What Would an Elden Ring Movie Even Look Like?
Late on May 22, Bandai Namco announced it would be partnering with indie darling A24 and Warfare director Alex Garland for a film adaptation of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Elden Ring, a game that drove many people — myself included — completely insane.
With world-building by George R.R. Martin, on the surface, Elden Ring is not much different from something like The Witcher or Skyrim, an open-world fantasy game with monsters and realms and a lot of riding on horseback. But the 2022 game of the year is also a “soulsborne” game — a catchall phrase for Miyazaki’s greater FromSoftware universe — with a distinctly punishing type of gameplay. In Elden Ring, the player travels around fighting various nasty creatures and bosses, accumulating “runes” (or “souls,” in past games) as they make their kills. If the player dies, however, before cashing in their runes, poof — gone. When the player is revived, they have one chance to go back and get their runes right where they left them, but if they’re killed again before that happens, the runes are gone for good.
The repetitive play model and arcane punishments that have come to define Elden Ring could make it a perfect match for a nihilistic director like Garland, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to literalize that on the big screen. Part of what’s always been tricky about video-game adaptations is that movies can’t really simulate the joy of gameplay (though a few of the side-scroller-inspired scenes in The Super Mario Bros. Movie got close). It’s likely we’re not going to have the sensation of losing 304,000 runes put on the big screen, but the story of Elden Ring leaves a little something to be desired.
There is a narrative — that’s why Martin is there — but one that requires a lot of lore-mining and player-focused exploration. The user plays as a lowly Tarnished eager to help a mysterious woman named Melina get to a gigantic golden tree called the Erdtree. There are side quests that end badly and giant yucky monsters to defeat, but the story is fairly esoteric, requiring the player to read a lot of object descriptions and Google “things you may have missed elden ring.” An attempt to streamline that story line would render Elden Ring not unlike Game of Thrones: a dark, twisted fantasy narrative where death rules over all. If Garland is wise, he’ll structure an Elden Ring movie like Annihilation, which overwhelmed the viewer with enough striking images so that they didn’t care that most of it didn’t make a lick of sense (or that the dialogue was not very good.) Why do you need stuff like backstory or motivation when you can see what the Fire Giant looks like on a big screen?
What’s thrilling about an Elden Ring adaptation, however, is the expansive room for casting: a number of characters and bosses defy the gender binary and could be any possible age. You could probably put anyone in this movie and it would make sense: Hunter Schafer could be Rya, The Rock could be Starscourge Radahn, and all the cute boys from Warfare could play the guys at the Roundtable Hold! These are characters with mouths for stomachs and anywhere from two to nine arms. The game’s worlds are simultaneously very ugly and very beautiful — leaving room for Garland to make this thing look like either Men or Annihilation, depending on his mood. If he wanted to make Rory Kinnear play every character here, that also wouldn’t be so far off.
If nothing else, a true Elden Ring film adaptation ought to be punishing. The movie should make you — the viewer — get good at watching it, rather than meet you halfway. As any soulsborne fan knows, the trick to these games isn’t working through cheats or glitches but arduous practice and dedication. This movie shouldn’t be good or fun to watch, nor should it be visually appealing or even make sense — if Garland can nail that down, he has a good sense of what makes Elden Ring so much fun.
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