Terraforming a 12-hour personal adventure into a two-hour romp is a risky affair. Telling Gordon's story will no doubt leave fans disappointed when certain elements are omitted, he speaks and it doesn't live up to what was in our heads, or it blunders like most adaptations do because it just doesn't quite capture the game's original magic. That's if Half-Life 2 is even the world that Valve explores - perhaps we see other scientists escape Black Mesa's alien invasion and subsequent nuking, maybe even Kleiner and Eli. How one man was left to act as a guardian angel, bringing lost souls through the limbo of undeath toward the rusted gates of escape. Perhaps even, more upsettingly, how Ravenholm went from a refugee town to a zombie-infested hellhole riddled with the stench of rotting carcasses. Valve could even delve into the liberating rebellion and its beginnings - Eli, Kleiner, Alyx, Barney, Magnusson, those who no doubt died along the way before Gordon ever stepped foot onto the scene. Gordon Freeman lingering in stasis, G-Man watching it all unfold: a bittersweet action film that doesn't need Gordon to work. Display the Combine at their most powerful to drive home the hopelessness of it all alongside the characters we know and love standing in defiance. A grand story about the Seven Hour War, a wide-scale butcher with the world collapsing into disarray as interdimensional conquerors crush humanity into submission. They don't need to be so prolific and over-the-top that they garner a reputation rivaling Gordon Freeman's - if they did, we'd have heard about them in the games - so it can be a smaller, more personal story. Telling this from the perspective of a civilian turned rebel could bring in the intimacy we adore from the games without butchering the original story. RELATED: Gabe Newell Makes Cameo In Valve Comedy Song “Count To Three” A story about how the people of City 17 went from obedient cogs in the Combine wheel, constantly pushed down, constantly berated, to rebels with a vengeance. They're barely breathing, the Metrocops towering above them in their soulless masks with fierce blue eyes, stun baton in hand, charged and ready for another swing. For example, a lone City 17 civilian, beaten and bruised in an apartment raid, their belongings ransacked and left sprawled across the rotting floor in pieces. Instead, they should expand upon that world with someone else, and fill out the corners with a fine-tooth comb.
Even without that issue, making the leap to tell the same story but condensing it down from dozens of hours to just two will always leave it feeling somewhat empty, and that's exactly the problem Valve will run into if they tell Gordon's story again through such means. Video games are a tough medium to translate into film, whether it's RPGs that build themselves upon character customization and choice, or story-based games with silent protagonists.
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