movies, I am nearly certain that trying to turn this game into a movie would be far worse.

Nobody's rooting for a L4D movie? Son...

Do we really need more zombie media?  Really?

Zombie media for the braindead audience? :why_so_serious:

See, this is how Peter Jackson got started.


:why_so_serious:

Then the next thing you know, Faramir's trying to take the ring and there's a song-and-dance routine in Jabba's palace.

Except removing the puzzle repetition means it is no longer a Portal movie. And how many lines does Chell get to say? She (like Freeman) is just a viewpoint for the player. There are plenty of people who have finished Portal and Portal 2 and were surprised to find that Chell was a woman.

I think there's already a short fan film based on Portal out there, but if you tried to stretch it out to 90 minutes+ you'd end up with either complete arthouse wankery (silent figure in claustrophobic labs) or something on the level of "Doom", possibly including wave after wave of flying killer robots.

"Cube" worked because there was a team of people you saw unravel. They got to bounce off each other. Can you put a team of people into a Portal movie and still end up with it being Portal?

A System Shock movie, on the other hand, would work much better, because it's a horror film setting.

Don't be stupid, mp movie has to be exactly the same as the source material to be a faithful and good adaptation.  Of course Chell can talk and of course you don't need every puzzle, you just need enough test environments to see she's a lab rat and while most of the movie will be her alone so there won't be talking, you can always add flashbacks.

It boggles me that anyone would think you need to have some sort of 1:1 conversion.

Describe Chell's personality to me.

Determined, self-confident, bold, independent, stubborn, inventive, single-minded, opportunistic...

You can tell what Chell is like by her/your actions in the game and GlaDOS response to her. Despite GlaDOS' incessant and cruel jibing and no matter what is thrown at her, Chell survives and keeps surviving, adapting to her situation, learning how to use the Portal device and then makes her break as soon as she can. She defies GlaDOS and perserveres, where previous survivors have given up and gone mad.

I've changed my mind about Portal being turned into a movie - it could be done. There are some interesting themes that could be set up and explored too about the relationship between mother & daughter. I know Portal 2 seemed to make more of that but even in Portal 1 I imagined that sort of relationship with GlaDOS as the overbearing mother - a digitized version of Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest or Margaret White from Carrie.

A film about an isolated individual doesn't have to be all Solaris-art house either. Moon is an obvious example that's already been mentioned, but Castaway was Tom Hanks on an island by himself and made half a billion dollars. Was Wilson a prototype Wheatley?  Also, 127 Hours, Buried and even I Am Legend/The Omega Man.

Planning a game with Valve, eh? They can't even get Half-Life 3 done in a reasonable timeframe.

You're projecting.

Provide evidence that she isn't shit scared, so desperate for human contact that she would carry a talking potato up a 1000 foot structure if it told her to, and so mentally unbalanced that she would begin to ascribe a personality to a metal box with a heart painted on it after just 3 minutes contact with it.

Didn't they say they gave up on episodic content years ago?  Or am I making that up?

Which would also be a personality.

Actually, Chell has a hard emotional shell that can be cracked if only she can find the right man to love her.

Or she's suffering PTSD due to the trauma of what she's experienced.

Or she's highly religious or disciplined professional, having taken a strict vow of silence.

She can be anything you want her to be because she gives away nothing. She's an empty shell that is your proxy. She doesn't respond to GLADos' taunting because... she's afraid? Too brave? Doesn't have a voice box?

Drama in films is built up with conflict between characters with differing motivations and the situation they find themselves in. Now, "Portal" has other characters and an interesting situation, but the main character Chell has no motivations, nothing to make an audience empathise with her as presented in the game. She's just the viewpoint through which you solve puzzles.

The second you make a movie there's a 99% chance that Chell (assuming she's the main character) will speak and have emotional scenes. There will also probably be the temptation to give her other characters to talk to. Some people will probably need to die to show the risks of the Portal world. Someone will need to talk back to GLADoS, to scream at her, and be made an example of.

I mentioned "Doom" for a reason: it took a basic plot - single marine fights demons on Mars - and then added other stock characters and backstory and a whole heap of other stuff to turn it into a film. Any "Portal" movie could easily go down that route. "Castaway" had Hanks talking to that volleyball as another character, as a way for him to interact with others. "127 Hours" was a man reviewing his life in flashback and talking direct to camera, not standing mutely starting at a canyon for 90 minutes. "I Am Legend" gave Will Smith a dog and family flashbacks to flesh out his character.

The narrative of Portal isn't the narrative of Chell, the character, it's a narrative of the world around her. Whoever writes that script will give Chell a personality and that may or may not line up with the personality you feel she has in-game.

I'm not saying that a "Portal" movie has to be a 1:1 conversion of the game, but that any characterisation for Chell is going to be tacked on to what currently exists and that's basically nothing. There's a very good chance that will go horribly wrong on screen, starting with whoever they cast to play Chell.

