Print Screen: The BioShock Movie

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Because the setting doesn't necessarily have to be all about turning corners and killing things, there is also a greater likelihood of introducing a romantic subplot. Not everyone in Rapture needs to submit to the madness, after all.

What Is the Moral?

Game critics have made a lot of BioShock's critique of Objectivism, science and free will. It sets the scene with the bathysphere slideshow about how Rapture frees you to pursue your talents as far as they will take you without any of that messy religion or politics or state control. Society is for suckers. The lesson is slowly unveiled, culminating in a confrontation that calls into the question the very nature of individuality and choice. The divide between freedom and slavery is as simple as the ability to choose.

If you had read no commentary about the game at all, it would be entirely possible to play through it and not plumb the depths of the commentary that Ken Levine and 2K Boston were making. BioShock can be seen as yet another pretty first-person shooter with some really neat mechanics.

Traditionally, films have been better than games at imparting moral lessons or driving home philosophical points, but Verbinski and the screenwriter will have to decide first whether the game's message is the one they wish to make, or if they even want a message at all. Ryan is a sort of Frankenstein, only the city is his monster; "BioShock" the movie could choose to keep it simple by focusing on his ambition and arrogance instead of making any larger point about free will and social constraint.

No matter how you slice it, BioShock will require some major adaptation in order to work on-screen, much more than Halo or Prince of Persia will. And these adaptations will worry many of the thousands of people who loved the game. A lot of it will come down to whether or not BioShock is seen as a setting, as a parable or as an adventure.

How Do You Deal With Plasmids?

Where the "Prince of Persia" movie can just have the hero running around and making acrobatic moves, BioShock's central mechanic involves mutation into superhero status. As fantastical as the idea of an underwater metropolis is, once you add a hand that fires bees at enemies, you are well past plausibility even in a world that is sideways to our reality.

Gamers are used to this sort of nonsense, of course. You jam your arm with magic sauce and the next thing you know you are Bee Man. In the context of the game, it works as myth -- humans transcending human nature and becoming monsters as much as gods.

If it were magic, it might work better for a mass movie audience than science-y arm goo would, but a 1950s-1960s setting doesn't lend itself to the same fantasy elements that a far future or distant past setting do. Plus you have the imagery of gaining superpowers by injecting drugs.

Verbinski, of course, turned a Disney theme park ride into a billion-dollar franchise, and partially through the expansion of magical elements to go along with the period swashbuckling and legends of the Lost Dutchman. And there are mystical elements in the Indiana Jones series, though more as deus ex machinas or MacGuffins than as central plot mechanics. You really can't have BioShock without the science run amok, so plasmids will need to be there somehow.