Please, I'm begging you, just copy/paste (A Horizon Zero Dawn post)
If rumors are to be believed, Sony is developing a Horizon Zero Dawn show for Netflix. If you’re not familiar with the property, it’s a video game about a lone female warrior named Aloy living in a post-apocalyptic future Earth who slowly discovers the truth about what happened to humanity. I freely admit to being biased about it, but I think the story of Zero Dawn is one of the best science fiction tales I’ve encountered in a very long time. It’s familiar in ways that prevent the need for too much onboarding of lore: It’s not a huge stretch to imagine how humans might develop after centuries without functioning technology. But Zero Dawn is also wildly creative, which keeps it from feeling tropey. I mean, yes, humanity is living in the ruins of old cities, but it’s also dealing with zoomorphic robots. That creature in the image above is a Tallneck, a robot somewhere between a giraffe and a…I dunno, an allosaur, maybe? Zero Dawn has robots modeled after hippos, alligators, gazelles — even a T. rex. And believe it or not, it even comes up with a reason for the robot fauna to exist that actually makes sense.
There are several challenges when it comes to adapting a video game to a TV show, with the first and most notable being that video game stories typically aren’t deep enough to be interesting in and of themselves. Zero Dawn has more than enough story to support several seasons of a Netflix show, so that’s not the problem here — but it is a problem. Players spend dozens upon dozens of hours with Aloy over the course of the game, and while a lot of that is spent doing game things like managing inventory or fighting, they nevertheless have plenty of mental cycles to devote to the plot. A cutscene maybe only take a few minutes to reveal some new and important piece of information, but the player has ample time to digest it. It also has to be said that experiencing a story when you’re an active participant in it is different from when you’re ingesting it passively.
Let me use an example from Zero Dawn’s sequel, Forbidden West, to illustrate my point. Aloy encounters a tribe whose culture is based on agriculture: harvest, crops, planting, all that. When a member of the tribe is born, they’re given a small pouch of seeds, which they carry on their person at all times. When they die, the seeds are planted by their loved ones. It’s one of my favorite environmental details from that game, and I only learned it because I had quests that directed me to go to a place, fight some machines, and retrieve the pouches of fallen soldiers. Within a TV show, it really, really doesn’t make sense for Aloy to go off and do random side jobs, but in a video game, it’s totally normal and thus presents ample opportunity for the introduction of new locations, characters, and stories. Outside of that structure, it’s much harder to find ways to work things like that into the narrative, and so the world-building becomes a little trickier as the writers have to make hard choices. Which bit of color gets to stay, and what gets the chop?
Video games are also more forgiving when it comes to info-dumping. Everything from the names of the machines to the weapons Aloy wields are fed to the player either in lumps, which is as accepted as taking time out from saving the world to help someone find ingredients for their special stew. They might even be tucked away in menus for the player to read (or not) at their leisure, because it’s not always important to know that kind of stuff when you’re busy trying to master combat controls. The same can’t be said for the TV adaptation, where information will be vital for viewers’ context and understanding of the world these characters are inhabiting. Finding a way to do that without resorting to an “As you know…”-style speech will take some deft writing.
And if I’m being honest, much of what made Zero Dawn’s story so impactful for me was that it was told in pieces. I might learn very early on that Aloy is living hundreds of years after whatever catastrophe happened, then encounter a video diary from a guy doing an “apocalypse world tour,” seeing as many things as he can before everything hits the fan. That diary provides the perspective of someone who knows the end is coming, which is context that stays with me when I explore the “cauldron” where machines are still being assembled. All of Zero Dawn’s various pieces inform its whole, combining to create a more complete picture. That kind of storytelling is possible in an episodic TV format, of course, but managing it in 10 episodes? Herculean. Hell, it’s going to take three or four just for viewers to understand who Aloy is and why they should care about her.
So, yeah, the creators of any kind of Horizon show have some heavy lifting ahead of them, but that said, I hope they just cherry-pick from what already exists. The problem I have with most video game adaptations is that they don’t use what’s already there. The Tomb Raider movie with Alicia Vikander? Just follow the story of the game and you’ve got a great adventure. NOPE. (I guess those filmmakers wanted to ground it in reality, thus we get a whole bike courier sequence to explain how physically fit Lara is. Dumb choice. Did we do that for Indiana Jones? No. No, we did not.) Strip Zero Dawn down to its most basic components: something is infecting and overriding the machines. In her search to discover what it is and how to stop it, Aloy uncovers the truth about the destruction of humanity. That’s it. That’s plenty.
Sadly, I doubt that will happen, because they won’t trust the audience to pay attention and thus will keep the world but remove the intelligent, nuanced story at the heart of it. I’ll bet you a dollar we’ll see Aloy astride a Charger fighting a Thunderjaw with her bow and tripwires, but I’ll be surprised (pleasantly so) if the show adequately explores the secrets of Zero Dawn.