By I’m a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and I’m very pumped at the notion of a Mass Effect movie, despite the awful track record of video game to movie adaptations. Maybe it’s because Mass Effect is basically a better version of the Star Wars universe, and that’s coming from a guy with strong feelings about Star Wars. The film’s screenwriter Mark Protosevich, writer of I am Legend and The Cell, gave a few details on project, based off of unanswered questions from Legendary’s Comic Con panel, which is obviously some years off.
What strikes me as the most interesting news is that the film is set to be a self-contained story (“We have to get the first one right to know whether there will be more.”), and that it will be a “completely new story.” The Mass Effect game trilogy has a long arc involving a hyper-advanced machine race that comes every few millenia to scourge life from the universe. That’s a bit of a MASSIVE undertaking, especially with the knowledge that the series may not go past the first film, so I’m glad to see they’ll be taking things slow. The strength of the Mass Effect series is the world that Bioware created, so I’m happy to see a movie try to explore that world, rather than just telling a story we already know. Then again, they also confirmed that player character Commander Shepard will be the film’s protagonist, so who knows how familiar the story might be. Just give me some Urdnot Wrex, and I’ll be a happy camper.
[Via Collider, via Legendary’s blog]