Imagine you’re tasked with adapting a beloved video game into a movie. Now, picture making a drastic change: instead of keeping key characters and setting, you replace them with completely new ones and shift the entire premise. Rather than focusing on the original storyline, you opt for a new take that feels like a generic disaster movie.
This is the feeling I get from the “First Look” at Sony’s upcoming Until Dawn movie, based on one of my favorite horror video games. While the film retains some elements of the game, such as a group of teenagers heading to a mysterious location, the changes are striking. The setting is no longer wintery, and the atmosphere lacks the ominous tension that made the game so gripping. Additionally, there’s no sign of the wendigos, a key element of the game’s horror. If you watched the footage without knowing it was tied to Until Dawn, you might not even recognize it as an adaptation.
One positive note is the casting of Peter Stormare, known for his role as “The Replacer” in Black Ops 6. He was also the voice of Dr. Hill in the game. However, even Stormare’s involvement can’t generate the excitement I was hoping for.
As a standalone horror movie, the concept isn’t entirely without merit. The plot description itself is intriguing, even if it seems more like something you’d expect from a video game than a film. The premise follows a group of friends, led by Clover, who venture into a remote valley to investigate the disappearance of her sister Melanie. Once inside an abandoned visitor center, they’re stalked by a masked killer and killed off one by one—only to find themselves inexplicably returning to the start of the same night. With each cycle, the killer becomes more terrifying, and the group realizes they have only a limited number of deaths left before they run out of chances to escape the nightmare.
Here’s the full synopsis: “One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one…only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they’re forced to relive the nightmare again and again – only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left, and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.”
The original Until Dawn was a groundbreaking interactive experience, designed to immerse players in a horror movie-like atmosphere. The game’s appeal was in making players feel like they were the ones in the movie, making choices that could change the outcome. By turning this experience into a traditional movie, much of the original appeal is lost. Even the presence of well-known stars like Rami Malek, who voiced a character in the game, helped elevate the interactive experience. It’s almost as absurd as adapting a chess video game into a real-life board game.
While it’s clear that Sony is taking creative liberties with the adaptation, these changes seem to go against the spirit of the original game. If the filmmakers are going to stray so far from the source material, it raises the question of whether an adaptation was even necessary.
For now, I remain hopeful but skeptical about this project. Hopefully, the movie will prove me wrong, but I have serious doubts.
Sony recently unveiled a slew of new game-to-movie adaptations, which you can explore here. Additionally, the trailer for The Last of Us Season 2 is also available and is worth checking out.
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