So if you were given a girthy budget to make a standalone Halo film (with of course the slight promise of sequelitis) how would you go about it. Most importantly what would the plot of your single film actually cover without being too long or too overly ambitious with its covered narrative?
The standard answer here is to adapt The Fall of Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved, or Halo 2. But those answers are boring, and they pigeonhole Halo into telling the same stories over and over again. There was a period between 2011 and 2015 where it seemed like every story in the EU had to tie into Reach, from awful animated adaptations of the book to the short lived Ground Command tabletop game.
I believe that a Halo movie needs three things to succeed:
Spartans: Let's face it, they're the main draw of the series. Even if the story isn't about them, they need to feature prominently in the first major adaptation to the big screen. While Marines, ODSTs, and other characters have a niche draw in the fanbase, the Spartans have the broadest appeal to casual fans and are an icon that non-fans can relate to.
The UNSC: Spartans can't carry the story on their own. While combat cyborgs sheathed in power armor are a draw, you need Human characters to tell a Human story. Notably, when 343i tried to make a game that was mostly just about the Master Chief and Cortana, many Halo fans found the UNSC-less levels flat and lifeless.
The Covenant: The Prometheans sure as Hell aren't going to draw audiences to the theater. The Covenant are a much more understandable enemy. And for a Halo film franchise to take off, the Covenant characters are going to need scenes of their own to elevate them from being mindless alien hordes. They're going to need as more screentime than, say, the Predator. Maybe as much as the German commanders in A Bridge Too Far. They need to be shown to be as cunning as they are fanatical.
What this story does not need: Another Forerunner McGuffin.
The story I’m going to pitch is one that simply builds off the conflict between the UNSC and the Covenant. This is a bit of a risk since only some Halo stories (Halo 3: ODST, The Cole Protocol, The Kilo 5 books, Oblivion) have tried to do so. Almost all of the mainline games and most of the EU stories have played it safe by using a Forerunner artefact as a McGuffin, or by using a Forerunner megastructure as a battleground. Often both.
Some say that the UNSC, the Covenant, and the Forerunner form a basic tripod of the Halo universe, and you can’t tell a good story without including all three. But this thinking is what led to the incoherent mess that is 343i’s run of the series. Forget about the Forerunner. You can’t have them be a mysterious vanished race that left behind rare, coveted technology, and also have a forgotten superweapon abandoned on every planet.
Plotline:
So, here’s the meat of the story. The UNSC heavy cruiser
Battersea is disabled in a naval battle that the UNSC wins. The Covenant board the ship during the battle, and reach Engineering before they are driven off and take refuge somewhere else in the ship. The crew is gutted, the primary powerplant is offline, and the scuttling charges are unresponsive. Worse, the Covenant incursion team has retrieved a navigation chart from the databases, and only heavy jamming is preventing them from broadcasting it to the rest of the Covenant armada.
The main character is Anton Myrick, a UNSC Marine stationed on the Battersea. Supporting characters are his squad, an ONI agent, and a team of Spartans who arrive after the battle. They have to hunt down the Covenant intruders before the intruders can get through the jamming. If the Covenant begin to broadcast, a one-megaton nuclear bomb will be detonated, destroying the ship and all aboard.
The twist is that the nagivation data is a secondary objective for the Covenant incursion team. Their primary objective is to draw out and kill the Spartans, who they know as Demons. To guarantee their success, there are additional squads of stealth warriors who laid low in the initial battle. What the UNSC thought was going to be a straightforward shipboard conflict turns into a deadly game of ambush and counter-ambush against enemies they cannot see.
Opening:
Since the heart of this story is the war between the UNSC and the Covenant, the story has to start on Harvest. It starts with a voiceover animation that shows the migration of Humanity into the inner colonies, and then the expeditions spearheading out. Human civilization is still confined to a fragment of the Orion Arm, but that territory encompasses thousands of stars.
"In 2291, Tobias Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa discovered the secret of faster than light travel. They opened a path to the stars for all of us. We colonized the stars in Earth's neighborhood, and then we pushed out further."
The animation focuses on Epsilon Indi, Harvests’ star.
The planet Harvest is shown, and then the scene cuts to the capital, Utgard.
"A hundred and seventy years later, my homeworld was colonized at the very edge of Human space. Harvest. It was beautiful."
Utgard looks like a slightly futuristic Kansas City, with a space elevator rising from its center. The viewpoint is high enough that we can see suburbs and farmland in the distance. As shipping containers rise and fall from the seven strands of the space elevator, the sun sinks lower into the sky.
The scene changes again. It is just after sunset, and a 16-year-old Anton is sitting on the deck of a Jotun combine harvester as it cuts through a corn field. He sits at the top of the ladder, and standing cornstalks pass by his feet like water around a raft. He’s holding a tablet in his hands, watching newly arrived news footage of insurrectionist attacks on Biko. He stops the movie and pulls up an astronomical chart, and looks up to the sky in time to see a strange blue light on the horizon. It’s a Spirit dropship.
(The Jotun is actually a dolled-up Gleaner S98 with a caterpillar track upgrade. Cameras and blinkenlight props are also added to the cab.)
"My family came here looking for opportunity, and they found it. I thought I'd live my whole life here. Even though the rest of Human civilization was sliding into chaos, it seemed like Harvest would stay untouched."
The footage cuts to the Spirit landing. Brutes and Grunts step out of the twin booms. A delegation of UNSC Marines and local politicians are waiting to meet with them.
"Then the aliens came. They call themselves the Covenant, and they were looking for something. When they found us, they attacked immediately."
Scene cut. Anton and his family have piled into a van, and are part of a convoy racing toward Utgard. Anton’s father looks out the side window, and sees a bright light on the horizon. The Rapid Conversion is burning Gladsheim.
Utgard’s streets are choked with traffic. Civilians are abandoning their vehicles and fleeing toward the space elevator. Anton’s family takes whatever they can carry from the van and run.
Anton’s family is separated. He, his father, and two sisters are herded toward a shipping container with thousands of other civilians. He fights against the crowd, but his father orders him to watch over his sisters and pushes out against the crowd. The doors of the shipping container close. Anton and dozens of extras are shoved to the ground as it suddenly rises upward.
The camera pulls back to that same shot of Utgard that opened this sequence. The space elevator in the foreground is working overtime. Smoke is rising from the city, and the Rapid Conversion is approaching the city’s outer limits.
Anton hugs his sisters close as the lights in the shipping container flicker. The camera cuts to an exterior shot, showing all the shipping containers hurtling up toward the Tiara at the top of the elevator. Space ships, DCS freighters, are already taking off and fleeing, their engines burning bright. An alternate scene might be a shot of the shipping containers arriving at the Tiara and being offloaded onto DCS freighters.
“When the Covenant declare war, they don’t hold anything back. They burn the planetary surface to glass and move on.”
The sequence ends with a shot of Harvest
glowing like an ember. Bright flickers can be seen where Covenant warships are still glassing the planet.
The scene fades to black.
Five Years Later...
