Games and Movies

(Sorry I didn't reply earlier, I was at work.)

policedanceclub is on the right track about what I mean.

By evoking this movie, I mostly refer to the very audacious and dramatic way the director, Alfonso Cuaròn, has chosen to stage several of his scenes. By shooting without cutting and letting the action unfold in continuity (a technique he had also experimented in his previous work, Y tu mamà tambien, and to a much lesser degree in Prisoner of Azkaban), he intended to give the film a ''documentary'' feel of realism. But I think that, unconsciously, the aesthetic he came up with actually has more in common with the form of video games. Let me explain a little more.

Consider the late sequence, which is probably the most obvious manifestation of this stylistic decision, in which the group of heroes attempts to escape the refugee camp, the pregnant girl is taken by the insurgents, the army intervenes, the Clive Owen character runs, rolls and hides in the streets and through a bus while mayhem occurs all around, enters a building and climbs a couple of floors before finding the girl pinned besides a window. All of this stupendous series of events is presented in a single 6-minute take (two or three takes in fact, pieced together by ''invisible'' cuts, but the illusion is what matters). The full realization of a ''documentary'' style would have required a feeling of true disorganization and the inclusion of the ''camera'' as an actual character (such as in Cloverfield, which contains several similar setpieces). But the action in this passage of Children of Men is too choreographed and, while agitated, too controlled and distanced to achieve such a sense of total chaos. And more importantly, it is too focused on a very singular element: its protagonist.

This climax constitutes, in a sense, not only a dramatic culmination of the story, but also of every strategy the film has deployed to create a particular relationship to its central character. In the very first shot (which is also a long take), the hero is literally picked apart from a group of ordinary people, followed in the street (while shown from the back), then showed from the front (by a circular travelling of the camera). He will later be shown walking around or riding in vehicles, witnessing (and thus allowing the viewer to witness) the daily horror of dystopian England, as well as crying or listening in the foreground of the image while events are unfolding in the background. His actions will involve stealth, violence and quick decisions, all of which are frequent and common in both fictional films and narrative video games. It is the very nature of their presentation which, in my opinion, brings it closer to the latter.

Considered from this angle, the final search and rescue of Children of Men reads like some form of ultimate ''scripted sequence'', which is the closest equivalent of ''mise-en-scène'' in video games. Specific events, such as the shooting of a rocket or the appearance or death of a character, occur at precisely calculated moments, and engender reactions from the hero. What brings it apart is the placement and movement of the character, which remains in focus at all times, in relation to the camera. Through his experience, his ''exploration'' of the scene, the transmission of the story is realized in an extremely powerful way. Which is why the point-of-view shots of the soliders lowering their weapons after all the carnage are so heart-breaking. None of this would be possible weren't it for the extremely straight-forward way the director has chosen to involve the viewer in the action, while also taking the time to give dramatic weight to his plot and themes.

Children of Men doesn't apply this sort of ''video game logic'' systematically. It contains many scenes of conversation for example, shot in a conventional manner (which might be akin to ''cinematics'' when opposed to the more active sequences). In fact, the already-famous attack of the car, earlier in the story, is filmed in a way which suggests a form of ''pure'', serene gaze from a passive observer (witnessing nerve-wrecking developments). It is also far from being the first film to employ long takes as a dominant stylistic device. But if it doesn't constitute a proper ''meditation'' on the subject of video games (the concept of ''simulacra'' doesn't even count as one of its themes), I do think its successful integration and dramatization of similar expressive means makes it some kind of model to follow, or take inspiration from, on the way to making video games a legitimate artistic medium. To some extent, it might even be possible to imagine its story taking radically different turns, based on important player decisions (which the hero makes on several occasions), while remaining plausible and/or meaningful, but that remains in the domain of pure speculation.

All of these arguments and observations justify why I consider Cuaròn's Children of Men to be, paradoxically, a very important film... in the history of video games (regardless of whether it is an appropriate adaptation of source material or not).