I never finished Horizon Zero Dawn, and I didn't play Horizon Forbidden West. Of all the PlayStation games that have come out in the last decade, I'd say that for my taste the Horizon series ranks pretty low among them.
That is not to say that these necessarily are Poor game. In fact, even though I never finished Zero Dawn, I went and watched all the cutscenes I hadn't seen so I could piece together the rest of its compelling story. While I didn't find its post-apocalyptic, robo-dinosaur-strewn landscape particularly interesting, I was very interested in the connection between protagonist Aloy and scientist Elisabet Sobeck, and how the world we explore came about due to irresponsible military use of technology.
While I was invested in the story, the game fell flat for me. I didn't like the fighting, or running around the world, or even the game's variation in biomes. I was too bored with actually having to play the game to see it through to the end, even though I wanted to know what happened. That's pretty much what makes Horizon an ideal candidate for a movie adaptation.
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Horizon has a great, relevant story
I'm not the only one who thinks Horizon's writing was top notch. In 2017, the year it was launched, the game won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Story and Best Game Performance. It won Outstanding Achievement in Story at the DICE Awards. It was nominated in almost every major category at The Game Awards (and every other major awards show, for that matter).
Even its themes are still relevant eight years after the game launched – maybe even more so. In Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy discovers that the Old World was destroyed nearly a millennium ago because a corporation, Faro, lost control of its military robots. Because the robots were designed to replicate themselves by consuming biomass, the robots spread across the planet and destroyed Earth's biosphere. Sobeck attempted to counter this by creating Zero Dawn, an automated terraforming system that would restore life to Earth and disable the robots.
We live in a world ruled by corporate interests and militarism. We also live in a world ravaged by climate change and worsening natural disasters. Corporate interests in general enable climate change. It is entirely believable that some idiot billionaire could invent this technology in a hundred years and make tons of money from it, regardless of the catastrophic consequences it could have on people's lives. We already see that kind of behavior every day. Horizon makes me think about how the world is as dangerous as it is beautiful and deserves to be preserved.
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But Sony needs to get this right
That said, we don't know anything about the upcoming film adaptation. Rumors circulating about the now scrapped Netflix-produced television adaptation suggested that the project would focus on the pre-apocalypse period, which would not have been a good choice. If this is what Sony is going to bring with the film adaptation, I'm not sure it will work as well.
Horizon Zero Dawn's story works on its own, and it doesn't need to be expanded upon. There have been too many video game adaptations coming out recently that failed to stick to the stories that made the games great, like Amazon's Like a Dragon: Yakuza series, the Borderlands movie, Uncharted, and probably the upcoming Until Dawn movie.
I'm not saying that experimental adaptations are doomed to fail—Amazon's Fallout told a new story, and HBO's The Last of Us expanded on the source material to great effect—but so many adaptations fail to recognize the strengths that already exist in the stories they take on the big screen.
If done right, Horizon already has all the ingredients for a great movie adaptation. All Sony needs to do is remove it. I'd say it can't be to difficult, but we have already seen so many failures. I just hope Horizon doesn't become another one of them.
Horizon: Zero Dawn
