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Mass Effect To Invade the Big Screen
UgLyPuNk writes "This could be a good thing or a bad thing: EA has just confirmed that it's making Mass Effect into a movie. The franchise has been acquired by Legendary Pictures, which is best known for its co-productions of The Dark Knight, Clash of the Titans, 300, Watchmen, and, um, The Hangover, as part of a co-financing agreement with Warner Bros."
Jack Shephard lives!
Maybe we'll get Zach Galifianakis as Shepherd.
oh my god... it's full of stars!
I'm in the middle of some calibrations.
Why does it have to be a man... I want my hot commander bouncing around!
And making sweet love to kelly.
Since he's made so many other game adaptations.
... Commander Shepard and this is my favorite store on the citadel!
My vote goes for a Movie based on the EVE Online universe. Keep it very dark, moving, and awe inspiring.
I bet you could get away with multiple franchise spin-offs too. Just like with Star Trek and Stargate.
Life is not for the lazy.
Wrex
Can I chose how I want the story to develop?
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Don't go spreading it around
Hollywood rarely gets it right. It's not impossible that they'll do a good job but, based on their track record, the odds aren't great.
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
Nethack or Dwarf Fortress.
Nethack. A medieval version of The Cube but with the characters entering one at a time.
And for DF... Something from the PoV of an immigrant that just arrives to the fortress. Something between Brazil, Fortress and LotR. With Orlando Bloom as the elf merchant. And Gerard Butler as the hammerer.
is rumored to be attached to direct! EPIC WIN!
There is enough story in the first game to make a good 2-3 movies. The problem would be costs causing cuts in parts. Imho, taking the engine and upping it to do prerendered scenes and packaging that as a movie would be the best way to do it, at least until Mass Effect 3 comes out.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Filmatise events of "Star Control 2" instead. The story is just as rich, if not richer. One could even keep most of the stage props from an already started ME filming production :-)
My recommendation? Leave Shepard alone. Work on another point in time in the universe,preferably in a spot where all the back-story that would have to be told is either integral to the story or doesn't limit people from understanding the story. Maybe pluck stories from the First Contact War, or events just before the start of Mass Effect.
I think will bring in characters/Actors from Mass effect 2 Adam Baldwin, Tricia Helfer, Claudia Black, Yvonne Strahovsky, at the very least
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Clash of the Titans (bland movie, with bland writing, starring a bland lead actor) gets listed among a bunch of moderate to great movies without so much as a hiccup and The Hangover gets a pretentious "um"? WTF.
Actually IMO it's the best movie mentioned in the summary, but maybe I'm weird.
You think they will keep Seth Green as joker? Kind of makes me wonder if they will replace him with some other guy.
In fact, just get the lady who does the voice to play it. She's awesome, and I can't imagine the story any other way (my Shepard is a skinny black woman with a buzzed head--she looks Ethiopian or thereabouts).
I second that. The Hangover was a surprisingly cool movie.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
As long as it's not like Clash of the Titans, the rest of Legendary's films have been pretty awesome. How are they going to get the hours spent driving the mako through rocky terrain into the film though?? I at least hope they stick the to game's storyline rather than "interpreting" it.
I loved Mass Effect 1 and 2. I have almost every achievement known to man in them, even in the DLC. I am a major fan. But I have no interest in a movie. Playing Mass Effect has, in fact, made me much *less* inclined to see a movie. Why? Because any Shepard on that screen won't be *MY* Shepard. Any story on that screen won't be something I will play a part in. The only choice I will have in that theater is which size popcorn to buy. That's not Mass Effect--it's just a glorified game trailer. I am no more interested in watching it than I would be in watching a video of someone else playing through ME1 or ME2. I couldn't give a shit less how the director wanted to play *his* Shepard.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've seen mass effect comics around. I don't know which came first and I'm too lazy to google, but the whole franchise could've been spawned by the comics and not the game.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
How about Half Life + HL2?
The old "portal to a dimension of baddies" has been used before, but there's plenty of other plot in there. Aliens preventing human conception. Traitors/Quislings. The combine. Headcrabs with headcrab zombines. A wacky scientist in the resistance. Ravenholm...
