I played Bioshock for ten minutes before realizing it wasn’t for me. It’s critically acclaimed, and everyone loves it, but it’s a puzzle, find the lever game with lots of atmosphere. I started hating those back when people were playing Star Wars: Dark Forces, and I’ve continued hating them with frustrated enthusiasm ever since. It’s just not for me. I prefer to get in a game, blow things up, and get on with my life. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes trying to find the right lever to pull, or listening to endless dialogue from characters I’d rather be shooting in the head. I have problems.

Luckily though, what games like Bioshock lack in immediate explosions, they make up for with a lot of story, and since it has a lot of story, it should be pretty easy to turn it into a movie. It’s happening, and Variety says it will be done under the direction of Gore Verbinski for Universal Pictures.

Verbinski has plenty of experience turning existing properties into blockbuster movies. He’s to blame for all those increasingly crummy Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Hopefully with Bioshock, he’ll have the good sense to stop after the first one.

As for Bioshock, it’s set in an alternative version of the year 1960, and the game follows a plane crash survivor named Jack who explores a spectacular, crumbling, underwater, dystopian city called Rapture. The city is infested with mutant beings and mechanical drones which, as you’d expect with fleshy headed killers, attack. Verbinski says he’s excited about exploring the idea of a utopia gone wrong, but we all know it’ll eventually boil down to being another zombie movie, because that’s what the kids want.

When rumors of this movie first started circulating back in January word was that they’d be taking a page from 300 and making it another all green screen movie, because Hollywood now builds all of its sets with nerd power. If the movie’s good, it’ll be the first videogame to movie adaptation ever to earn that distinction. Unless Verbinski manages to talk Johnny Depp into saving his ass by being in it, I wouldn’t bet on that happening. The long and sordid history of bad videogame movies is not on Bioshock: The Movie’s side.