The hunt for a great video game adaptation goes on. Following Assassin’s Creed‘s shrug-inducing reception but a solid overseas box office renaissance currently helping the film become a relative success, Ubisoft has signed off on their next video game adaptation: Splinter Cell.
Though we’re still in the earliest of production stages – no script has been finalised yet – the film is set to star Tom Hardy in the lead role and will be partly produced by Basil Iwanyk. Collider spoke with Iwanyk about the state of the film:
“We’ve got a script. It’s a little long, but it’s the best script we’ve had. Now that I’m back from Mexico City, we’re going in there to figure out how to cut some pages and give it to [Tom] Hardy. This draft kind of addressed Tom’s notes. We’re going to give it to Hardy in the next couple of weeks and hopefully try to get it done this year”.
The games follow Sam Fisher, a highly trained agent of a fictional black-ops sub-division within the NSA who must prevent planned terrorist attacks. The games delve deep into Fisher’s backstory and seem ripe for a nuanced yet thrilling amalgamation of character development versus commentary on our current political climate, but Iwanyk seems to think the film might be a little different to its source:
“Splinter Cell really is a first-person shooter game. And so the challenge of making Splinter Cell interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters.
“I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted”.
This might not exactly be music to the ears of fans, as they’ve seen plenty of video game adaptations simply go down the route of “lets make a giant action film” and fail miserably. As we saw with Mad Max: Fury Road, though, Hardy can make pure action work. Maybe they should hire George Miller to direct?
One thing Iwanyk insisted on is the dedication to not rip off some of the most successful 21st century spy films:
“The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?”
These admittedly sound like relatively vague answers that could lead to a forgettable, generic action film. If Hardy signs on, though, that would be a sign that this could be something more with the right hands to mould it. It’ll be a while until Splinter Cell goes into production, let alone hits cinemas, but we’re hoping for the best.
#Peace.Love.SplinterCell
