Please Let There Not Be a Mass Effect Movie
I don’t think they’re making one just yet, but given how successful the series is, I often fear that they will someday. And when that day comes, I will cry softly.
First thing, allow me to make it absolutely clear how much I love and adore the Mass Effect series. The third game isn’t even out yet and I already know that it’s one of the best video game series of all time, bar none. By the way, this is coming from someone who usually gravitates towards fantasy over sci-fi and is way too obsessed with a series of ancient computer games based on Dungeons & Dragons. Space operas are not usually my bread and butter. But Mass Effect is just that good. It resonates with me in emotional places I didn’t even know I had, it has utterly masterful plotting and characters, it’s visually stunning, and it’s even making its creators bushels and bushels of money.
That said, here are three reasons why nobody should ever, ever make movie versions.
1. They Won’t Be Any Good
It’s no secret that video game movies are bad. They just are. We all know it. Somewhere between the fun of watching a hero have adventures, and the fun of guiding an avatar through adventures, is an unfun wasteland of lame where all movies based on video games dwell in misery.
Why, we all are! We're all video game movies, and I am your king.
Many of the problems here are obvious. A person playing a game finds it fun to do certain repetitive tasks, but that same person watching a movie would get bored and frustrated if the film’s hero did the same. I wouldn’t watch an action movie where the hero just hides behind cover and spends their time alternately shooting at people and throwing glowing things at them, but I’ll spend hours doing that myself in Mass Effect. Which is as it should be, because the fun of the game is that you’re doing it.
Time is another stumbling block. A movie is designed to take up about two hours, while a game is designed to take up weeks of real time. No movie could cover the same ground a game does. Bioware games have excellent stories and rich characters, which might seem to make them suited to cinematic adaptation. However, the problem is that they have too much of both for a single movie to handle. Sure, if Hollywood made it they’d probably make it a trilogy, but the game’s already a trilogy, so you’re still stuck trying to stuff dozens of hours’ worth of content into a tiny two-hour thimble. You can, of course, cut out a lot of the game’s filler (Mako, anyone?), but the fact remains that the plot and characters were designed with the intention that they would have plenty of time and space to grow. Movies don’t have that luxury, and trying to shoehorn in a story originally created for a longer-running medium almost always results in a mess.
Case in point.
I just don’t have faith in Hollywood to make a video game adaptation that doesn’t fundamentally misunderstand what people liked about the original franchise. They just don’t get video games, they don’t want to, and as long as the people who make games and the people who make movies exist in two entirely different camps, there won’t be much of a marriage of the mediums.
2. Canon Shepard is a Dumpster-Faced Lunkhead
This reason could technically be part of the first one, but I’ve singled it out as it’s likely the most important. I know Bioware constantly insists that there’s no “canon” Shepard, but that’s bull. We all know that if they make a movie we’re going to end up with this guy, probably played by Christian Bale:
See what I mean? The bald head, the five o’clock shadow, the dead eyes, the neck like a ham haunch? He’s a Space Marine. Invented specifically so that 14-year-old white boys can pour themselves into him and vicariously shoot aliens and touch boobies, he has no personality. He is not my Shepard. He isn’t a lot of people’s Shepards.
It’s not just that I’m upset that there’s no way they’d make a Shepard who resembled my female space warrior of justice, the Shepard who means so much to me. Well, that does really get to me. But it would also bother everyone else who has played the game. Because the beauty of the original game, something lost in film, is the fact that each of us gets the opportunity to make Shepard our own. Every person who has played Mass Effect has played a Shepard who was the true reflection of their inner hero, whether male or female, white or black, subtle or forceful, kind or ruthless. Make Shepard “officially” someone else and you take that away from us. It taints our experience of this story to paint some meathead in the place of the person we chose to represent us.
While I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant about how much I hate Space Marine protagonists, it does apply here, as movie Shepard would indeed be a dumpster-faced lunkhead. You know they’d do it. They’ve been doing it to everybody lately. But applied to a video game hero who was initially customizable, it would be egregious.
