While Resident Evil movies are looking to make a comeback, Uncharted is releasing stills from its shoots, and Castlevania has been successful and has a fourth season in production, game companies are no doubt exploring options for how to proceed with adaptations of their intellectual properties.
The writer of the new Mortal Kombat film currently in production, Greg Russo, has expressed interest in turning Far Cry 3 into a movie. While the series has come a long way since its humble origins, and with the much-ballyhooed Far Cry 6 release looming on the horizon, here are a few reasons why Far Cry 3 is still currently the best choice in the series to lend itself to a film adaptation.
THE PLOT
Far Cry 3 starts out with a group of privileged California 20-somethings who are on vacation in Bangkok. After agreeing to go on a shady sky-diving trip, the group lands on Rook Island, which is, unbeknownst to them, pirate territory. They are then promptly captured.
The player plays as Jason Brody, who escapes captivity with the help of his brother, Grant, who perishes in the attempt. Jason is then trained in the ways of the Rakyat, a tribe native to Rook Island that seeks to free it from the pirates’ grasp. With his new training, Jason sets to free his friends, including his other brother, from captivity.
As far as plots go, it’s a pretty solid premise that doesn’t require a hefty amount of setup. In movie form, viewers would be able to immediately get a sense of stakes, why they’re rooting for the protagonist, and why they’re rooting against the antagonists. The game itself manages to effectively do all of this with its opening cutscene in just two minutes. The less time a movie has to spend setting up its premise, the more natural it feels, and the viewer doesn’t feel bogged down having to learn a whole bunch of fake history before they’re able to enjoy what’s happening.
THE VILLAINS
Far Cry 3 has two primary antagonists, Vaas Montenegro and Hoyt Volker. Hoyt is the man in charge of all of the nefarious happenings in the game, using Rook Island as his hub of drug-running and human-trafficking.
While Hoyt is serviceable as a villain, Vaas is much more memorable. It’s clear Ubisoft thought as much, as Vaas was featured in all of the promotional material for the game, including a short film where he, played by Michael Mando, kills McLovin’ from Superbad. His character is erratic and brutal, but charismatic. He takes sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing those he has captured, and often feels compelled to deliver a monologue before condemning his victims to their fates. His diatribe in the game’s premiere trailer about the “definition of insanity” even approached meme status on the Internet when it first released.
Hoyt is a bad guy who loves to give a speech every now and then, but he’s a businessman and his actions are in service of his bottom line. Vaas is a more compelling villain to watch because he is so unhinged. It can be hard to predict what his character might do next, which gives him not only a chaotic element but also a broader range of emotions to explore. He’s fun to watch in-game, and there’s no reason to think he would be any different in film form. As far as the games are concerned, Vaas might even make a comeback.
THE MAIN CHARACTER
The Far Cry series has, with every iteration, been a fresh start of sorts. Each game brings a new location, a new conflict, and a new protagonist to shoot the bad guys. Jason Brody in Far Cry 3 has made for the most interesting player character of all of the currently-released games in the series because he’s the only one with an actual arc. Thankfully, Far Cry 6 looks to bring this element back.
At the beginning of Far Cry 3, Jason Brody is nothing more than a thrill-seeking white guy from Los Angeles. Over the course of the game and his many, many murders, he not only gets used to the act of killing people but even begins to relish it, telling one of his one friends, “it feels like winning.”
The transformation first becomes apparent on a mission to rescue one of his friends from captivity. After escaping a prison compound in a jeep, Jason starts fighting off pursuant vehicles with a machine gun mounted on the hood of the vehicle. He’s terrified at first, but as he continually reduces opponents to bursts of flames and shrapnel, he starts to enjoy himself, cheering with each new explosion and yearning for more fresh meat. He eventually decides he wants to stay on the island because he’s having such a good time killing pirates.
What makes Jason Brody’s arc as a character even better is the metatextual nature of it. Far Cry 3 is, at the end of the day, a video game. It’s meant to be fun, even if it does task the player with gruesomely murdering a bunch of people with a machete. When Jason Brody starts to enjoy killing people, the disconnect between player and player character essentially dissipates, his motivations mirror the player’s, and he inhabits the gamer id. Killing the bad guys to Jason feels like winning because, for the player, it is winning.
This concept can be carried over faithfully into movie form since movies are, ultimately, just another form of entertainment. Jason Brody may enjoy killing people, but is there much difference between him and the viewer since they derive pleasure from watching Jason kill?
Current entertainment has become increasingly self-referential because of the massive industries that keep churning out new movies for people to watch and new games for people to play. Why should an action movie based on a video game be any different? Having a main character of the film whose motivations reflect why the audience is watching would not only help the film feel more relevant but could potentially give the film something to say not only about itself, but audience participation in simulated violence. It doesn’t need to be ground-breaking, but having even the smallest amount of commentary on the subject like Far Cry 3 does would be a welcome treat for viewers who appreciate it when their entertainment is more cerebral than surface-level action and plot points.
Far Cry 6 seems to be trying to return to some of the elements that made the plot of 3 so successful, casting Giancarlo Esposito as the villain and giving the player a character with personality and personal stakes. Maybe this new installment in the series can capture what made the game feel so special. In the meantime, a TV series based on the standalone expansion Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is in production, so perhaps a film may arrive sooner than expected. Until then, there’s always more pirates to be found on Rook Island should players ever wish to return there.