Limits of Control: Best Film-Game ever
Very generally speaking, Films are about viewing a series of events without having any direct input whereas games are about player-centric volition.
Many films based on games, let’s say Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or Street Fighter [et al] fail to capture the unique quality of games and instead they strive to drop meagre one-liners or 5 second nods to their gaming counterparts. In general they are incredibly bad films by film standards because they are merely being made as a bi-product of a games success, either monetary or cultural.
When a gamer watches a game-based film, they feel cheated in the way that it represents nothing of their game playing experience.
There seems no end to this pitfall of incredibly bad game-films because many film producers rarely understand the bespoke qualities of games, in the way that narrative can be told through interactive and/or explorative ways.
Funnily enough however, it seems that the best films with game-like qualities share no marketing resemblance and just recently, the film District 9 in some way manages to capture the essence of a generic action game such as halo et al.
Leaving that as it is though, a film primarily designed to entertain, i then recently came across the limits of control.
I was attracted to the Limits of Control because not only was I a huge fan of Broken Flowers and Ghost Dog but because it also shares a very slight resemblance to Goichi Suda's Killer7 [The LONE MAN is similar in style to the games GARCIAN].
Indeed, after having watched and enjoyed The Limits of Control for numerous filmic reasons, it also struck me how many game-like qualities it unknowingly possessed.
For instance, adventure games allow players to freely explore worlds and environments at the players own desired pace. In general a player can create their own mise-en-scene, a trait perhaps unique to games, although underdeveloped. Indeed, how could an aforementioned game-film show, or even allow such an aspect without frustrating the viewer. Imagine if in the Silent Hill Film, a half an hour scene was devoted to simply walking around the town without any action: it just would not work from a film producers ‘blockbuster’ intention.
Along comes The Limits of Control...
The limits of control manages to feel very much like a game in the sense that the LONE MAN could quite easily be controlled by a gamer if we look at it from a gaming perspective. He ponders about town, looking at posters, walking through children’s games, talking to people and is very much interested in 'scripted' moments such as the scene where he just sits in the bar watching a musical performance.
In many respects, this type of behaviour is commonplace in numerous adventure games, players decide when to progress with their 'mission' and can quite literally do nothing but enjoy the environment [the best example of me doing this would be in games like Shenmue or Elder Scrolls]. In a way, this type of behaviour is very un-filmic and is perhaps one of the reasons why many people dislike the film as being too artsy or pretentious, they are not used to such slow and aimless [but purposefully so] pacing. To the contrary, such pacing has been a staple of adventure games for many years and is one of the primary reasons why i enjoy Jarmusch's languid style.
Indeed, perhaps films should begin to utilise some design aspects from games, as Jarmusch has indirectly done so in my example, and games should borrow some of the better lessons that film has to offer, aspects as lofty as Neorealism or action-less character dramas or as basic as adequete screenwriting.
In essence, I simply enjoy the window of opportunity that The Limits of Control provides. It instils the idea that there could be films in the future that can emphatically highlight the strengths of gaming (and vice-versa), instead of just ripping them off with intentions to meagrely entertain, furthermore sullying the potential of games in the eyes of film critics such as Kermode and Ebert.