Here at Cracked LCD, I don’t get to write a lot of movie reviews. It stinks, because I probably love film more than I love board games and I usually have lots to say about the pictures I watch. But hobby games have never really been a hotbed of inspiration for screenwriters and filmmakers, at least not to the degree that we’ve seen many films based directly on intellectual property and licenses.
Sure, we’ve had POKEMON and YU-GI-OH cartoons (if you consider those hobby games) and that absolutely execrable feature film and great-when-you’re-ten Saturday morning cartoon both based (allegedly) on DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. And there’s also that 1981 schlock masterpiece of pre-Satanic Panic alarmism MAZES AND MONSTERS, a film that blew the lid off obsessive campus RPG groups and ended with Tom Hanks convinced that he could cast a flight spell like his in-game wizard. I doubt we’ll ever see TWILIGHT IMPERIUM: THE MOTION PICTURE or a TV series based on WARHAMMER 40K, and it’s probably for the best. Clumsy, misunderstanding hands could easily bungle even the most interesting and cinematic of story ideas that hobby games have produced.
Such is the case with the 2008 film MUTANT CHRONICLES. Based on a long-running but somewhat second-string line of board games, miniatures, CCGs, and other gaming properties including the classic SIEGE OF THE CITADEL and the recently canned Fantasy Flight Games collectible miniatures game, the film is directed by Simon Hunter and stars Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, and John Malkovich for about a minute and some change.
The film kicks off with a voiceover giving the barest outline possible of the MUTANT CHRONICLES world—at least what the screenwriter took from it, which isn’t really much. A machine crashes into earth 10,000 years go somewhere around Poland. A secret society vows to safeguard it. Mumbo jumbo and crudely drawn backstory follows with hooded monks, fire, and swords that all looks extremely chintzy; kind of like a Flying Frog board game. We get a map showing the world of 2707 and how the big corporations (Bauhaus, Mishima, Capitol, and Imperial) control the world blah blah and so on but if your favorite part of the games was how it combined a kind of cyberpunk-ish worldview with the baroque occult element you’re already going to be disappointed because that’s all the lip service you’re going to get. Oh, and go ahead and rule out seeing an Ezoghoul, Doomtroopers, Blood Berets, or anything to do with the Dark Symmetry. Apparently the Cybertronic Corporation decided to sit this one out too- guess the producers couldn’t figure out how to do robots on a shoestring.
The story proper opens on a big battle between combined Capitol and Imperial forces with the Bauhaus army (think the US and Great Britain versus Germany). The good news is that the opening sequence, despite looking extraordinarily cheap due to its set-bound and digitally over processed quality, is actually kind of inspired. It feels like the director and screenwriter really wanted to make a science fiction World War I film with all the trench warfare, wagon-wheeled artillery, tommy helmets, and fixed bayonets. It’s an original idea, falling somewhere between PATHS OF GLORY and steampunk, even if the characters and dialogue are incredibly trite and clichéd. I actually kind of bought it and was willing to give the picture the benefit of a doubt just because I liked the concept if not the execution. The bad news is that not only does the film looks almost nauseatingly murky, but also that the armies decided to fight right over where that big machine parked, and its occupants decide to join the party. And my goodwill toward the film pretty much disintegrated.
What ensues is a sequence of half-assed, z-grade zombie piffle that makes ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST look like a masterpiece as the film’s version of Necromutants spew out and kill everybody with bone-blade arms. The Necromutants run amuck and overrun the world. The corporations decide to evacuate earth- at least the folks who have these special evacuation tickets which more or less means the rich and privileged. Social satire? Barely. The secret order of monks catches wind of the machine doing its business and Ron Perlman sets out to round up a team of soldiers to put this key into it to stop it from spitting out Necromutants. It’s a suicide mission, of course, but Mitch Hunter (Thomas Jane) and a crew of doomed-to-die redshirts representing various racial stereotypes are persuaded to sign on with the promise of these golden tickets to give to their families.