3. It’s Just Not the Right Choice
I don’t count myself among the naysayers who proclaim that no good video game movie will ever exist under any circumstances (although I find myself inching closer to them on a regular basis). I think that there are some video games that could lend themselves well to film interpretation.
A story of deep conflict and tragic loss. --NY Times Film Review
Mass Effect, however, was already created to have a cinematic feel to it. The cut scenes, the dialogue, the way the camera moves during character conversations-–all of it was supposed to invoke a feeling of a seamless story like that of a film. It makes the games great, immersive to play and incredibly fun. It’s also the same thing that makes a movie adaptation pointless. What could a film version hope to bring to a story that was already told with all the style a movie would have, plus the player choice and interactivity a game needs? It could only possibly take away excellence from the story as it was told before.
People are excited about the Bioshock movie, and you know what? That could actually work. From the original game, you have a story that’s simple enough to fit a movie’s running time, but unique enough to hold interest. You have a fantastic world chock-full of iconic imagery and great opportunities for characterization. There are places where a movie could tell you more, where the game left some blank space that a film interpretation could expand on. It’s a good choice.
Not that I’m convinced it will be good. The history of video game movies is a history of failed ideas, whether or not those ideas could have worked in theory. But enough about the Max Payne movie. I really need to get lunch.
Stupid Max Payne Movie
It was too much to hope that this movie would be good. But dammit, if any video game movie was going to be good, this one would have been it. Coming from the original, there’s actually a story friendly to the cinematic format, and angles left to be explored that the game left up to the imagination. The movie could have really expanded on the juicy concepts from the game itself, as well as reliving all the cool noir pulp that Max Payne always heaped on with a spoon.
Instead, the movie had a formulaic action film plot in which everything creative about the game it was based on was very carefully avoided (Danger: Spoilers Ahead). Max Payne, our rugged everyman hero, is a good cop thrust into a bad situation, trying to root out the corruption that seems to have seeped into every corner of his life. In this, they stuck to parts of the original story. You still have a dangerous psychotropic drug, Valkyr, circling the streets. It’s still connected to the deaths of Max Payne’s wife and child, and is still being circulated for all the wrong reasons after being covertly developed as a super-soldier drug for the military. But the movie only touches on these plot points as though it’s obligated to, rather than have Max Payne slowly discover the pieces one by one as he goes on his journey of revenge. Sure, he shoots a bunch of bad guys, fights an intimidating super-soldier villain, and discovers that his boss and old friend was the one responsible for his family’s death all those years ago. But that’s all there is to it: good man fights bad people. It’s just boring as hell.
It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but that’s the problem. What bothers me is that anyone watching this film will think that the game has exactly the same theme. It can line up with all the other reasons people think games are an inferior storytelling medium. You can enjoy the story if you have the right mindset, but in the end you’ll just say, “Oh, our hero goes out and shoots everyone who ever wronged him. What a childish fantasy.” And as far as the movie is concerned, that would be correct. Making the bad guys so eeeeeevil that you can then kill them with impunity is indeed a childish fantasy. But without playing the original, a viewer watching the film would have no way of knowing how ironically the game makers portrayed that idea.
In the original Max Payne, you, the player, indeed step into the shoes of a tough-as-nails cop out for revenge. You mow down hordes of faceless thugs, all in the service of discovering the next clue that will lead to the people behind the cover-ups and dirty, dirty corruption. You fill bodies with bullets and you smash faces with baseball bats, and by God you enjoy every minute of it. But the game is made in such a way that, in between each of your raging bloodbaths, you are forced to question your own motives. With every drug-fueled dream sequence and every vanquished enemy pleading for his life, the game drives a little nail further and further into the back of your mind. A voice appears, while you kill and kill and kill, a voice that seems to keep getting louder, always whispering: Maybe you’re not a hero exacting righteous vengeance. Maybe you’re just a psychopath.
Please, Max! No! No, Max, I'm sorry!
Hear your dead wife, begging you to stop doing…something? Hear your crying baby? Who killed your family again? It was those guys, right? Those guys you’re going to shoot and maim and beat to a bloody pulp. Who are they again? Oh, right, they killed your family. At least, you think they did. But they did, right? I’m going to kill those bastards. I’m going to kill them! I’m going to kill all of them!
