Why do I do it? Why do I keep sticking with the Mass Effect series? I've made no secret of my disgust for the way the series ended and a lot of things about Mass Effect 3 as a whole, so why have I restarted the series recently in the vain hope of remembering why I loved it in the first place? More importantly, why did I purchase the animated movie Paragon Lost? Am I really that hopeless? Seriously, I'm starting to wonder if this is what it's like to be in an abusive relationship; something about it means that I can't just abandon it so easily.
Anyway, here's a loose gathering of my thoughts while I was watching the film. Here be spoilers, so don't say you haven't been warned.
Just to give a brief rundown of the story, in Mass Effect 3, newcomer James Vega reveals to Shepard that he was once stationed on the colony of Fehl Prime during a Collector attack, just prior to the events of Mass Effect 2. In that mission, basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and this film is that story. Well, it actually starts off two years prior to that attack, justafter the Normandy was destroyed and Shepard apparently killed, and it seems Vega's a bit of a Shepard fanboy. We're also introduced to Vega's squad, most of which basically have one personality trait but all are fairly inoffensive.
Well, except for the resident biotic smartarse who (and I'm not joking with this) actually gropes a female
co-worker's arse. Sure, he gets his arse kicked for it, but the way he goes on that alone would have been enough to get him locked up for sexual harrassment in any sane world. Why the hell was this guy not reported to Alliance Command? I suppose you could argue that the woman (I forget her name) decides not to press it any further as she can handle him, but it's still stupid that someone like that hasn't been discharged before now.
Also, why is one of the group wearing glasses? Is that the only way the animators could illustrate that he's supposed to be a techie/nerdy type? As I understand it genetic engineering in the Mass Effect universe is commonplace, to the point where things like problems with eyesight don't need to exist (hell, it'sprobably the only reason Joker's still alive in spite of having brittlebones disease). Still, compared to what's to come, it's a minor complaint, so I'll let that slide.
The squad's dropped in to stop an invasion of the colony by a band of Blood Pack mercenaries, in what
I've got to admit is a pretty cool action scene showing off the strengths of each squad member and how well they work together, as well as some gruesome deaths for the no-named expendables. However, I've got to say that the animation looks pretty damn cheap (and this isn't my own dislike of the animé style speaking; there's some damn pretty animé out there, like Studio Ghibli's work). There's a noticeable lack of detail, which is understandable on characters for the sake of smooth animation and the "Masking Effect" (even though the animation isn't that smooth), but on backgrounds (particularly the CGI) it looks distinctly unimpressive. The art direction is also baffling and doesn't really fit with Mass Effect, with some things just looking flat-out goofy. The Krogans are the biggest victims of this, as they look more like some kind of bizarre land shark with a chin that would make Bruce Forsyth envious.
Anyway, the Blood Pack forces get their arses handed to them, but as the leader (again, forgotten his name right now) is rendered helpless and at the mercy of the group Vega spares him. Captain/Councillor Anderson (delete as appropriate) and Admiral Hackett call in to commend him on a job well done, yadda yadda. However, neither Keith David nor Lance Henriksen reprise their roles for this film, and their stand-ins to a pretty bad job. To the film's credit Freddie Prinz Jr. does reprise his role as Vega, and much like in the game I felt he did a surprisingly good job taking this blank slate of a character and actually making him pretty enjoyable. Mind you, he's still struggling against what's really a naff script, full of the usual animé tropes of cheese and awkward (and in the case of aforementioned sexual predator biotic, downright juvenile) banter. Seriously, they could have got Brian Blessed in to read these lines and I doubt even he could have salvaged them.
Two years later, the squad is still stationed at Fehl Prime, guarding the place for some reason they don't know about, though they've heard the rumours about the colony attacks. Then, just like in Mass Effect 3, we get introduced to a kid who we just know Vega's gonna be haunted about by the film's end, though to be fair there does seem to be a genuine connection between her and Vega as they've likely known each other for a while, so I'll let that slide. We also meet an Asari scientist called Treeya, who's basically Liara's protegé. Wait, Liara had a protegé? If this person was so important to Liara, why has she never mentioned her?
