So they're making a Mass Effect movie...

WHY?

I enjoy the Mass Effect series, I mean really enjoy it, its probably safe to say that I've sacrificed a few percent of my final mark for my degree with the time I've spent on it. So, it may initially seem surprising that the idea of a favourite thing of mine being adapted so that more people can enjoy it, is what I am officially considering my front runner for Worst Adaptation idea of the early 21st Century.

Allow me to expand on this; no film adaptation of a Video game has ever been a real success, and it would be naively optimistic to assume that Mass Effect will do any different. But in the mainstay, games that have been adapted already have had a major advantage over Mass Effect: none of them had as much freedom of choice available.  

Everyone who plays Mass Effect plays the game in a different fashion, Choice is a major part of the game, and personally it's one of the big draws of the game, that for once your actions have definite consequences in the games' Universe.  Whereas the vast majority of games that have been adapted have single linear path from start to finish, that can be easily adapted into a script, event A neatly ties into event B. This is not the case of Mass Effect, which follows more of a tree structure with the plot, from even before the game begins, you're faced with choices that will govern how the game turns out: what gender do you choose? what background? what specialisation? All of these allow you to tune the game to yourself, and how you want to play, and the choices become more and more frenetic after that: 

Do you go to Feros or Noveria first?

Or do you go and rescue Liara?

Do you kill the Rachni queen or not?

Do you leave Alenko or Williams behind to die?

Do you do all the side quests?

Do you romance Ashley/Alenko or Liara?

Or do you bide your time, hoping they make a certain Quarian mechanic romanceable in the second game?

Do you let the Council die, or sacrifice the Alliance fleet to defend them?

These are just some of the choices available, and everyone I've spoken to had a differing set of responses, to these questions, meaning that everyone has a different version of what the "true" Mass Effect story is, the odds are dramatically against the screen playing managing to make anyone happy, I predict many comments of "They clearly don't understand the real story of Mass Effect" being made when the film gets released (hell I'll probably be making them as well).

Then there are the actors, who are they going to cast? If they don't have the original voices, then there will be a lot of complaints made by people, and they'll be right. Every character already has a voice associated with them.  There's also the problem with how the cast will look, in general, with the majority of the rag tag bunch of misfits that you put together being aliens, CG is going to be extremely prevalent, but for the humans how are they going to work on that? Will they use actors who look vaguely like the characters? Or will they decide to use CG for the humans as well? If so, will they just use the CG from the game? Carrying on down this avenue of exploration, will they reason that most of the film has therefore been built for them already? If so, why not just use someone doing a play through of the game as the film?

This is something I can really see them considering, and the reason it won't work, is that the story of Mass Effect is one that needs to be interacted with, in order to get the most worth out of it.