Doom being a shit movie had very little to do with the source material and how weighty it was or was not.

Doom being a shit movie had everything to do with the source material.

Aside from some action scenes, nothing in Doom converts to a feature film without being wholly rewritten. From there the law of averages takes over, and so most movies being shit implies that a wholly rewritten Doom would most likely be shit.

Why do I need to provide evidence that she isn't? Scared isn't personality - it's a state of mind. Given that she's put into life or death situations regularly, scared is a typical human response so, in all likelihood, she is scared. Very scared. But given that she finds herself in a position where she seemingly has no option but to assume the party position and die in a fiery pit and yet, somehow, manages to escape, I'd hazard that she isn't paralyzed by that fear.

From an audience point of view, surely being scared is more interesting and appealing than being cold, unemotional and rational. There may even be the beginning of a character arc here - starting in a state of fear and conquering it or starting in a state of self-doubt and reaching a state of confidence.

Better movies have been made with less. Every film starts with a core concept like "Man fights X" You either get good writers or you don't, there are a thousand ways they could have simply used the basic story and made a good movie.  It's as though you live in a world were there is no such thing as a screen writer, whose job it is to you know, write.   There is no concept that can't be done well, from the bare bones of doom to the aesthetic of portal as long as you have someone with a halfway decent ability to write.

My point was not that she had no personality.

My point was that portal did not show you one. You can project any kind of personality you like onto Chell, as demonstrated above.

There is little to no story in the events of portal. Instead the game rewards you by revealing another story with other characters that occurred years earlier. If you made a film out of portal as it is, starring Chell, the viewer would simply wonder why they are watching this story instead of a much cooler story about Cave Johnson.

I mean, you could make that film, could be an interesting exercise, but I don't know why you would choose to do so.

The game works that way because the story snippets are a reward for puzzle solving. I don't think that would necessarily be a great structure for a film.

We have one outside view of Chell:  the Aperture Science boot commercial.  What we have there shows Chell as pretty fearless, quick on her feet, and athletic.

We know that GlaDOS considers her stubborn.  Maybe not her motivation for why but that she is.  From the Portal 2 intro, we know she's either got a few crossed wires, or that she's a smart-ass.  (The whole talk/jump scene with Wheatley.)

We don't know she has any actual attachment to the companion cube.  That's all GlaDOS and fan-art.

Any movie with Chell would do best to keep her silent and emotionless as possible beyond getting through the difficulties that face her.  The surrounding characters need to provide the dialog and motivation, and all they can do is muse about what Chell is thinking.  Let her be the focus of the camera, but everything around her is the story.

There is very much a story in Portal 1. I think perhaps you're confusing story with plot.

(Lucky for you, I'm at work and don't have time to write an extended essay about this. Thanks to you and Unsub, I've totally changed my mind about Portal being suitable for adaptation so cheers for that.  :awesome_for_real: If I didn't have so much to do, I'd even be tempted to pull a treatment together.)

By removing the repetition, I mean you could potentially include all the puzzle mechanics, but repeating them in the same way the game does would be unnecessary (and boring).  You need repetition in a puzzle game so that the player (even a dumb player) can slowly learn the skills they need to tackle the harder puzzles.  If you're experiencing it all vicariously as a viewer you don't need that. 

The general structure of the first half of Portal was "here's a chamber with a new game mechanic, here's two more chambers where you can practice that mechanic, here's a chamber with another new mechanic..."  I think you could trim it down from eighteen (or however many) test chambers to six brutally difficult ones where each one introduces a new thing for Chell to figure out.

Personally I think having a bit of dialogue between Chell and GLaDOS could be good too.  There wasn't any in the game because dialogue in games always feels very artificial, but I can envision Chell expressing frustration to thin air, and GLaDOS obliquely pretending to be a dumb recording for a while, and having that gradually evolve into an adversarial relationship, which is essentially what happens in the game.

I agree with the sentiment but ultimately, the portal gun is irrelevant to the story and is simply a plot device. Yeah, of course - without the portal gun it wouldn't be identifable as a Portal film but that's not what the story is about in the same way that Source Code isn't about the Source Code project.

EDIT: Source Code is probably a good parallel. Colter Stevens wakes up, not knowing where he is and has to learn the rules of his world. Then he has to repeat his scenario - his version of test chambers - countless times. But the actual solving of the plot mystery is all done in montage because we don't need to see each single time he goes into the Source Code - it's already been set up for us. Similarly, in Portal, you don't need to see Chell complete all the puzzles because the audience understands that she uses the Portal device to do so.

It might have actually been decent if they'd stuck to the source material.  The only thing the movie shared with the game was a name.   :oh_i_see: