Video games rarely work as movies. The basic forms are alike in surface
ways, but the best parts of a video game are usually the parts where the
player is in control, all the action stuff. In video games the story is
usually the tertiary concern (gameplay and graphics usually come
first), so what works in a game doesn’t translate to cinema.
But
there are a handful of modern games that feel like they could actually
make decent movies. A handful of games that have rich characters and
stories and worlds, and that aren’t just excuses for endless series of
battles or the solving of puzzles. One of those is Mass Effect, BioWare’s space epic, and it’s
been optioned by Legendary Pictures.
Legendary are the folks behind the
new Batman and Superman films, as well as the upcoming Godzilla and
World of
Warcraft,
among many other geek properties. They’re hiring I Am Legend‘s Mark Protosevich to write the
screenplay, which I’m assuming will be based on the first game (there
are two right now, with the series being planned as a trilogy).
In
Mass
Effect you
play Commander Shepard (who can be male or female, but you can bet
it’ll be a dude in the movie) as he takes control of the SS Normandy to
battle an alien threat that wipes out all life in the galaxy every
500,000 years. The pending invasion takes place against a backdrop of
hundreds of alien worlds and dozens of alien cultures, with the human
race still getting used to life as a spacefaring species.
There’s
no word on a date for Mass Effect.