And that’s video game Max Payne. That would have made for a kick-ass movie. And the one good thing about the Max Payne film was the way they portrayed the effects of Valkyr, so I know they could have done Max’s self-questioning dream sequences to great, maybe even iconic, effect.
But as usual, the chance was squandered. I honestly believe that Hollywood purposely half-asses its video game movies because it has no respect for them and wants video games to stay in the gutter where they belong. They’re okay with making money off their franchises, mind you, but they’ll never put any effort into truly adapting the spirit of a great game into what can be a great film. Instead, we just have Max Payne, another lackluster entry in the hall of shame that is video game movies. Games are never going to drag themselves up at this rate.
A Fantasy Movie I Liked For A Change
I spend a lot of time complaining about fantasy on this blog, and it probably looks like I hate the stuff. Of course, I love the fantasy genre, I just hate most of what’s in it (because I love the fantasy genre). Recently I sat down and watched a fantasy movie that did a lot of things right, so I figured I’d better yak about it here, just to add some balance. Oh, and this post has plenty of spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
The film I watched? Dragonslayer. Sure, it takes a few too many cues from Star Wars, but what do you expect? It was the eighties, and those movies had just finished blowing everyone’s mind. And sure, the subject matter is inherently cheesy, but the story is well-told and even the dialogue, often bad in this sort of film, is generally cleverer than you would expect. Okay, maybe the hero is a weenie-bitch whose gains in confidence only make him into more and more of an annoying jerk, but…well, I’m not really going to defend him. He’s the worst thing about this movie.
There he is on the right.
Despite everything I’ve said, I still like this movie, goddammit. There are just so many perfect little fantasy touches that make it all worthwhile. The setting is, to me, what every fantasy setting should be: stunning natural beauty plus acute human misery. The peasants work their asses off in their fields and shops, while their King, wearing gold-embroidered robes, sits in a drafty castle next to a dwarf dressed as a jester and a freaking wolfhound. This isn’t a world of kind, just rulers and gaily singing serfs. This world is one where the common folk live in fear of terrible wild beasts on one side and tyrannical bureaucratic governments on the other. A world in which people are cold, hungry and dirty, a world of greasy fires and woolen clothing and crumbling stone towers. A proper fantasy world without a Calvin Klein model in sight. This is how you do medieval fantasy, kids.
There are so many things about this movie where they just had the right idea. The plot is a cross between the “Saint George and the Dragon” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” legends, a naturally awesome mix. There’s a sacrificial virgin who actually tries really hard to get away before getting made into barbecue, and a princess who is noble, pure, and beautiful, but gets her feet gnawed off by baby dragons anyway. The hero’s dragon-slaying weapon is not a sword, but a supremely bad-ass lance forged by the local blacksmith. It’s really nice to see a fantasy avoid the whole “speshikal magical god-sword” trope for something that’s more down to earth, but is all the cooler for it.
Not to mention that his dragon-slaying weapon actually fails to slay the dragon. What does work is to turn his dead mentor into a freaking wizard-bomb and blow the dragon apart in mid-flight. Then, while its bloody, smoking corpse is laying on the ground, the jerk of a King shows up and takes credit for all of it while the heroes say “fuck this shit” and ride off in a random direction, letting him have his petty empire with his fascist monarchial propaganda. This definitely qualifies as one of my favorite endings to any fantasy film, ever. Not everyone is saved. The dragon is dead, but that isn’t the end to all problems. People are just going to have to do the best they can in this unfair world–an unfair world with awesome pulley-based technology and stunning vistas.
It almost makes all this social oppression and backbreaking labor worthwhile.
So while Dragonslayer may be only vaguely remembered as a minor fantasy classic that people enjoyed for the cool visuals and little else, I would like to give it props for its gritty, troubled world. If adopted, that trope alone would be a vast improvement to so many of the bland and whiny fantasies of today. I wish I’d seen this movie a long time ago.
