With Mass Effect creator BioWare’s latest sci-fi game Anthem due out just next week, the marketing for the game is really picking up. Earlier this week it was rumored and then quickly confirmed that the director of District 9 would be releasing a short live-action movie based on Anthem directly to the internet. Today the Neill Blomkamp Anthem movie “Conviction” is now live, and while short, it sets up or teases events that will play a big part in the game itself.
Anthem: Conviction serves as a prequel to the game, introducing a girl called “Kali” found in the wilds outside Fort Tarsis, who impossibly lived there for years, and seems to be the key to unlocking the Anthem and defeating the villains, the Dominion. We also get introduced to the hulking Monitor, the head of the Dominion, who wants to find Kali for some reason. We also get a bit of backstory for the world’s people, who were previously slaves of a race called the Urwrath, and who broke free to set up Fort Tarsis along with the armored Javelin power-suits.
Neill Blomkamp rose to fame with District 9, a fantastic sci-fi movie set in his native South Africa, and notably features a very Javelin-like power-suit near the movie’s climax. He was down to direct a reinvention of the Aliens movie franchise, but was sidelined for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, something we bet Fox regrets. Before District 9 he was also attached to a movie adaptation of Halo with Peter Jackson, but that fell through, although he did direct a series of Halo short movies called Halo: Landfall. He set up Oats Studios in 2017, which released a series of short experimental movies on Steam and YouTube, and produced this new Anthem movie.
Anthem itself releases on February 22, so we don’t have long until we find out just how Conviction ties into the game’s story.
