If there’s one thing that Hollywood seems to mess up consistently, it’s the video game to movie adaptations. As far as I can remember, there hasn’t been a highly successful movie that’s been adapted from a video game. Sure, some of them might be commercial successes but fans of the game were most probably let down by a weak story line, poor acting, or just an overall terrible attempt at bringing a video game to the big screen.
But thanks to YouTube, we’ve seen quite an influx of good video game films (albeit most of them are just shorts) in recent years – yet Hollywood still hasn’t learnt. The dedication and effort put in by indie filmmakers have shown us all that a big budget isn’t everything. Latest one to join the ranks of great video game shorts is this masterpiece from Dan Trachtenberg – with his short film adaptation of the highly popular puzzle game – Portal.
Called Portal: No Escape, the short film shows the director’s take on a subject familiar to gamers worldwide and it certainly impresses. While it may be gloomier than the Portal video game, and doesn’t have GLadOS, turrets or robots, the director certainly used whatever he had in his arsenal to make things work and successfully captured the essence of the game (in my opinion anyway). The video has only been up for about 14 hours and it has garnered 14,566 views at the time of writing – hopefully its popularity will convince Valve or a movie studio to hire this guy for a feature-length film. Check it out for yourself:
Filed in . Read more about Portal, Portal 2, Valve and Video.