Mass Effect: Paragon Lost

Dont listen to what others say about this not being true to mass effect. I found it entertaining and funny and the fighting was great. Choices are made and the last one will get you. Recommended for anyone, not just fans of the games.

before i get into this review id like to state the difference between paragon and renegade in the mass effect series as a whole. paragon and renegade choices aren't supposed to be simply as good vs evil. paragon represents Idealism a.k.a. the Socrates school of philosophy and Renegade represents Pragmatism a.k.a. the Machiavellian "Ends Justify The Means" or in simpler terms for you numnuts out there, paragon is lawful good and renegade is chaotic good. when playing the mass effect trilogy as commander Shepard i usually mixed these up and played as either a paragade or a renagon, essentially a mix of both moralities to make both a realistic and idealistic protagonist. now onto the review, first of all the story:(SPOILERS AHEAD) this film is essentially part of the backstory of alliance marine James Vegas deployment on a colony planet and his encounter with the collectors from mass effect 2. one thing you will notice about James is his good leadership skills and combat expertise. another noticeable trait from James is his admiration and idolization of commander Shepard from the mass effect trilogy, going so far as to wear a badge commemorating the remembrance of the ssv Normandy. members of Vegas squad, his captain and even admiral Hackett mention this. either teasing him for it or warning him that "greatness like that comes at a great price". the other characters were well created and felt like real people in a terrible and life threatening situation. tough not everything was combat and action, there were both fun and lighthearted moments between Vega, his squad and the colonists and some very emotional and heart breaking moments such as the death of one Vegas squad member and James final decision near the end of the film. id say that this was a 10 out of 10 for me, being a fan of the mass effect franchise as a whole i loved it. the animation was very good and the soundtrack was phenomenal. also the reason why the movie is called "paragon lost" is because James Vega himself is a very paragon character. its the reason why he admires and looks up to commander Shepard because Shepard saved the galaxy against impossible odds in mass effect 1 and became regarded as a true hero around the galaxy. near the end of the film Vega had the choice of saving the colonists or saving the intel on the collectors. James made the renegade choice, he saved the intel at the cost of the colonists, as such he lost his paragon. even tough James greatly admires Shepard and wants to follow in his footsteps, he has no idea what its like to be Shepard. when playing as commander Shepard in the mass effect trilogy i had to make dozens of tough choices and decisions both good and bad and live with the consequences. when James went trough the exact same ordeal it emotionally destroyed him, ironically making him experience what its like to be Shepard. when you meet him in mass effect 3, he still admires you but after experiencing firsthand what its like to be him Vegas idolization has been replaced with respect and relief of not being commander Shepard who he sees as a "loco"AKA crazy. for the things that the commander has done. its a very a mentor protégé like relationship between those two and part of the reason why i love his character.

No but seriously. You could make a movie about Tali or Liara. James? Really?

This movie is about James Vega, for those who don't know him he is a companion in Mass Effect 3 video game, you don't know much about him. But he loves earth and he is just as loyal as Shepherd and he wanted to make a difference so he decided to join the best, The N7, he stands for the earth's greatest contribution just like Shephard for humanity. This movie made me respect him a lot more and I decided to always take me with him, the more you progress in the game and the more you talk to your companions the more you hear about their background stories and what they've been through. He was not my favorite companion to bring along to missions but after have seen this movie it built up a lot of respect for him so I decided to take me with him even more and he suddenly became my favorite companion, he only hints small information about his background story and you can guess it was something terrible that happened to him and his squad, but you never knew what it was until this movie came. Now when I've seen it I could never have guessed how tragic it was for him to experience what he did. I'd say this movie represented his background story to the fullest. I gave it a 7/10, I had no problem with the cgi/animation and I loved the story, Mass Effect is about tough choices, what you believe is to be the best possible outcome, sacrifice and gain. The movie title speaks for itself. James Vega has my respect, thumbs up for this movie, bring us more Mass! Effect!

When i heard about this movie i was expecting for it to be a really good movie. This movie sucks cuz the story plot goes against the story in the game series and the animation is horrible not to mention that one of the characters in this movie made a disrespectful comment about commander Shepard to Vega saying "Sucks for you that Shepard's dead"

Oh. Right. Because of the money. If you've read the other reviews, you know the plot, so I"m not gonna rehash that. Space Cowboy tries to save the world, fails, manages to save the girl instead, and in the process saves the universe... ... to which I say, "Huh?" OK, let's start with the animation: it's cheap and cheezy, even by Funimation standards. I've only seen a few of their films, but the others had at least some pretension of knowing what a human body looks like. The character designers here seem to have gotten their inspirations from fun-house mirrors, with impossible elongated torsos and teeny little heads.The mix of CG and cel didn't work for even a second. As for the backgrounds... well, the less said about those, perhaps the better. The story? Well, in the extras, one of the producers points out that he and someone else kept a file of scenes from films they both enjoyed, and after watching this... well, pastiche... I can see why they followed the dictum of only stealing from the best. A little Star Wars here, a little Blade Runner there, some Alien over there, a whole whack of Starship Troopers over there... you get the idea. There's not a single original concept to be found anywhere, just a hopeless mishmash of other people's films. The direction? Similarly dreadful. The voicing seems to come straight out of Acting 102, while the visual style relies way too much on full profile shots of clenched jaws and sad, somber eyes. Some of the action scenes are little more than a series of explosions, followed by a couple of the main characters congratulating themselves on surviving. Cut through it all, I probably should have stopped a half hour in, as I was tempted to. But I stuck it out just to see where it was going. As it turned out, nowhere all that important.

