After years of development hell, a couple of Ubisoft’s many non-gaming projects appear to be genuinely happening. The Splinter Cell animated series begins airing next month after forever in development. Meanwhile, a year after filming was said to be completed on a Watch_Dogs movie, signs of life have appeared in the form of some recent reshoots and the declaration from one of the film’s actors that it’s nothing like the games.
Post-production is obviously a lengthy process in projects bursting with CG, with most movies now enlisting the work of multiple SFX studios once shooting has wrapped. But a year without a single piece of news, early teaser, or even a leak still makes you wonder, especially as this silence came after the extraordinary ten-year gap between the film’s announcement and actually getting it in the can. However, news of reshoots reported by ScreenRant suggests things are definitely still progressing. What’s more intriguing, however, is the claim from the movie’s lead, Tom Blyth, that the result is “very different” from the source material. “It’s not the game,” he says.
That might immediately sound bad, because films that have wandered far from their original point tend to be aimless, meandering noise. But Watch_Dogs didn’t exactly have a memorable storyline, and is best remembered for its hacking within an all-consuming surveillance system, so ideally the film would lean successfully in this direction: thwarting the underground criminal world of Chicago through grey-hat hacking. It would have been great if it could have offered us this without fridging the protagonist’s niece at the start for some deeply lazy motivation, but there’s plenty there to serve as the basis for an action romp with a sci-fi edge.
Blyth (speaking to ScreenRant about his current movie Plainclothes) expanded a little. “They’ve done an amazing job of making…I don’t want to spoil too much. I’m trying to pick my words carefully, but they’ve done an amazing job of making the game into a film. It feels very film. It doesn’t feel like they’ve tried to copy and paste the game onto the screen. It feels like its own thing, and it feels like the beginning of a world-building exercise.”
It feels very film.
Super-fans of the original game might be disappointed to not get a highly faithful cinematic retelling of it, but given Watch_Dogs released in 2014, the vast majority of people have forgotten the story entirely. An exciting movie set in the world of hacking, surveillance and untouched criminal networks sounds like it could entertain me well enough, should director Mathieu Turi do a half-decent job with it all. Turi is still something of an unknown quantity, having been AD on movies like Inglorious Basterds and the infamously terrible United Passions, with just 2020’s Meander seeing him succeed at the helm. (His other films have not troubled the attention of critics.)
But, if nothing else, we know the Watch_Dogs movie feels, at the least, very film.
