Unless you’ve been living in a damp Hylian cave, then you’ve probably heard the news: decades after its debut on the NES in 1986, Nintendo has finally green-lit a live-action Legend of Zelda movie with Maze Runner director, Wes Ball, at the helm. Clearly, despiteseemingly giving fans what they wanted,the news has folks feeling rattled, nervous and generally shocked, but not me.
I’ve been thinking about this forquitesome time, and instead of taking the obvious route of the hero, heroine and antagonist, i.e. Link, Zelda and Ganondorf, I’d like to propose a different type of Zelda flick that doesn’t even feature the series’ titular princess.
I playedMajora’s Maskas a ninth-grader in 2000, and I didn’t like it at all. In fact, I flat out despised it for being an Ocarina of Time-lite, deprived of the merriment and majesty its predecessor had. What’s more, waves of despair and frustration prevented me from even finishing the game until years later, when I was in my 20s, and only then did I allow the poignant darkness to penetrate my Ocarina-loving heart in order to recognize its cult status.
The Doom And The Moon
For those who’ve forgotten (or never played it), Majora’s Mask was the sister game of the N64 hit (and my favorite),Ocarina of Time, and the result of Nintendo having too much awesome material leftover from Ocarina to waste, hence the similar graphics and familiar characters. The plot revolves around Skull Kid, an enigmatic rascal who wears a mask of terrible power, Majora’s Mask, and by wielding it, he sets in motion the apocalypse via a furious moon that will descend on Hyrule’s parallel world of Termina in 3 days. Topically, that’s heavy enough, but there’s more than just impending doom.
Inhabitable masks, despondent citizens and one creepy grinning salesman flesh out the game’s guts, making it as deep a game as I’d ever played, with mature themes consisting of loss and acceptance in the face of, what seems to be, inevitable destruction.
It was, at its core, an existential nightmare, making you simultaneously fret about every wasted second, while all the while questioning the futility of it all. And there lies the silver lining. Majora brings out Link’s most humanistic and altruistic traits, as he spends hours taking on a plethora of side quests that seem inconsequential in the big picture, yet meaningful to the townsfolk of Termina with the time they have left. This is just the kind of stuff the Academy would gobble up.
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A Darker Shade Of Link
Here’s how I see the movie playing out: zero context. Boom. A chunk of Majora’s mystique came from dropping players into an entirely new story with little warning or assistance, so why couldn’t the same esoteric experience work for those in the audience?
If Wes Ball needed inspiration on how to properly pull this approach of instead of another Maze Runner, he could take a page out of controversial Dutch auteur Lars von Trier’s book from the 2011 movie Meloncholia. In a nutshell, a newlywed and her sister freak out and eventually make peace with the fact that a newly discovered planet, the eponymous Melancholia, will collide with Earth. Sound familiar?
The side-quests have some great stories hidden therein too. Any Majora movie would have to include Anju and Kafei’s touching quest, where Link reunites a betrothed couple who have been separated due to Kafei’s transformation into a kid via one of the game’s cursed masks. Wes could also throw in the totally heartbreaking Deku Butler’s Son quest for an added emotional kick.
It doesn’t take a fan of the game to acknowledge its potential as a movie though. The fan-made artspeaks for itself, and as awesome as a Majora flick would be, it probably won’t happen. However,if, by the will of Hylia, it does, I almost hope that it’s as polarizing as the source material, separating the wheat from the chaff. You may as well push the boundaries of a live-action adaptation with a hard PG-13 rating, limited speaking on Link’s part, and little room for levity. This is your chance to either make another video-game movie, or a video-gamefilm. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at what this company already did with CGI and tell me a Netflix-backed movie couldn’t do even better:
Let’s shoot for the moon here, literally and figuratively, at least before Illumination makes aMariosequel.
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