Mass Effect, an award-winning, best selling science fiction video game series, will be heading to the big screen in the near future. After it’s first two entries, Mass Effect (2007) & Mass Effect 2 (2010) both sold millions of copies & delighted the critics, the call has been made for the series to take a shot at becoming a full length film. An RPG third person shooter, Mass Effect was conceived by its creators as a trilogy from the beginning. Mass Effect 3 is planned for a 2011 release date.
Mass Effect centers around a battle-tested human soldier, Commander Shepard, who must save the galaxy from a race of biomechanical beings known as the Reapers in the year 2183. Mass Effect 2 takes place two years later, and sees Shepard fighting the Collectors, an alien race abducting entire human colonies in a plan to help the return of the Reapers.
I just received a press release announcing that Thomas Tull’s Legendary Pictures has acquired the rights to bring the fantastic video game Mass Effect to the big screen.
As a fan of the series (yes, I finished both games), I’m honestly really excited at the chance of this becoming a great sci-fi trilogy someday. I know we’ve all been burned before on the “video games becoming movies” front, but I’m willing to take a risk, and bet on this series. If done well, fans will surely enjoy a great sci-fi epic story. Since Halo isn’t moving forward anytime soon, I would love to see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp take on it. I think he would do wonders with the action sets and feel/look of the series.
To me, both games so far, have been the perfect mix of an RPG and a action/shooter. I mean, basically you had to start from scratch and make your way up on a galaxy where humans are not that respected. You had to make your team up of total strangers – from other planets/races, with different attitudes and specialties. You had to trust them, they had to trust you. This made for some great epic storytelling and decison making. Yes, one of Mass Effect’s trademark achievements was that based on the decisions you made through the game, the outcome would shape up differently. Even cooler, for Mass Effect 2, if at the end of the first game, some of your teammates died or were “sacrificed”, then they wouldn’t be available for the second go around. If they were alive and well, then they would fight alongside you once again. Both games have been long and epic – worth every single penny.
I agree that Commander Shepard’s default character model for the game totally looks like Matthew Fox. And now that Lost (best show ever!) has finally ended, it would be cool to see him take on this role. He’s got the look, and he’s got the chops for this particular kind of role – the tragic figure who becomes the hero. I wouldn’t mind giving him a shot.
