[Kie99]

If your going to aspire to something, make it a little higher then ID:4

Wait, what's wrong with independance day.... and since when were there sequels?

ID4 is a nickname for the film Independence Day for reasons of marketing.  I think it's mainly a US thing.

[Blue Lion]

Independence Day 4: Even more Independencer

[darkdaej]

For an FS movie to actually WORK, it would need to be either the T-V war or the Great War.  Having played FS2 before FS1, i can attest that while I loved the game, until FS1 I didn't get what was so frightful about the shivans, given that except the bits with the Sath, you feel as if your fleet and your fighters are the strongest posible thing out there.

In FS1 you actually felt outgunned as well as outnumbered and the game required more skill to complete, except bombing runs of capships, they just got harder with flak and AF beams, which was good cuz FS1 capships look like big slow hunks of metal with target signs painted on em.

Story-wise it'd be much easier to make this story about the humans being at war with this other species for 14 years, nearing economic collapse because of it and then some mysterious, indestructible (at first) enemy shows up and makes short work of anything they encounter, forcing the humans to ally themselves with the Vasudans, who face the same threat.

FS2's story is basically one of an arrogant government who believes they can handle anything because they adapted 30-year old shivan tech to their ship designs...

[starlord]

I tend to agree, even though I presently think that novels would be more adapted to the freespace universe...

Independence day? I remember having yearned at that movie when i was very young. watching a missile barrage set a city destroyer alight was genuinely appealing to me. And the scale...
I know that because of this (and also the add at the beginning of the film), I tracked the ID4 PC game during 4 years (I didn't know how to order on the internet at the time, not that it was as develloped as today). Easily one of my longest hunts.

[Eishtmo]

Turning either game into a movie would be, um, damn near impossible.  I think I made the only serious (and complete) attempt to write FS1 into a story, and looking back on it now, it wasn't that great.  Lots of issues come up when making a movie, the biggest being scale.

FS1 and FS2 are BIG.  Very big.  They cover a lot of ground and compressing it into a movie with a concentrated plot would be difficult to say the least.  Your best bet would be to ignore most of the game's overall plot, and focus down on something small and easy to cover.

Let's start with a rescue mission gone wrong.  Space battle to get to a ship, tow it back, etc, etc.  A little tweaking and you go from a sci-fi space war movie into a space horror picture (imagine a Shivan chasing the cast down corridors of an Arcadia).  Finally a big battle to escape, possibly with cameo's of squadrons or ships (the Bastion comes to the rescue perhaps).

That's rough and off the top of the head, but that would be my best bet on a movie:  Ignore the game as anything but source material.  You'll have better luck than a true game movie.

[Flipside]

Agreed, problem is, if you go for the small, personal level, you get a remake of Alien, if you go for the grand Space Opera scale, you get a kind of massively watered down version of Babylon 5.

You'd do better, as Eishtmo suggests, using the story as the background, oh, and it would have to have, just for the sake of continuity, at least one mid-battle collision between wingmen

[Killer Whale]

Good Movie = millions of $ of profit
Bad movie = millions of $ of deficit
Therefore: Movie = millions of $ of risk
Amount it would take to bribe to make FS3 = Considerably less
# of people with millions of $ who'd make FS3 = nil, or they already would have done it or have never heard of it
# of $ in the hlp < cost of a movie
Epic movie of FS = Fantastic
Low budget movie of FS = A disaster
FS Movie = low budget?
FS Movie = disaster
FS Movie = Non-existant

[Getter Robo G]

We just need to hope a FAN with $ gets an idea and stays true to the story.

Like how Toby M. is supposedly a "Fan" of Robotech and made it his project he brought to Warner Bros.


Wing commander is a great example of how to F-up your franchise.

Chris Roberts (the CREATOR) had to bow and scrape and cave in to demands fo otehrs and is on teh record bascially saying "i didnt; want to do this". And it turned into anythign BUT a WC movie...

We all got robbed.  For any IP based movie you need the the right person, at the right time, with enough $ and the POWER to make it happen and NOT take **** from others.

Any step along the way not covered by those can spell disaster...

[BengalTiger]

The story of crew trapped inside the NTF Iceni would be a good story to make the FS movie. Like from the part when they arrive in the Nebula to the part when the survivors get rescued.

[Blue Lion]

That would require a ton of backstory

"Previously on FreeSpace...."

[Snail]

Or, you could just say they were simply rebels fleeing from a government force hunting them down, and that the area they fled into was inhabited by evil aliens.

[Blue Lion]

Then it's not really a FreeSpace story, simply a story based off a FreeSpace plot?

[TrashMan]

The best story for such a movie would be the story about a group of people who were at the forefront of the Great War(s).

The story could be about the crew of the Baastion ...or the squadron serving on it.
Or about Bosch...or admiral Wolf.

You got leavy for a great story here, since FS given a great background.

[Eishtmo]

You got leavy for a great story here, since FS given a great background.

Not really, truthfully.  Freespace has very, very little background stuff to play with.  At the same time, there is so little that every piece is very, VERY precious and if you don't use it right, you'll trash it.