There's plenty of stuff in there for a good movie.
Actually, if you take the time to talk to your team-mates etc, MA did a pretty good job of fleshing out their personalities, etc. There were also quite a number of offside jokes etc, though sometimes you had to think a bit to catch them.
For example, the bit on "Krogan Testicles"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Nl4KmGxYQ ...
"Why would anyone want Krogan testicles"
"They'll pay up to 10000cr each, that's 40000 for a full set"
FTA: "I Am Legend script writer Mark Protosevich is currently chatting to the producers about bringing his talents to the project"
That is not a good sign...
and, um, The Hangover
The Hangover was one of the most critically and commercially successful movies in the last 10 years.
The game came before the comics. The comics are being used to explain things between games...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
People, stop whining that the movie will suck because the Commander Shepherd on the silver screen won't be your Commander Shepherd from the games. Shepherd has not appeared in any of the Mass Effect comics or novels for this very reason. Most likely the movie will not have Shepherd in it, either. It will be a separate story set in the Mass Effect universe.
I have a bad feeling about this...
Every playthrough I've done on Mass Effect 1 and 2 was with a female character. Why? Two reasons: for one thing, Jennifer Hale is a fantastic voice actress, and her work on ME 1 & 2 was truly great. (The male voice actor, not so much - his performance seemed flat by comparison.) Second, I figured if I'm going to have to look at an ass for 50+ hours, it might as well be a nice one.
But the priiiiize.
Seeing how Bioware's corny romance dialogue applied to on-screen theatrics. Will we get to see Shepherd: space gigolo or akward male-on-male bonding: nobody can resist the dwarf!
Once upon a time, adapting video games to film made a kind of sense. You take the low-res pictures from a much-beloved digital property, and pump millions of dollars into a really pretty film. Sure you lost interactivity, but you gained some things early games didn't have--plot, characters, and eye candy.
We're not there anymore. Mass Effect was essentially interactive cinema. With lots of eye candy, production values comparable to a big-budget film, more characters, plot, and character development than would be possible even in a very long, expensive movie. BioWare did a very good job of leveraging its medium to create an experience that was in a way more than cinema could provide.
So in making a film from that property, we lose interactivity, as well as significant depth of character and plot. And in exchange, we gain...what, exactly?
It should be shown with 24-style action panels simultaneously showing what Paragon Shepard and Renegade Shepard do at each conversation. Also sometimes the panels should show male Shepard and other times female Shepard.
Also if you watch the DVD a second time it should skip some scenes because you already started with Paragon left over from the last viewing.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for linking to Clear Skies. I found myself enjoying the story and characters, the pacing was decent with animation and voice acting that was surprisingly good for a fan made video. My only real critique was there being a serious need to fix the audio levels when talking over explosions.
Why do this? Why do this and enter the complicated territory of having a different face and voice for any of the characters? Yet more actors who may ask for more power over their "IP" when lending their faces and voices for the movie. Deal with the ones you already have and the voices people know and love. How about the risk of disappointment from a badly adapted script, bad acting or shitty execution? Crappy special effects with blue/green screen on the level of the new V series (that's really bad) trying to merge live action with CGI spaceships? Stupid latex rubber alien faces no better than Babylon 5 or Ster Trek? I'm not knocking either of the last 2 in and of themselves. I'm just pointing out that there's only so many variations of "humanoid head with extra bits and a bad hair day = alien" and "tortoiseshell box with a pin hole and tubes = really alien."
They have the foundation of a 3D CG feature film already in the two games. Why not bring in Blur - who did that fantastic Dragon Age: Origins trailer and I believe the WAR Online trailer too - to inject an upgrade of graphic goodness. Then pretty much just link the cutscenes from the game together with the paragon/renegade choices considered canon by the developers.
You might even increase the sales of a movie-linked GOTY edition of Mass Effect when people who don't usually play games realise they can actually play the movie with their own choices and their own version of Shepherd!
One of the best western game storylines ever!
-rr