Home
Editor's note: Is the Mass Effect movie adaption dead in the water? Paul thinks so, and he makes a pretty convincing case why it is. Do you agree with him? -Brett
The Internet went nuts back in May, when The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Legendary Pictures (producers of 300, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Dark Knight) had secured the film rights to the hit BioWare series Mass Effect. Less exciting -- at least to me -- was the news that Ari Arad, who produced stinkers like Ghost Rider and Punisher, will executive produce alongside his pops, Avi Arad. To make matters worse, the story revealed that Mark Protosevich, who bored me to tears with his scripts for The Cell and Poseidon, is on board to write the screenplay.
Not exactly a promising start. Nonetheless, on video-game message boards and movie blogs alike, excitement abounds.
This wave of frenzied excitement is the first phase of a now-familiar pattern in the gestation of any Uwe Boll-less video-game movie. The initial announcement is always delivered to much fanfare, and the producers make a point to assure fans that they’ve learned from the mistakes of the approximately 8,000 horrible video-game movies and bring moviegoers a film that will magically entertain the masses without snubbing fans of the source material.
Soon enough, however, several people shuffle in and out of the production line-up, two or three scripts are summarily rejected, someone with legitimate acting chops (usually Ben Kingsley) mysteriously signs on, and then...we hear nothing. A couple of years and numerous video-game sequels later, out pops a movie so lackluster that people wonder what possessed them to get excited in the first place.
Maybe someday, some happy accident will result in an enjoyable video-game film being made. But the Mass Effect movie project is proof that it’s not worth all the time, money, and popcorn butter-related stomach cramps, and here’s why.
First of all, the element of choice is the defining characteristic of Mass Effect’s story. Strip the series’ universe of all its sci-fi tropes -- crazy alien races, intricate planetary histories, the galactic glue that holds them all together -- and you’ve got what amounts to a story about choices and how they affect the people around us. This means that even if the filmmakers nail the look of the Mass Effect universe, its heart and soul will never appear onscreen. The choices that players make during their time with the game are what pull them into its universe, just as much as the writing or the action. Even if everything else is right on the money, this exclusion will leave viewers feeling like they watched the non-interactive portions of the game -- in other words, the boring parts.
Furthermore, fleshing out the game’s universe in a two-hour film will prove to be logistically impossible, to say nothing of it being unwatchable. There’s simply too much content in the first Mass Effect alone to be bound by the average length of a feature flick. The Watchmen film wrestled with a similar conundrum, which it dealt with by (a) ignoring major plot points and story lines from the comic entirely, and (b) providing supplemental and companion material on DVD. Both of these methods (and the film itself) were met with scattered critical response. On top of that, the Mass Effect film project has neither the budget of Watchmen or a filmmaker of Zack Snyder’s caliber to offer fans any hope that its prognosis will improve.
Finally -- and maybe I’m in the minority on this final point, but I still feel like it’s the strongest case against a Mass Effect film -- I have no desire to see someone else’s interpretation of the Mass Effect universe. I don’t want to know what Hollywood thinks Shepard should look like (or even what gender he/she should be). I don’t even want to know what BioWare’s interpretation of the story is; when I read what Mass Effect 2 says “happened” at the end of the first game if you start from scratch, I felt disappointed and unfulfilled. It was as if I'd read a Choose Your Own Adventure book cover-to-cover.
The Mass Effect universe is my universe -- not Bioware’s, and certainly not Hollywood’s. Over the last three years and over 65 hours of game time, I’ve cultivated it from the ground up. I made those choices for my own reasons, and the meaning I’ve taken away from my experience isn’t like anyone else’s. That’s what I like most about Mass Effect, and that’s the way I want it to stay.
Recently, Bioware has taken to boasting in the press about how many hundreds or thousands of variables affect the way the story in Mass Effect will unfold as you play it. But if those variables are unique and special, why allow them to be turned into static, unalterable realities on film?
The Mass Effect film project is a case study on the limits of cinema as a storytelling medium. It might be amazing to see the Normandy fight the Reapers on the big screen, but to me, diluting the experience for moviegoers isn’t worth it. Let them pick up the game and experience it the way it was meant to be. They’ll be glad they did.
Paul Alexander is a student of Interactive Media and Game Design at SCAD in Atlanta, Georgia. He talks games, culture, and competitive air guitar at twitter.com/fender_splendor.