There are 4 wars (5 if you count the Ancients), a bunch of battles that are connected, sometimes loosely, sometimes really tightly.  From FS1 there are two characters (Shima and Wolf) that you have any interaction with at all, the rest are wingmen screaming for help and Vasudans being jerks.  The cutscenes are either text or disconnected scenes of war.  FS2 has more characters, but outside of Bosch, Snipes and Peterach (sp), they have very little in terms of character.  Hell, the SHIPS have more character than most of the people.

The whole thing has a very epic feel to it, but it doesn't actually have a tightly wound story, and what it does have for a story isn't enough to actually build a movie on.  A TV series could work, but even that would be hard without basically rewriting a signficant chunk of FS canon.

Even writing the campaigns as a book would be and was difficult.  For my Great War story, I had to basically create characters from the ground up, build relationships you never see and concive of reasons why things are the way they are.  My original 14 Year War timeline was developed as background for the story because I needed something to work with.  FS Vanilla just doesn't offer that.

What will end up resulting in the attempt to make a film is a rather generic space war/horror/suspense/drama movie with Apollos and Orions fighting Dragons and the Lucifer.

[starlord]

Actually, if you take a campaign like homesick, you'll notice that some mission designers clearly wanted to give more thought to character devellopment.

I would clearly have seen this scenario as a novel.

[NGTM-1R]

*snip*

Bollocks.

This is a writer's dream for a derivative work because there's so very little to get in the way. The setting responds very well to adaption. Look around you; this is GenFS. A thousand different views on everything you consider problematic exist already here, most of themy equally supportable. Those things that are not discussed here are, for the most part, actually irrevelant to a well-plotted story. FS is an in media res sort of world.

What you percieve as weakness is, in fact, strength. Nothing but what you choose to make of it.

[Uchuujinsan]

*snip*

Bollocks.

This is a writer's dream for a derivative work because there's so very little to get in the way. The setting responds very well to adaption. Look around you; this is GenFS. A thousand different views on everything you consider problematic exist already here, most of themy equally supportable. Those things that are not discussed here are, for the most part, actually irrevelant to a well-plotted story. FS is an in media res sort of world.

What you percieve as weakness is, in fact, strength. Nothing but what you choose to make of it.

I can only agree.

[TrashMan]

NGTM-1R put it better than me.

The strength of FS background is that is it's powerful, but simple and sparse enough that you can really build a lot upon it.

[Eishtmo]

Bollocks.

This is a writer's dream for a derivative work because there's so very little to get in the way. The setting responds very well to adaption. Look around you; this is GenFS. A thousand different views on everything you consider problematic exist already here, most of themy equally supportable. Those things that are not discussed here are, for the most part, actually irrevelant to a well-plotted story. FS is an in media res sort of world.

What you percieve as weakness is, in fact, strength. Nothing but what you choose to make of it.

A writer's dream, perhaps, but a fan's nightmare.  With practically nothing to build on, and what is available is rather generic, the writer gains almost TOTAL control.  Their minds go wild and the result is something that says "FREESPACE" in the title, but it won't ever be Freespace.

So to my point:  The canon campaigns can NEVER be made into a movie.  It's impossible.  Side stories within the campaign are possible, but then the writer can go completely off the tracks and create a very generic movie.  Even the one I briefly described is something that would be at home as a bad SyFy (god I had that name) movie.

The FS background isn't super special, it's very basic and cliche.  The only thing that really stands out are the Shivan's themselves, going by as totally unexplianed for two games and an expansion pack.  Most games and movies would never let that happen, but they did it.  Everything else is pretty generic.  Swap out the models and the names and you could have a dozen different games/movies/TV shows.  I suppose you could say that about any game, of course, and that's the point..

As another point, more freedom for a writer often is a detriment to the writer.  Limiting yourself when writing, or by given constraints, allows you to fully explore those limitations and truly develop what is possible.  Could this be done with Freespace?  Not really, because FS has so few constraints that it's not hard at all to break them.  Have you ever seen my 14 Year War timeline, the canon version?  Aside from a few stated battles and dates, there's NOTHING there.  The rest of FS is just as empty.  Without a sturdy set of barriers in a writer's way, they'll go nuts, perhaps all over the place and we won't get a Freespace movie, if we're lucky.

Could it be done?  Maybe, but damn would it be hard.  I'm not hopeful about it.  Hell, I wouldn't even attempt it myself.

[Scotty]

*snip*

Could it be done?  Maybe, but damn would it be hard.  I'm not hopeful about it.  Hell, I wouldn't even attempt it myself.

Soo..... Because there is so much unexplored/explained, it would be harder for a writer to write a good story ?  The lack of a great deal of characters is actually a boon in this instance, because the writers can make up ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING about those people, where they came from, why they came from there, why they got to where they are now, etc., etc., ad inifnitum.  It's a blank canvas only limited by the three canon campaigns.  Campaigns that do absolutely nothing but give people an idea of how nasty the Shivans are, and how idiotic some people can be.

but then the writer can go completely off the tracks and create a very generic movie.

I'm sorry, but this phrase taken out of context just made me laugh for some reason.