Speaking of Liara, she makes a brief cameo in this film too, but her voice actor Ali Hillis is absent too. She appears to give a ten-second recap of the events of the first game after the group comes across an artefact that she suspects to be Reaper in origin, and this sequence turns out to not so much bend the lore but punch out its soul. This sequence, as brief as it is, has become infamous in the fanbase for its extremely blatant contradictions to the established lore and ending of the first game, and now having watched it myself I can see why. Seriously, this brief clip blows my mind for several reasons.
First, the Citadel does not orbit any planet, let alone Earth as is strongly implied. It orbits a star in the middle of a
gaseous nebula. Even only playing the first game for half an hour or so would tell you that.
Second, it's not the seat of Alliance power, as is strongly implicated. Yeah, humanity has a Councillor on there now, but they have little direct power to override the Alliance's autonomy. If it's any seat of power, it's the Council's, which was comprised of four races, the last time I checked. The Alliance's seat of power firmly remains on Earth or Arcturus Station.
Third, Sovereign's body. It looks pretty damn intact in this film, when I'm sure it was blasted to smithereens with barely two pieces left to rub together. In fact, isn't this annihiliation, plus the fact that pieces get lost or stolen, one of the reasons why the Council are hesitant to believe that Sovereign was a Reaper? You know, the whole "lack of definitive proof" thing?
Fourth, if Vega has seen Liara before, why doesn't he recognise her when they cross paths on Mars? Seriously, he's on the verge of shooting her when they first meet! Yeah, you could argue that he was spooked because she just slaughtered a bunch of Cerberus troops, but why would Vega be so unnerved by that?
The worst of this is is that the problems with this sequence have such easy fixes. Why couldn't the flashback show the Battle of the Citadel itself, with the Citadel in its proper location and so they can show an intact Sovereign without any story-breaking? Why couldn't they have said it was the seat of galactic power rather than Alliance power? I mean, at the end we see the Citadel in orbit above Earth again when the group sees Hackett and Anderson again (by the way, the Council Chamber looks nothing like how it does in the games); why couldn't they have made it Arcturus Station (yeah, I know that's not above Earth either, but changing the background's not a difficult fix)?
Anyway, with that bit of lore-breaking out of the way, we get the Collector attack itself and... Holy Hell, these Collectors are on steroids! Seriously, they're like three times bigger than any of the humans! Didn't the animators even play the games?! Also, the Collector General seems to be on the ship, and the Collectors seem to suddenly have a language now. There's artistic license then there's just being an idiot; Collectors just chirruped like insects unless Harbinger "assumed direct control". To be fair, the attack itself is pretty unsettling, as the Seekers paralyse everyone in the colony save our heroes, who just happened to be out of town.
The rest of the film is pretty much Vega's squad getting picked off one by one as they try to escape the Collectors. They discover that one of the colonists, who's now in the group, is in fact a Cerberus agent keeping tabs on the Collector attacks. I'll go into more detail on this later. They also discover that research was being done into the attacks and that a partial cure for the Seeker paralysis was found, which they use to cure the biotic idiot who got himself paralysed for absolutely no reason I can see. Seems pretty redundant to me; in Mass Effect 2 the Virmire Survivor (either Kaidan or Ashley) seemed to indicate that the paralysis doesn't last long anyway, and that the Seekers have to maintain the stasis fields around the captured colonists until they're sealed in those pods. At least that's the impression I always got, so why a cure for the Seeker swarms is even in there is beyond me. Then of course there's the bigger issue that researching the Seeker swarms and developing a cure is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE since the Collectors left nothing behind that could be examined for such a cure to even be created!
There's a neat Aliens-esque action scene where the group is chased by a Praetorian, which has somehow already incorporated one of the dead squad into itself (I can't exactly remember why Praetorians do this; are the bodies like organic batteries or something?). Vega also discovers that the Blood Pack leader has remained a prisoner under the colony all this time, and Vega lets him out as apparently he's got a ship stashed away that somehow hasn't been stumbled upon for the past two years. After a quick chase scene, the surviving members of the group decide to attack the escaping Collector ship to try to disperse the cure and save the colonists (it's strange that they actually go to great lengths to explain how exactly they expect to be successful). They get into the ship pretty much without a hitch, until Cerberus guy shoots the Krogan and gets the group captured, paralysing Vega and his surviving squad (Biotic Prat and a pessimistic sniper) and keeping Treeya for himself. He reveals that he's a double-agent, apparently working with the Collectors, deliberately drawing them to Fehl Prime so that he can gather data on the Collectors for Cerberus while keeping up the appearances of helping the Collectors...
