Mass Effect: The Movie

It was announced yesterday that Legendary Pictures have purchased the rights to make a Mass Effect film (Bioware announcement here). I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. Quite a few video games have been made in to films however very few of them are any good. I enjoyed the Resident Evil films, but I've not played a lot of those games. I also liked Doom, aside from the lack of Cacodemons and Arachnotrons, it was good but not great. However so many of the others range from mediocre to complete rubbish. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, House of the Dead, Tomb Raider, Max Payne, nothing really great there. I've not seen Prince of Persia yet but I don't have high hopes for that.

Can a Mass Effect film be any good? As a fan I really do hope so. It's off to a fairly good start. Legendary Pictures have a history which includes The Dark Knight, Watchmen and 300, all films I enjoyed. Also Avi Arad has a producer role and he has been involved in many of the great Marvel adaptations including Iron Man, X-men and Spiderman. Some of the Bioware staff also have executive producer roles, so they'll obviously be keeping at least some creative control. I hope they can keep Drew Karpyshyn involved somehow (lead writer of the games and books). Although I see someone else I've not heard of (Mark Protosevich) is currently in talks to do the script.

The big question is what do you do about the story. Do you remake the storyline from the games or do something new based in the same universe. Personally I'd opt for the latter. The game play and story is based on player choices. If you choose to make the film script follow a particular path from the game then you'll disappoint those who choose a different path. In addition to that is the problem of the player's character, Commander Shepard. By default he is generic male space marine type, but in the game that's fully customisable and for me (and many others) she's female. So whoever you were to cast in that role a lot of people would consider it wrong. Unfortunately that probably won't be given a huge amount of consideration as the people who played the game are probably only a small subset of the people who will see the film.

I'd say it should be a separate story from the game, like the books are. I've seen some people on the message boards saying it should be about the First Contact War but I think it would be more fun to have it set closer to the game's time frame so there could at least be cameo appearances from the game characters.

Finally there's the budget to consider. The Mass Effect universe consists of many planets spread all across the Milky May which all have a unique look. Huge sci-fi cityscapes, frontier colonies and ancient ruins, a lot of that will need to be CG and it won't be cheap. There is also the aliens to consider. The Asari and Krogen could probably be done with prosthetics, but I don't see any way to do the the Salarians or Turians without them being fully CG characters. I know all that is a lot easier these days but to do it well will take a good chuck of cash and I'm not convinced it has a broad enough appeal to make it back.

So for now I'm quietly confident and hopeful for the project. It will be at least five or six years before it's released anyway and there's Mass Effect 3 to come before then!