Jeremy-93

Bioware's space-opera in RPG form is, on the whole, a magnificent piece of storytelling and a thoroughly absorbing, playable and re-playable game that goes out of its way to accommodate newcomers to the genre but doesn't lack depth. Here I'll concentrate on the more 'filmic' qualities of Mass Effect, on the assumption that if you want a review that focuses on gameplay you'll go to a gaming website. Suffice to say I've enjoyed playing it through multiple times (on the PC); one could pick holes in various bits of the implementation, such as the AI in combat and the inventory system, but the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses in gameplay terms.

Mass Effect is, up to a point, what you make it. Commander Shepherd, the protagonist, can be selfless, principled even to the point of being holier-than-thou, or unsentimentally pragmatic; he/she can explore the blurry boundary between patriotism and xenophobia, or hold out for species-blindness; there are politicians to be mollified, tolerated or deliberately alienated, as well as a crew representing five different species, none of them straightforward quasi-racial caricatures, whose inner lives Shepherd can discover (or not), sympathize with or mock. He/she may find herself falling for one or two of them, but there are also sacrifices to be made. It's testimony to the quality of the writing, character design and animation and (not least) voice acting, that most of this feels supremely persuasive. One can feel really guilty about some of the choices one's forced into.

Technically, the game is often miraculous. Something it manages really well is the focus on nuances of character, helped along by a magnificent facial animation system, and some first-rate voice acting in most of the primary roles. Special nods go to the always excellent but never better Jennifer Hale as the female Shepherd; lovely, characterful work from Raphael Sbarge (Alenko), Kimberly Brooks (Ashley) and Brandon Keener (Garrus), and a fine performance from Fred Tatasciore as Saren, no one-dimensional villain. Not all the squad-mates are as well-written or performed, and neither Tali nor Liara quite comes to life as a character; their line readings tend to sound less spontaneous, but the actresses really do have much less to work with. (Edit: but Liz Sroka is quite wonderful in Mass Effect 2, given much better material and delivering it with terrific dramatic power.)

There are limits and compromises to the game's self-conscious feminism: when the female characters aren't tough soldiers they tend to be a bit feeble, and the exploitative character design for Matriarch Benezia should have been sent back to the drawing board (she's voiced by an uncomfortable-sounding Marina Sirtis). On the plus side, supremely solid support comes from the likes of Keith David as the compassionate, experienced Captain Anderson, and the unmistakable voice of Seth Green is very well cast as Joker. He gives a subtle, variegated performance that steals a few scenes without ever seeming to be doing so on purpose.

There are two fundamental tensions which Mass Effect has to disguise, if we're to suspend disbelief. The first and less important is pacing. In a race against time to save all civilization from an ancient foe, there's always time for a long chat, a side quest, a shopping trip. I'm happy to accept that as a necessary fudge; it's the price you pay for replayability. More serious is the tension between choice and linearity. For all the nuance with which you can create and develop 'your' Commander Shepherd, you gradually discover on multiple playthroughs that most of your choices are less meaningful than you think. Whatever you choose, the consequences are much the same in terms of plotting, and have only limited ramifications at the level of personal relationships.

This is one of those moments where a technical necessity starts to become a philosophical tenet by accident. Mass Effect presents itself as a morality, a story about choices and their consequences, but the more you play the game, the more you become aware that those consequences are locked down in advance. Of course they are: just imagine the inefficiency otherwise - the amount of dialogue, cut-scenes, character relations and plot developments that would branch off. Mass Effect simultaneously flatters and explodes the heroic illusion that every choice one makes changes the universe. That at least is a provisional conclusion: it'll be very interesting to see how, and how far, the sequels work out the consequences of choices made in the first game. And I for one will certainly be playing.

I wanted to like this, I really did. The BBC were trailing it as just the kind of episode I wanted to see - taut, scary, grown-up, sombre, intelligent sf. And if you'd cut it by about half, re-edited the remainder, and come up with some new stuff, you'd hit the jackpot. I like David Tennant's Doctor more and more, and will miss him in the role - he has a near-perfect combination of gravitas and impatience, and can shift in a moment from excessively cheerful to deadly serious to alarmingly peculiar, like no-one since Tom Baker. And I like any episode that doesn't turn on conventional sexual tension imported from Buffy. Trouble is, the script just wasn't good enough. Scenes went on and on, with diminishing returns. Doomy, adolescent self-indulgence got substituted for seriousness. Scary gave way to vaguely embarrassing. I started feeling sorry for Lindsay Duncan without even being sure whether she was feeling sorry for herself or had got sucked into the corporate self-regard of a show that badly needs to be stripped back to basics. I prefer to be optimistic that Steven Moffat is the man for the job, given the very high quality of the eps he's written. Lots of hard work went into 'The Waters of Mars', but the writing is hollow.

"Unbreakable" is an extremely well-crafted film. The acting is mostly terrific, with Bruce Willis cementing his position as almost the only actor who can convincingly fill a certain kind of role: an unpretentious, quiet, blue-collar man, no intellectual but also no fool, well-meaning but no saint. As in "The Sixth Sense", he is on quiet, controlled form here, but in this film he's more regularly the centre of attention, and he's sufficiently magnetic to carry it off. Samuel L. Jackson, the perfect Tarantino actor, also excels in a completely different, much more restrained aesthetic.

The production is in many ways as good as the performances: measured, pretty dour and unvarnished. Within individual scenes the writing is usually fine, and some of the staging is memorably done - although the director's obsession with precise storyboarding does yield a certain inertia, making this largely a film of fluent compositions rather than dramatic scenes. The trouble is that all this sophisticated film-making can't disguise the fundamental lack of intelligence behind it. It's not that the plot is silly or the idea self-evidently implausible -- that is very rarely a problem so long as the film is made with conviction -- it's just that the idea isn't illuminating, it doesn't tell us much about anyone or anything. Its impression of seriousness is bogus.

The family drama which occupies the foreground most of the time is in fact incredibly ordinary: if you imagine this story shorn of its fantastical elements, it would barely pass muster as a TV movie of the week; and (more damagingly) that family story is in no way enriched or even much affected by the journeys taken by Willis's and Jackson's characters. And I don't even think that this film tells us much about comic books or superhero origin stories -- certainly little that isn't squeezed into the opening couple of minutes of Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" (itself no masterpiece). It's very strange to see so much professionalism and care in all departments lavished on such a thin, underwhelming, half-baked idea for a movie.