Originally posted by Carl
no, because it'll just be a mindless action movie. that is, unless they fill in the plot a great deal. you'd have to make a cast of characters, and a story involving them outside of the whole war thing.
Turning it around the other way, if you looked at games based on movies, like "The Return of the King" or "Star Wars: Starfighter," these games do not have sufficient depth to make a movie from them, because they necessarily pick out certain points from the film that would make a good game. Almost by definition, the only thing you'll find in a game are the action scenes -- Arwen doesn't have much of a role in the "Return of the King" game... In other words, you'd *have to* fill in the plot a great deal.
You would need a writer and a script before you could make a film, and the film would only be as good as the writer and director made it. And they would have to take certain liberties, since the media are fundamentally different. A plot in a (decent) game is merely something so that the missions make sense, and unifies the whole thing. A plot in a film must be far richer.
To make a Freespace film, you would start off with the elements in Freespace universe -- Terrans/Vasudans/Shivans, the GTA and the PVN, jump nodes, the
Galatea, etc. You then add the events that would *have* to be in a Freespace movie -- the 14-year war, the Ross 128 attack, the McCarthy treason, the first "real" contact with the Shivans, the HoL, the reverse-engineered shields, the appearance of the
Lucifer at the destruction of Tombagh Station, the loss of the
Galatea, the devastation of Vasuda Prime, the discovery of the Ancients'records, and finally the destruction of the
Lucifer and the isolation of Sol.
All of these elements would probably need to be in the film, but alone they wouldn't make a good movie. It would certainly need to be more than a bunch of dogfights: you need characters that the audience cares about, and a storyline that glues them together. You'd need to set things somewhere other than in the cockpit of a fighter, either on the ground or on board the
Galatea and
Bastion. And give some screen time to the Shivans. Damn, I'd like to see a bunch of Shivans, more than the 10 seconds worth in the "Hall Fight" cutscene.
If I was the writer
I'd probably start off about where FS1 starts, and fill in with flashbacks to the start of the T-V war. Maybe Alpha 1 could be Lieutenant Petrarch
The age is probably about right -- figure 25 or so years old in FS1, and an Admiral at 57 in FS2. (Hmm, except Alpha 1 from FS1 is stuck in the Sol system at the end, so maybe that wouldn't work.) Cadet Aken Bosch could have a cameo though... In any event, the intro movie would go in almost verbatim -- that's good stuff. But not every mission in FS would need go in (e.g., you don't need the one where you're escorting the
Galatea through the asteroid field, nor the one where the Shivan cargo blows up).
I always thought the penultimate mission in FS ("The Great Hunt") would have made a great scene -- trying to beat the clock, with wave after wave of Shivan and HoL fighters warping in; and then finally, as the pilot is almost at the jump node, the
Prophecy fills the screen in front of you, like something out of a bad dream. (Of course, the dialogue leaves something to be desired "We'll never make it in time!" "Keep quiet! We have no other option!" but the soundtrack makes up for it, adding the right level of urgency.)
Hey, maybe I'll try to buy the rights to Freespace from Interplay and make my own... well, never mind, maybe not.
