Undoubtedly I’m setting myself up for a fall, here . . .
11 o'clock, October 5, 2005
. . . but I’m cautiously optimistic about the Halo movie. Alex Garland is a very good writer, for one thing (go read The Tesseract if you don’t believe me — I’ll wait); and for another, it seems like Microsoft is really interested in protecting the value of the franchise, and not just out to make a quick buck. Latest news is that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have signed on as executive producers and WETA’s signed on to do the effects — so at least the monsters probably won’t suck.
The worldbuilding in the Halo games is as good as any I’ve seen in a video game, and better than the worldbuilding in a lot of SF novels — in some ways I think it’s as close as the US gets to answering the UK’s New Space Opera. (The plot doesn’t have as much to recommend it, but, hey, Alex Garland.) It’d be nice if some of that could make it on to the big screen.
If you ever get a chance, check out the Metroid Prime games...pretty good worldbuilding, pieced together by using a scanner visor and scanning data in from, er, hotlinked items. At some point I actually need to play Halo.