Back in May, rumors ran wild that Brett Ratner might be directing a big screen adaptation of the popular video game series God of War. Bad news for video game fans, today’s MGM press release for the Robocop reboot contained the following juicy tidbit:

“David Self’s credits include 13 Days and Road To Perdition. He wrote God of War for Universal, to which Brett Ratner is attached to direct, and was a writer on Universal’s Wolfman currently in production.”

Is this official confirmation that Ratner is officially attached to the project? We hope not.



Max Payne Shot at 1000 Frames Per Second









Mark Wahberg, Mila Kunis, Ludacris, and Director John Moore (The Omen, Behind Enemy Lines) were in attendance to premiere Max Payne footage at the Fox panel at Comic Con.

During the Panel, John Moore kept repeating how important it was for him to stay as subjective to Max Payne’s character as possible. He believed once you take away the controller from the player, you better make it as personal to the audience as you can. Moore’s reasoning is that when you play the game the whole reason to play it is to feel like you’re a part of the story.

If you’re a fan of the game, you would be excited of what we had the privilege to witness. For instance, one scene involved Max Payne following some “junkies” into a subway system. As he passed them, they were sitting on a bench, he took a right into the bathroom. The next thing we saw was Payne looking into the mirror, he noticed the reflection behind him were the junkies. A shootout soon took place inside the bathroom, if anyone has played just the beginning of the game, the set were this taking place will seem very familiar.

Some other perks from the game, has Max Pax Payne narrating how he feels, using very dark metaphorical dialogue, but making it as simple sounding as it can, giving the feeling like you’re listing to someone read a comic book.

The last thing we were shown was a 3 minute highlight reel of the movie. It started with a zoomed shot of a barrel of a handgun, then with the same single shot started zooming back, until you saw Mark Walhberg standing holding the gun in in a alleyway while it was snowing. It went on with Led Zeppelin’s “Candy Store Rock” blasting in the background and seeing quick clips of various gun fights and showing different characters Max Payne will encounter, including dream sequence that are involved with the game. It ended with with a scene showing Max Payne holding a hostage in a office with an swat team of about ten, holding guns pointing to Payne. He throws the hostage to the ground and a fire fight ensues. Payne on one side of the room, the swat team on the other. Max Payne then tries to sneak to the other side of the room, ducking and dodging bullets by using the office desks as cover. At one point the emergency sprinklers go off, giving the firefight a little beauty to the scene.

At the end of the firefight, we see Max Payne dive, while shooting at a door to unlock it. The clip then slows down, using a bullet time effect much like what the game does. John Moore briefly discussed how they achieved bullet time. by Using a hard drive called Phantom. Phantom is a machine that can record video at 1000 Frames per second, which gives the effect of slowing down time time to the thousandth degree. The effect gives a smooth rendition of what the game does so well.

All in all, the movie has beautiful cinematic shots but the question remains, will the story be worth watching? Again, they seemed to keep the simple dialogue from the game, I’m not sure how well that will translate for a full movie.