Len Wiseman recently spoke to Bloody-Disgusting about his work on the upcoming Gears of War movie. The film version of the popular video game seems to be well on its way to becoming a sprawling epic trilogy. Wiseman claims that he is prepping Gears of War to become “Basically a harder edged Lord Of The Rings” Those are some big Oscar-winning shoes to fill! Although Gears of War does feature other-worldly creatures, it is hard to imagine that a video game adaptation would even come close to touching the level of acclaim reached by the LOTR books and films.
But, I might be wrong. Maybe I’m just biased against video games. It seems that Wiseman himself is a little biased against video games. He admits to BD “I suck at video games, it just takes me too long and I can’t get the coordination of ‘em.” So, how did he get into the making of Gears of War? When I was on [Live Free Or] Die Hard, I had to choose some video game for the background in a scene with Kevin Smith. I was shown about a dozen games and told to ‘Choose one to be in the background’ and I said ‘this one looks really, really cool whatever it is,’ and it was Gears Of War. I just really connected with it; the design of it the world, the whole thing. So I actually brought an Xbox 360 to start researching what it was.”
Gears of War follows the story of the soldiers in a group called the Delta Squad as then try to save the humans who inhabit the planet Sera. The enemy is the Locust Horde. Gears of War is a third person shooter game and the player gets to be Marcus Fenix, a former POW and tough-as-nails soldier. Wiseman claims that the film version of the video game is “going to be much more [on the] science fiction side of it than the creature side of it. I’ve always been much more of a sci-fi action fan than a horror fan.” He also says that “The hope is that were wanting to do a three movies and really cover the bases on everything.” Now, I’ve never played a video game the whole way through, so I’m not sure what “cover the bases on everything” entails, but I am assuming he’s talking about all levels of the game. That sounds like an overwhelming task: for the collector’s edition of the game the purchaser gets a 48hr trial period of the game. I assume that means that you can play this game for hours, days, and months on end.
When asked about how he will incorporate CGI into his vision of Gears of War, Wiseman responds “Yeah, I think about [3D technology] quite a bit, the more and more I get involved with these movies and the bigger they are the more you rely on CG effects to help you out. And you can do it properly; I’ve been a big fan of practical work and still am, it’s finding a way to incorporate them together.” Looks like this “hard edged” trilogy might just be more awesome than I am anticipating. Either that or Wiseman is just a really great hype-man.
