During the recent press tour for the Legendary Edition of the Mass Effect trilogy, series lead writer Mac Walters stated a movie version of the games never materialized at Universal and Legendary Pictures, because “it felt like we were always fighting the IP. What story are we going to tell in 90 to 120 minutes? Are we going to do it justice?”
As a result, the producers began to reconceive the live-action version as a TV series instead, which never happened either. It’s a perfectly understandable decision if you’re familiar with the games: the first installment, released in 2007, had a pretty cinematic, five-act structure suited to a film adaptation, but that went out the window in its sequel, which revolved around 10–12 unique squadmates, all with their own recruitment missions and personal storylines (some of which proved vital to setting up the main story arcs in the third.)
As a die-hard fan of Mass Effect, I’ve always wondered how a movie version of Mass Effect 2 could work: would Garrus Vakarian be reintroduced working as security for Mordin Solus’s clinic on Omega? Would montages of the recruitment and loyalty missions convey the necessary characterization? Worse, who would die during the suicide mission? (I know I’d be upset if Jack was deemed expendable, as her storyline in ME3, where she becomes the mentor of a group of young recruits, is a perfect, ready made spin-off.)
It dawned on me that, because Mass Effect is a video game, it’s still a box with limited choices, and a film adaptation would mean there are no restrictions on how the story would unfold. You only need to look at how the biggest movie franchise of all time — the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and other superhero films freely adapt their episodic source material: when Marvel produced Iron Man, they were ostensibly modernizing the character’s ’60s origin story, but they also used Iron Monger, a villain introduced in the ‘80s.
Likewise, the first Avengers movie used Black Widow and Hawkeye instead of founding members Ant-Man and Wasp, and major storylines like ‘Civil War’ and ‘The Infinity Gauntlet’ have been adapted while longstanding characters like the X-Men or the Fantastic Four remain unintroduced. In the same way, a cinematic version of the Mass Effect universe can mix-and-match the arrival of characters and storylines, depending on what’s best for the movies.
For instance, Commander Shepard doesn’t have to die at the start of Mass Effect 2, because it’s not a new game where the player character’s experience and skills have to be reset for maximum playtime. They could be ordered to go join Cerberus to spy for the Alliance, and meet Legion two years earlier, opening up the geth-quarian arc to be the center of its own film before the Reaper invasion. Likewise, imagine if the cryopod of Javik, the last Prothean, not the Beacon, was the artifact that kicks off the first installment on Eden Prime, or if the Alpha relay from the Arrival DLC, rather than the Crucible, proved to be the Reapers’ silver bullet.
I’m certain there are more ways to better integrate plot threads from the DLCs into the main stories, especially ME2’s geth-centric Overlord, or ME3: Citadel’s big twist, as well as moments from the tie-in comics and novels. (Companion TV series adapting some of those would be great, especially if you wove them together, either chronologically or with flashbacks.) Even Andromeda characters could appear before their departure to the other galaxy.
Let’s also look at it this way: when making Iron Man, Marvel weren’t compelled to establish everything in their universe from the get go — Asgard, the Infinity Stones, Wakanda, the Kree-Skrull War and so on, technically existed by virtue of it being a Marvel film, but they weren’t relevant. Similarly, a Mass Effect movie doesn’t have to cram in everything its virtual equivalent had: aspects like the rachni, the Shadow Broker, humanity’s feud with the batarians, or anything else that might render the world too dense or exposition heavy for newcomers, can wait for a sequel.
Continued belowWhat of Commander Shepard their self? It’s always been an unspoken assumption a Mass Effect movie would star a male Shepard, similar to the default version of the character (based on Dutch model Mark Vanderloo), but in a post-Wonder Woman world, a film starring “Femshep” would be just as commercially viable. (Similarly, Shepard’s canonically ambiguous gender offers a great opportunity to cast a non-binary actor like John Wick‘s Asia Kate Dillon, or Bill and Ted Face the Music‘s Brigette Lundy-Paine.) At the end of the day, I think fans can all agree that Shepard simply ought to be well built, especially after Femshep’s ME3 body design feel prey to the opposing pressures of making her thin and curvy, leaving no one happy.
It’s entirely possible a movie version of Mass Effect could sidestep the need for Shepard altogether, making other Normandy crew members like Captain Anderson, Kaidan Alenko, and Ashley Williams the main protagonists instead. Perhaps that would be one diversion too far from the trilogy’s gameplay, but in the age of Ted Lasso, centering Kaidan’s self-described “annoying” integrity would be an interesting contrast to the ruthless Ashley or Cerberus, as if we were watching the “paragon” and “renegade” versions of Shepards interact. In any case, a live-action Mass Effect would be a strong opportunity to explore the relationships between the non-player characters outside mid-mission banter.
All in all, a Mass Effect adaptation should thoughtfully consider what worked in the games because they were games, and what remained compelling about it outside that context, the essence that can be found in the best tie-in novels and comics, and which has inspired so much great fan art and parodies over the years. (Citadel was a self-parody and it was the best DLC, OK?) Hopefully, even if the best path for Mass Effect is likely on the small screen, hopefully we’ll get to see the universe on the big one someday. Whatever form a live-action version takes, it must do the games proud, and even outclass them in some respects.
