TAG Critical Watch Series Year One Retrospective - Andrei Zanescu and Friends
It’s surreal to think back on this first year of TAG Critical Watch, given how many offhand discussions Marc and I have had over the years of programming a slate like this. Before we ever committed to this, there were smaller viewing parties around campus, and at folks homes, and one recurring tension that popped up was how cinephiles felt about game movies, and conversely how players felt about movie adaptations of their favorite games. It seemed like the discussions would always come back to why. Why adapt this game, when it works better as a game? Why this director, or this year, or this genre? Marc’s always been interested in adaptations of games, and I was getting increasingly involved with research on the overlap between Hollywood and the games industry (which is being fairly reductive already). And in 2025, we finally had access to the infrastructure, and TAG was brimming with interested folks. On my end, I had students asking me about this in pop culture, television and game studies classes for weeks.
So, we finally decided to just do it last year. We sat down for two afternoons and hammered out a slate that seemed varied, but also branched out in unconventional ways. We wanted game adaptations, but we also wanted movies about games more generally, or even technological imaginaries. What if we thought through adaptations of game theory, or even board gaming more broadly. The one thing nipping at our heels though, was time. We realized how quickly the clock was running against us to get the events on the calendar, and how we could time them against other releases, either films or games.
Once we got going though, it was all rapid growth, far more than I ever expected at least. Packed houses at most of the events, and clear interest from industry and local folks. We had expected TAG folks, already invested in studying games, to show up, but we were blown away at the number of undergraduates that showed up, and became repeat attendees. We knew we hit something special when we started having production folks from Blur Studio show up as well.
As part of this Year One retrospective, what we’d like to do is to highlight how we chose the movies we did, and what the viewings taught us, as well as some of the folks from the community that shaped this year. Pretty informally, of course, and then, forecast what we’re cooking for Year Two!
1. The Super Mario Bros (2023)
Andrei: The first one out of the gate is always the trickiest. How do we pick the right one? How do we pick a movie that gets folks in the door and onboard with the project? Will people even care? It turns out that we were worrying too much. We actually ran out of tickets weeks before the viewing was even scheduled and we ended up with folks sitting on the ground. Most of all though, folks immediately clocked why Mario was our first choice. An out and out smash success in 2023, grossing over 1.3B USD and kickstarting a new wave of animated films, Mario also became a bellwether for Nintendo finally opening its IP trove for adaptations. It also passed the Pixar’s animation crown to Chris Meledandri’s Illumination, at least as far as box office pundits and distributors were concerned. More importantly though, the room was vibrating when we dimmed the lights. People were excited, and it certainly helped that we had some kids with us. We hit that perfect cross between why this movie hit with children, its vibrant energy and colours and action-comedy trappings, while bringing in older fans of the games, through callbacks and the adaptation of in-game mechanics and installments. It just hit, and it set up the rest of the year.
Jules Maier-Zucchino: The Super Mario Bros. movie attempts to be “faithful” to the franchise in a number of ways. Mario finds and obtains power ups. There’s a Mario Kart inspired driving sequence on Rainbow Road. But all these surface level references do not get at the heart of what makes this movie a good adaptation of the game: it’s just a fun time. I’m sure it would have been entertaining in any context, but to experience it amongst such an engaged community only heightened that feeling. I had a blast!
2. War Games (1983)
Andrei: War Games was a lot more of a gamble, looking back. General interest was lower, and I imagine part of this is because we didn’t lead as much with the place that film occupied in the political thought in the mid-80s. At first glance, it looks like a straight down the middle Matthew Broderick political thriller with light sci-fi elements, until it kicks into high gear. Nonetheless, the response from the room was to think of it as an artifact of its time, and it is perhaps the only showing I’d say was not as successful. Not because the movie isn’t good, but because we live in a context where AI panics are so rampant that its message about the need for human agency amid systems of management seems relatively soft. As a viewing, the film played entirely like a comedy, which is perhaps the biggest testament to how much the frame of reference matters in the viewing experience. What seemed dire in 1983, looked like a joke today.
Fenwick McKelvey: WarGames literally started American cyber policy in the same way that Mission Impossible made President Biden worry about AI. Beyond Reagan's revelation, the movie is a perfect encapsulation of 1980s attitudes to computers. After decades of building computers as technologies to calculate mass global death, Americans are introduced to their military industrial complex by a spunky teenager who makes the whole threat of nuclear annihilation fun as if resisting this military machine was as easy as war driving your way to the beach.
3. Uncharted (2022)
Andrei: Of our entire slate, Uncharted was one of the easiest inclusions. That’s because the games the movie adapts are already so film-like in format and tone. Part Indiana Jones and part Tomb Raider, the trope of the thief-archaeologist is perennial as both a figure of action film, and the action-adventure genre of games. It also presented a foray into adaptations that lean primarily on starpower, with a stacked cast: Antonio Banderas, Tom Holland, Mark Wallberg and the more recently popular Tati Gabrielle. Uncharted was our Hollywood-Game fusion choice, where the game feels entirely subsumed by those production decisions that shave off all “gameness.” Unsurprisingly, the adaptation had gone through many studio hands and eras before it hit screens, given that it felt like a movie from the mid-2000s. It was another massive hit with the audience, but once again as a viewing experience where the audience takes nothing seriously. You can only be so serious about a viewing when Mark Wahlberg is trying to find Ferdinand Magellan’s lost gold.
Marc Lajeunesse: Put this film in a crate and bury it deep beneath the earth, locked away behind tedious puzzles and cruciform keys.
4. Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Andrei: This one was a surprise for me. I had expected the reception to be tepid, even if I’m somewhat in on the franchise as a whole. I told myself, as a longtime Sonic fan, I was overinflating how the movie plays, but Ben Schwarts, Jim Carrey and James Marsden have a way of making a ridiculous premise and somewhat cursed execution of the animation-live action combo work. Schwartz’s Sonic is endearing and charming, while Carey’s Robotnick is given all the space to cook a 90s comedy meal. It’s one of the movies that the audience felt was objectively middling, but a viewing experience they enjoyed the most among the slate. In some ways, the movie plays like an experiment at mixing many generations of game adaptation DNA, and one where it works the most. On my mind was also a conversation we had with Dr. Kishonna Gray years back on the Humour & Games podcast, where Dr. Grey mentioned how hard this movie hit with black audiences. Once you’re thinking about this aspect, it becomes easy to recognize just how consistently underrepresented folks of colour, and their brand of humour, are in videogame adaptations. And when we left, we were consistently asked, when are we screening the sequel.
Renée LeBlanc: The first thing that comes to mind when I think about 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog adaptation is ‘fever dream’. The movie itself, whose development began with the most cursed interpretation of the titular character’s design (those teeth still haunt me five years later), attempts so many genres at once that it becomes a parody of all of them. It swings drastically between a buddy-cop film to a family-friendly romp, to a time capsule of Internet and meme humour from the early 2010’s. Likewise, the tone of the movie is all over the place – Sonic himself goes from bubbly to morose faster than the speed of sound. All of these half-baked components come together to create a movie so bad that it’s good. 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog is undeniably entertaining and ridiculous. I can’t feign to be the biggest Sonic fan, even in childhood, but this movie sparked a renewed joy in me for seeing this recognizable character come back to life, so much so that I went back to play an old Sonic game for the first time in over fifteen years. Just like my favourite road sign found in Sonic’s cave and attic bedroom, watching this movie was mentally a ‘wide load’ that I was more than happy to experience through a TAG Critical Watch.
5. Assassin’s Creed (2016)
Andrei: I knew it was going to be rough, but I underestimated just how rough. It’s amazing to see a solid director like Justin Kurzel, with quality performers like Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson, just produce an absolute bomb. Part of the reason we wanted to show this one was exactly because it was such a misfire when it was released. The movie feels like two halves smashed together, peanut butter and vegemite. The audience dropped out of any serious viewing commitment a few minutes in, and as an ironic watch, it is too self-serious to produce the kind of humour you’d like. It’s both too camp, and not camp enough. The overwhelming feeling was that Kurzel should’ve committed to a movie set entirely in 1492 Andalusia, instead of 1/3rd in the past and 2/3/rds in a present that split both emotional investment, and narrative flow. Ironically, this is a critique raised by game players, so maybe Kurzel succeeded in unexpected ways.
Elizabeth Eraña: This movie did not know what it wanted to be and was stuck in some liminal space between a period piece, a dystopian prison future, and some weird romantic tension between tradition and personal freedom. I remember being particularly perplexed about Sofia's character who, arguably had the most character growth in the story, which ultimately reverted by the end when the Assassins kill her evil dad. I get it, it's complicated, family is complicated, but the story was much more concerned about these cerebral notions of duty and agency and freedom than they ever were about familial bonds. Familial bonds end up being used as like the reconciler for whatever the story needs to be next. Cal needs to get with the program? Here's ghost mom, she's an assassin!!! Sofia needs to walk back her politics on free will and murder guilds? Her dad's dead now. I can see they're trying to use it to reconcile the liminal-ness of genres and timelines, but it just doesn't work and feels very out of place.
6. Jumanji (1995)
Andrei: Marc fought hardest for this one. We went back and forth for months before settling on this original Jumanji as our choice. We had toyed with the idea of showing the reboot first, but we realized we had no movies from the 90s, and we also had no board game movies. Much like War Games, the creepiness and tension of the film are lost due to contextual shifts, but there was a different appreciation for the kind of adventure family movie that dotted screens at the time. Audience members were delighted to see an original script, and loved the campy performances, with particular praise Robin Williams and Jonathan Hyde’s dual role as a stern patriarch and crazed safari hunter. Overall, this was a fantastic success, and one that ended the year on an upward trend, with once again a full room. And like Sonic, folks are hungry to see the remake to compare notes.
Maia Earl: Jumanji (1995) is a hidden gem in a sea of recent adaptations that often feel formulaic and overworked. I was fully on board with the choice to show the original instead of the reboot. Yes, we gave up a few signature one-liners from The Rock, but we got something with more substance: a charming adventure film that is both weird and delightfully entertaining. We loved the jungle animals stampeding through suburban streets, the indoor floods, and of course, the special effects involved in young Peter’s transformation into a monkey, which sparked several strong opinions in the room. Where the film lacked in scale and CGI, there was personality and creativity. Everyone was charmed by the performances of the actors, and I think there’s something important here to be said about a movie that’s just genuinely fun to watch.
The TAG Critical Watch Series, Year II
And so, without further ado, that brings us to this year’s TAG critical watch series movie line-up, handed down from on high and carved in stone by Mario himself:
Our first film of the new year is Tron:Legacy, showing on Thursday September 25th at 5:30pm in the Fine Arts screening room, EV 10.525. Seating is very limited, so if you wish to attend, please RSVP by sending an email directly to tag.coordinator@concordia.ca or by messaging Marc on the TAG Discord.
Thanks for reading, and see you at the game movies!