Spare a thought for the oppressed Kyrati. The victims of Pagan Min’s iron fist will not find liberation on Noah Hawley’s upcoming Far Cry TV series for FX. Speaking to Deadline, Hawley confirms he is “not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out.” Instead, the series will be similar to his work on Fargo or Legion, not specific adaptations of stories previously told in other media, but rather a “dialogue with this franchise.”
In that way, Far Cry is the perfect vehicle for remix master Hawley. Now more than 20 years and more than 10 games into its run, Far Cry has always been an anthology series, offering new stories, characters, and locations with each installment. It’s what attracted Hawley to the project. Hawley says, “That’s how I approach Fargo, and it was an exciting idea that we could build an anthology game adaptation where each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized.”
It’s those themes that often put Far Cry on the receiving end of harsh criticism for its depictions of “civilized people” meeting the “uncivilized.” The games have been chided for their use of racist tropes, like “white saviors” and “noble savages,” and deployment of thorny subject matter, like white supremacist cults and Himalayan warlords as window dressing, while failing to engage with those ideas in any meaningful or challenging way. Thankfully, Hawley intends to speak with the manager of Far Cry about that. He describes his style of adaptation as allowing him to “have a dialogue with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.” That allows him to have a “larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games.”
Though your mileage may vary on Hawley’s approach—the inevitable problem with long-running anthologies is that some installments are better (Fargo season two) than others (Fargo season four)—but he has a strong read on video game adaptations and where some stumble. “When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cut scenes that you can skip,” he continues, “so when you go to adapt those games, you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show.”
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