In becoming the century’s most popular (and profitable) artistic medium, video games have created countless expansive worlds of science fiction, some comparable to the worldbuilding in the famous sci-fi of film, television, and literature. Games like Halo and Mass Effect are among the best known for a reason: they both have intricate narratives about human nature projected hundreds of years into the future, allowing for fascinating speculation about where we might go and what sort of existential threats might wait for us in the stars.
Now that Hollywood is in the honeymoon phase with modern video game adaptations (look no further than the opening-weekend success of Resident Evil), it’s only a matter of time before those great works of interactive sci-fi come to the big screen. Halo already had a two-season TV show, and there’s currently a Mass Effect show in development at Amazon. But there’s another, far more recent piece of video game sci-fi about to burst onto the big screen, and it stars an actor that television audiences are very well acquainted with.
