Development Hell
By Chris Tilly
“This is based on a true story. Some scenes and the order of some events have been altered for dramatic effect.” It’s pretty normal to see those words appear onscreen at the start of a film, as obviously no narrative can fully capture or convey real-life. What’s less typical is for them to be followed by the sentence “It has not been authorised by the makers of Grand Theft Auto.”
That’s because The Gamechangers – a tale of two obsessive men, which combines the story of the creation of Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas with the efforts of a moral crusader to take the studio behind it down – is currently facing a lawsuit for trademark infringement from the parent company of that very studio.
So from the outset it’s clear that at least one party isn’t happy with this version of events. But that’s the least of this BBC TV movie’s problems, with The Gamechangers offering a mildly diverting overview of the aforementioned events, but failing to tell either story in any real depth.
The film’s early scenes introduce Rockstar boss Sam Houser (Daniel Radcliffe), a brilliant man with an audacious plan to revolutionise the games industry. We know he’s a maverick because he brainstorms while playing table tennis, and we know he’s a visionary because he says things like “whatever we do next, we have to take it to the next level.” He also has an unhealthy obsession with infamous Hollywood producer Don Simpson, which here seems to represent character depth and development.
Houser dreams of a world in which people talk about video games in the same way that they speak about music and films, and plans to achieve that San Andreas, introducing hardcore sex and violence into the mix and – perhaps forgetting about the existence of Mr. Potato Head – planning to create the world’s first fully adaptable hero across any art form.
But frustratingly we learn very little about what goes into the making of such a revolutionary game, with tech-speak bandied about and electronic leaps forward alluded to, but very little actually explained. And while director Owen Harris tries his best to make programming look exciting, he fights a losing battle.
Rockstar’s efforts to make the greatest game in history are juxtaposed with scenes of Alabama youth Devin Moore playing Vice City, committing a crime, getting arrested, grabbing his interviewing officer’s gun, shooting two policemen and a radio dispatch officer, and stealing a police cruiser to make his escape.
The latter scenes are somewhat insensitively shot using Grand Theft Auto’s POV style, while the next day’s headlines quote Moore as saying “Life is like a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.”
This brings the issue of violence in GTA to the attention of Jack Thompson (Bill Paxton), an attorney and moral crusader who had previously railed against the likes of Howard Stern and 2 Live Crew.
Shocked and appalled by the content of Rockstar’s games, Thomspon sets up a civil case seeking damages of $600m and demanding the industry takes responsibility for the effect their games are having on the youth of America.
Believing that “if you tell the tales, you define the culture,” Thompson builds his case by trying to establish a link between children playing violent games and committing violent acts, with a soldier revealing that the army calls military games ‘murder simulators’ and uses them to train killers, and an academic claiming they trigger violent behaviour in the brain.
Brainstorming at the Chateau Marmont.
But of course, that case was immediately thrown out of court, meaning these scenes build to something of an anti-climax.
The rest of the film revolves around a graphic sex scene cut from San Andreas, but left hidden in the code. A Dutch gamer found the material, posted it on YouTube, and caused a scandal that might have been the smoking gun that Thompson was looking for.
Suddenly Hilary Clinton was taking notice, the House of Representatives were making claims of fraud, and the Federal Trade Commission were threatening to re-rate the game and pull it from stores.
But while again tension builds to what should be a dramatic showdown, the result is yet another anti-climax, with Rockstar receiving little more than a slap on the wrists, and Thompson being disbarred not for his actions in court, but via the campaign of intimidation and hate he waged outside it via email.
So with the storyline amounting to very little, we’re left with a character study of two headstrong idealists fighting for what they believe to be right.
Unexpectedly, Thompson is the more developed of those two characters. Quoting Martin Luther King, comparing himself to Batman and Elliot Ness, calling GTA America’s second Pearl Harbour and talking to God on the golf course, he often comes across simply as a crackpot, and Bill Paxton always gives good crazy. But there are other times when Thompson is a much more well-rounded character, doing what he genuinely believes to be good and right, and unable to fathom why it results in he and his family being harassed and roundly hated.
In a strange way, Houser is less sympathetic; undoubtedly a pioneer, quite possibly a genius, but also a prat, a bully, at times something of a dictator, and as the proverbial hits the fan, both reckless and paranoid. Daniel Radliffe frequently struggles to nail these different facets however, at times looking like a child playing at being an adult in a stick-on beard (even if the beard’s real, it still somehow looks fake on the actor) and ultimately failing to convince as Rockstar’s Alpha male.
That might be because he seemingly has no life beyond the game, so where Thompson has a wife and child to interact with, giving the audience a better sense of who he is, Houser spends most of the film simply barking orders at his employees.
He isn’t helped by several clunky scenes and some truly cringe-worthy dialogue, with James Wood’s script filled with awkward conversations and lines that are weighed down by exposition. News broadcasts and radio phone-ins give context but fail to ring true, while a scene in which the game producers hit the streets for research purposes, face off with a gang of seemingly threatening kids, and then befriend them due to their love of the game is actually painful to watch.
The result is a film that’s fine if you’re looking for a simplistic overview of this series of events. But if you’re after a more complex character study, a deeper examination of the ‘violence in games’ debate, or a more detailed account of how this bunch of Brits revolutionised the industry, you can move on as there’s nothing to see here.
The Gamechangers tries to cram so much into its 90-minute run-time that you can’t help but wonder if the story might have been better served by being told over the course of a mini-series. That said, The Social Network was a feature film about a group of youngsters who changed the way we communicate and managed to be detailed, nuanced and hugely entertaining. Gamechangers endeavours to do a similar thing with the story of how Rockstar changed the way in which we both view and play video games, but fails on the majority of fronts. The result is a film that’s simplistic, cliché-ridden and ultimately pretty underwhelming.
