The Quarry Blurs the Line Between Video Games and Cinema

When the new teaser trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water--the next entry in James Cameron's CGI-heavy film franchise--came out, many viewers opined that the footage resembles a video game. As praise or pejorative, that comparison is a touch hyperbolic. Yet it signals, too, the perceived overlap between the video game and film industries, which have increasingly come to share technological, narrative, and visual approaches. Multiplex screens are nowadays laden with game-like images--exceptions exist, but a sense of green-screened unreality certainly abounds, whether you're watching an explosion-rich action film or a well-paced drama. Other ideas also flow freely across mediums: Games and movies alike have set their watches to Matrix-style "bullet time" effects; both forms have shaken up their cameras à la Bourne; and as virtuosic a filmmaker as Brian De Palma has marveled at how certain games have deftly repurposed cinema's roaming, first-person point-of-view shots.