Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images
I’ve been content to think about Alex Garland’s Elden Ring movie in the abstract. This thing is far away. It’s going to take forever to make. I’m not gonna think about it, not when there’s a James Gray movie coming to Cannes and The Odyssey on the horizon. That was all well and good until someone found what looks suspiciously like a Church of Marika in the middle of a field in England, and now it’s all starting to feel very real, very quickly. On April 20, A24 announced the film was set for release on March 3, 2028. (That’s two days before the Oscars that year, so we can already put some Kalshi money on whether there’s going to be a monologue joke about, like, Conan O’Brien being the Fire Giant.) Along with the release date, it announced a cast featuring a number of Garland regulars, like Kit Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman, as well as a bunch of other actors who it’s just plain fun to think about saying video-game dialogue, like Ben Whishaw, Tom Burke, and Havana Rose Liu. Not long after that, some eagle-eyed fans spotted a Leyndell Knight walking around the Greenwich Naval College in South London. It was like a switch flipped, and I went from wondering what the hell this thing is going to be to wanting to see it more than anything.
The big question that remains, as fans start to dissect early leaks of photos and wonder about casting, is will Garland fuck this up? Like any beloved and popular IP, there is a standard to uphold when it comes to adaptation, but no three Elden Ring fans can really decide on what that standard is. Having real-deal actors is one way to guarantee a certain pedigree, even if we don’t know who is necessarily playing who (or what) beyond Connor as the possible lead of the film, his armor resembling that which is depicted on the game’s cover, and Emma Laird being spotted in Marika garb. (There are rumors of Burke playing Blaidd, but I personally think he’d be a great Morgott.) Elden Ring is kind of a narrative medieval epic, but it’s a narrative medieval epic where the lore is borderline impenetrable and the narrative qualities are otherwise opaque. To do a “faithful” adaptation of the “plot” of Elden Ring would be to have characters pick up objects and then read a whole paragraph on what that thing means and where it’s from and to whom it originally belonged. Garland’s dialogue, as evidenced in movies like Annihilation and Men, can be both elliptical and brutally straightforward. Again: Kind of sounds like the same deal as Elden Ring dialogue. This shouldn’t feel like Lord of the Rings or King Arthur. It should feel like you are in space and being deprived of oxygen, as it feels for the first 12 hours of playing Elden Ring if you’ve never played a Soulsborne game before.
The Elden Ring sets are looking very real in a way that summons an overpowering urge to replay a game that takes 400 hours to get through. I, for one, am excited to learn what the story of the game finally is, having skipped over all those object descriptions to get my ass beat by Malenia. Also: Isn’t it fun to think about someone explaining Elden Ring to Ben Whishaw? Like, that’s Peter Hujar. We still have a ways to go until Garland’s vision is up on the big screen and not random Reddit posts, but until then, there’s one big question that lingers: Where’s Torrent?
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