...
I'm just gonna put my head in a pillow now and try not to smother myself, as tempted as I may be.
Seriously, this twist is utter bull****. Even if Cerberus was brain-dead enough to even try such a plan (though frankly I wouldn't put it past them), the fact that he does end up learning what the Collectors are up to (thanks to a plot-convenient Prothean beacon that's on the ship, which by the way implies that the Protheans were instantly
Husk-ified into the Collectors, WHICH WAS NOT HOW THEIR CONVERSION WORKED) pretty much makes you wonder this; if Cerberus did engineer at least one colony attack to find out who was behind them, WHY IN GOD'S NAME DID THEY EVEN NEED SHEPARD TO FIND OUT WHO THE HELL WAS BEHIND THE COLONY ATTACKS IN THE FIRST PLACE?! I mean really, you could probably already skip Mass Effect 2 without it impacting the story in the slightest, now the writers of this movie are doing their damndest to make everything you did in the game entirely, utterly and completely POINTLESS! God, this is such a stupid twist that it's unbelievable. Okay, you could argue that he does die and that his information never reaches Cerberus, but why wouldn't it? It's hinted that the agent's sunglasses had a live feed to somewhere, indicating that Cerberus knew exactly what was happening! Admittedly that's pure speculation, but from the clues in the movie it's entirely plausible! Besides, we know that Cerberus has agents within the Alliance; what's to stop them from getting the data from the Alliance?
Honestly, what the hell happened here?! This is something that just did not need to exist in this movie. Then again, if it didn't we wouldn't get the Big Dilemma at the end, the reason for the film's title. See, Vega (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Vega and his team are spared from paralysis as he slipped the antidote into their drink earlier) ends up having to choose between Treeya and the data (she's been thrown into a Collector pod and is now burning up on re-entry over the planet with the data) and the colonists. In the end, he chooses Treeya and the data. While this is a neat moment that reflects the tougher decisions that come up every so often in the games, it's born from such a stupid plot twist that it just comes across as false.
The Collector ship also gets destroyed, and the Collector General dies. Wait a minute, does that mean there were two Collector ships? What was the point of a second Collector General? Ugh, my head hurts.
So Vega, along with Treeya and the sniper, are the only survivors and they hand the data over to Hackett and Anderson, an action which turns out to be pointless since the Alliance certainly don't act on it, what with the Terminus Systems being outside their jurisdiction and all. One other thing is that if the Alliance had this data, and knew exactly what the Collectors were and what they were up to, why the **** didn't Anderson think to pass it on to Shepard when they met?! Wow, this movie is keen to paint everyone as a complete ****. Also, Vega gets promoted to the N7s, something which didn't happen until AFTER the Reapers invade Earth. Part of his story arc in Mass Effect 3 is his shock at getting the offer, his feelings that it's too late to do any good, but him eventually rising to the challenge of being an N7 with Shepard as a mentor figure. Now this seeks to completely undermine that arc.
By the movie's end, I have a considerable headache, mostly brought on from slapping my forehead.
If I can say one kind thing about this movie, it's that it's not the worst Mass Effect tie-in work out there, as at least it is somewhat entertaining with a couple of neat set-pieces and it gives some much-needed context for Vega in Mass Effect 3. However, the animation looks cheap, the characters are stock, the story's big twist is stupid beyond belief and the way it plays fast and loose with the lore and established storyline, much like Deception and Mass Effect 3, make it impossible to reconcile with the series' timeline. This is just further proof, if any was needed, that Bioware needed to have the equivalent of a story editor, someone who could yell at the writers of the games and the tie-in material whenever they were making contradictory or self-indulgent tripe, telling them to scrap it and start again. Completists will want it in their collection anyway, but this is still one tie-in work you can safely skip.
Modifié par BD Manchild, 19 février 2013 - 12:42 .
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