I have no problem with story, as a huge fan of whole series, it was my duty to watch that. Characters are fine, but very stupid and "cliche" acting, that is the most minus thing I've noticed. Stupidness of some things even make me believe scenarists and writers did not even know what (or where to) they are doing, what is conclusion of that story and they just "put it there" to enlarge video length to 90 minutes or so. But maybe that's just my opinion. Next thing I did not like is the very own graphics style and animation. It looks like kind of "ducktales" from 90s' :-) Why the asari have lips as big as some kind of *-star? That was my first thought when I saw her for the very first time. Other characters are only a little bit more "normal", but still better than asari with big... blue... eyes of hers. In the original game there is theory asari looks "sexy" to all species, so krogan sees asari like "blue krogan" etc. (Refering to "bachelors party" at Ilium, ME2). Maybe we see asari like Vega's dreams "sexbomb" may appear and in games we see asari like Shepards ;) But I don't like this asari, I like Sheppards more. Next thing I have to mention here is some illogical bits and pieces of story. I don't want to make spoilers here, but just... I think some things there are written in original game better and more smooth. E.g. after watching I still don't know relation between ending of this movie and start of ME3 game, how and where J.V. met Sheppard. And last thing -- dubbing. I think it is just horrible. At game JV has more "acted" voice, here I have feeling it is just read from script. And other voices are... just... strange. I don't think bad, just strange. But after all, I think this movie is worth of it, it is not just some great "megafilm", only a little movie most for fans of games.

Maybe the worst animation in a feature length movie I have ever seen.

Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is by no means the worst video game movie adaptation I've seen in my life, but it's the only one we have of the Mass Effect universe, a game series published by Bioware. The problem is the quality of that game series. Mass Effect is all about the story. It is a vast, epic saga of galaxy in peril and is to be counted, at least in my opinion, among the greatest of space operas, along with Star Wars and Star Trek. So you can imagine that in my honest opinion a cheap anime-style direct-to-video tie-in doesn't quite cut it. Taking place during the events of the second game and telling the backstory of one James Vega, an eventual teammate in the third game, the movie admittedly has a few good things going for it. The character animations and designs, for one, are mostly pretty good. They look like the characters from the game, the facial expressions are evocative and the action scenes work. I have no idea why they made the krogans and the collectors appear almost twice as big as they are in the games, but that's a nitpick. The ending is also surprisingly good, capturing the essence of the Mass Effect games and their tendency to make you face extremely tough choices, usually between the good of the individual and the good of the society. But then, the downsides. While the characters are animated decently enough, given the budget, the backgrounds are pure guano. They're cheap CGI garbage, clash horribly with the actual characters and don't convince for a second. Every single background in the actual games was more convincing than anything in this film. And the first one of those came out five years before this film. The story is also lame, aside from the ending. It shows us nothing new of the Mass Effect universe, thus failing to please the existing fans, and it is pretty much inscrutable by anyone who has not played the games. There are few cutscenes to the previous events, and they're so quick that they don't help much. And it's not like it would have been hard to include a brief segment in the beginning. Like: "In 2147 humanity found a cache of alien technology on Mars. A decade later they managed to join the larger galactic society, which had flourished in the ruins of the civilization that came before them, the Protheans. Later this new galactic society was threatened by an ancient threat, known as the Reapers, led by Sovereign, a dreadnought spaceship of vast technological superiority and might. It was eventually beaten by the joint taskforce led by Commander Shepard, but his warnings about the eventual Reaper invasion were dismissed. And now he is believed dead." See? Not that hard, and would have made the whole movie infinitely more watchable to newcomers. So yeah, while Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is not as bad as it could have been, it's certainly not good either. That's mostly due to the limitation of the budget, I believe, but it still means that I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone. Not fans or newcomers. If you're a die-hard fan of the Mass Effect universe, you're going to see it anyway, in which case I can say that at least there's some good in it, but trust me, it's not worth it.

The game is incredible (to many people, you might not like it as much, though it would make no sense checking the movie, if that is true), but the animated movie (with a sub-story involving a major character from Mass Effect 3 (but not Shepard himself) is nicely told, but there is never a real Mass Effect feeling. It never got hold of me that is. The cartoon style is made differently than the one of the game on purpose. You might find that one of the reasons you might not connect. You cannot deny EA that they were trying. There is some fun dialog in the movie, but it never evolves to anything more. The question also would be, does it make sense watching it before Mass Effect 3 or after you played it? I watched it after, it's OK as companion piece, but I won't revisit this again (which cannot be said about the games ... re-playable a lot)