Misgivings

Spielberg and Halo, sounds promising but will it work?

Long ago when I t’was but a child, a game emerged from the darkness that changed First person shooters forever. That game was Halo, and almost as long as its been out, there have been rumors about its first foray onto the big screen. First Peter Jackson signed on then off again, no wait on again! Then back off and the project labored in development hell and fans around the world screamed and shook their fists at the moon, or maybe that was just me.

Anyway video games to movies usually end one of two ways, terrible for the fans or terrible in general. Resident Evil is a good example, I challenge you to show me at this point, any connection to the game’s plot at all. I won’t wait because it’s not there. They completely overhauled it into an apocalyptic zombie fest which isn’t bad but it definitely isn’t a reflection on the survival horror game I came to love that had you constantly searching for ammo.

Street fighter legend of Chun-Li made me literally hate Chun-Li, I honestly haven’t played as her on Street fighter since then. It was such a bad movie (as was the first street fighter) that it may have negatively impacted sales of the video game.

What usually happens is the production companies see the video game industry as a comical thing. They don’t respect the genre and see it as a cheap way to make money, so they go cheap on it. They don’t get the best producers, they get the writers that have never proven themselves in an action genre. I.E The writers for the Tekken movie had people that only wrote dramatic films which led to over developed characters, not enough action, and a storyline that never quite got fulfilled.

However with all of these things in mind Microsoft would not allow that to happen to the child it stole from Apple(c’mon people look its right here). They have now enlisted Steven Spielberg to Executive Produce a Halo television series for Xbox Live gold members.

Now here’s the problem…A TELEVISION SERIES. Halo is far to epic in reach and scope to be confined to the small screen. Honestly I don’t know if I want to see the Master Chief every week anyway. He lacks the character to be seen repeatedly in this sense. In fact the most interesting dynamic in the entire game is his relationship with Cortana, the computer that is far more human than he is.

“For me, the ‘Halo’ universe is an amazing opportunity to be at the intersection where technology and storytelling meet,” Spielberg said.

I just don’t know on the one hand it’s Spielberg, coming off of Lincoln I’m sure he’s just itching for some sci-fi epic goodness. On the other hand a television series with characters that are basically reasons for the Master Chief to blow things up in awesome ways just seems, unreasonable. Now I know as a quasi-nerd I should go by the “in Spielberg we trust” rule but for me its doubly rough to take the fact that a feature length live action film probably won’t be made, and also that Halo will be basically an experimental project for the Xbox1’s crossover capabilities and appeal.

Hopefully it will be as awesome as it’s potential but that will be seen in the months to come. Until then I’ll keep holding out for a Gears of War movie. Maybe they’ll wait a year or so and I’ll be able to direct that. You never know!

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Brian Bell-Wiseguy Industries

The New Justice League Movie, some ideas but maybe to little, to late.

So for quite awhile now I’ve been hearing about Warner Brothers attempting to make a Justice league movie. Lest we forget –

Yeah if you’ve never seen that it’s a still collage from the Justice League of America made for tv film. A fun game is to try and watch all 82 minutes of it without throwing your television into the street in anger, (did i say fun game? I meant “substitute for being in a saw movie”).

This little mistake may be why the WB has focused so much on their animated films, (awesome) instead of expanding smaller characters into feature length live action films. They are scared. To be sure they’re characters were never as…realistically character driven as Marvel’s characters. The reason Marvel became so popular in the first place is because Stan Lee’s focus was on showing normal people who attain SUPER powers and that’s why they show up so well on screen. I mean sure the 90s marvel films all sucked but that’s because they ignored what made the characters great in the first place.

So now that Marvel has found its mark with the Avengers, DC is licking its chops ‘cuz boy do they smell money. I’m sure those executives at WB and DC sat in the tallest building just drooling all over the table.

“THINK OF IT OH THE MONEY!”

“YES WE’LL MAKE MILLIONS,BILLIONS!”

(and then the one guy who makes sense)

Uh guys, wouldn’t we just be copying Marvel? And don’t people usually respond negatively to cheap knockoffs clearly made for nothing more than the money?

Then this happens…

Yeah they are making it, so lets just talk about what they SHOULD do.

WHAT THEY SHOULD DO

They SHOULD have a lead in to it entitled “World’s Finest” Starring Batman and Superman. If you aren’t familiar with the animated “movie” (it was really a two part on Batman the animated series later released as a feature length film). It has The Joker going to metropolis with a lot of Kryptonite, he’s somehow found out that it’s superman’s weakness and he knows the one guy who will pay for him to be gone (if you’re good at something never do it for free).

This ends up being the first true meeting of Batman and Superman as Batman finds out what Joker’s up to and takes a trip to save Superman. This perfectly sets up the relationship between the two and as I think their relationship is one of, if not the, best friendship in superhero history, I would really like to see this on the big screen.

Them teaming up at the end to defeat the two could lead to a further idea in Batman’s head to set up an entire team in case of a giant event. Thus the Justice league could be born without having to do several other movies like Marvel did. One new superman movie, one new batman movie, world’s finest, Justice League. Bad-A-Boom Bad-A-Bing like magic.

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

I’m not a pessimist, I’m not an optimist, though I try to be. In truth I’m a realist and I’ve seen this go bad before and in my darkest nightmares I see the worst that could, and probably will happen. No they won’t get Schumer to direct it, that would incite a full fledged nerd war. But they will make several bad decisions. Such as poor casting in all venues including director. They were talking about Ben affleck but after Daredevil people just aren’t as warm to him in the superhero genre. I’ve also seen the name Michael Bay floated around, he can stick to the Daredevil’s spawn of TMNT and racist robots thank you. Preferably they’d get JJ Abrams to direct it but he’ll be doing star wars AND star trek (lucky). So who does that leave? uh a bunch of people actually that will be spitballed around a room and then thrown away for whoever they think has the big enough name to bring in the money.

They won’t develop the characters properly.

There would be WAY too much CGI. It’d be to the point where they couldn’t even have certain key characters because of all the powers the Justice league utilizes.

Basically this is just a big flaming ball of turd waiting to happen. However maybe they’ll listen to the fans for once and pull of a spectacular film. Or maybe they’ll just pull it completely.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wise guys guessing