Why No One Knows How to Adapt Halo for Screen

there are two holy Graves of Storytelling and in my Attack on Titan breakdown I've already showed you what the first one is and how is sayama manage to attain it so the time has come to unravel the second one and probably to the surprise of well most people it comes with Halo so stay tuned as I show you how Halo or rather old Bungie and Eric Nyland managed to attain this elusive treasure for the most part by accident I will also show you what must be done to achieve it yourself and if you succee

d in doing so you will share the stage with the likes of homare Shakespeare HP Lovecraft tolkin and John wo it's a small but extraordinary Club I will also showcase why no one in Hollywood knows what to do with Halo because it goes against the current Hollywood Zeitgeist also how and why the Paramount show wears Halo like a Buffalo Bill skin suit and to top it all off will be screenwriting Halo writing the onepage elevator pitch for a Halo movie with all the elements necessary for telling the re

al story of Halo so subscribe and hit the like it helps to get the word out and the Machine it enjoys it like Hollywood producers enjoy their booger sugar so let's not waste any time and jump into wrong ends us only The 40-Year-Old Virgin this is you in space I'm going to say something very controversial here down 911 tell the police to get up here quick somebody's about to get killed but why why is it so hard to make a Halo movie for example it all has to do with the second Holy Grail of Storyt

elling and it's when you invent your own genre and this is why Halo adaptations range from palatable to Absolute disasters because no one has ever distilled what this Halo genre actually is and this is also why lore alone is not enough lore does not account for this genre but every element inside buan era Halo games is molded by and through this genre from the music to the floatiness or dance of the combat to even the in-game level design and architecture all are part of this unique new genre th

is genre is also responsible for why we never got the proper Halo movie Nobody understood that Halo exists within its own genre so everyone felt entitled in making Halo thinking they'd understand it it's just some sci-fi SL aliens not off right wrong both Microsoft and Paramount have no clue what Halo is and I'll show you why don't worry we'll get to Neil Bloom Camp as well for those wondering why it's so important to Define this genre well you can't really write the screenplay without the genre

genre is the first thing you make a decision on before you write your log line your synopsis or any possible character sheets let alone beat sheets or the actual script you pick your genre even if you're going goal is to subvert diffuse blend mix or elevate a genre you must understand the rules before you know how to break them so before we understand Halo we must understand banie and what they did and to understand what they did we must learn one crucial lesson genre is one of those things whe

re you can ask 10 people what it is and you'll get 10 different answers and it gets even more confusing when dealing with video game genres they make as much sense is Rule 34 tags I mean what is the difference between massive and gigantic T and there is no ontological difference between gangas and bazanga going back to Carl Gustaf greenfeld and his scientific inquiry into bed the rise of industrialization Dove tailed with terms like jugs and milk fact massive jiggle twins anyway I simply prefer

the term milk truck all right with that out of the way we can finally talk about film genres my favorite way to think of genre comes from Save The Cat by Blake Snider save the cat is very formula and I only recommend the book to newcomers it's good for when you just start out but it becomes very restrictive when you want to experiment or go beyond the formula what's great about the book is Snider's hyp sense for pattern recognition the man could watch any hundred movies at random and distill the

m all down to one unifying pattern and he did the same with genre which helps us get insight into what genre is the term itself goes back to the Latin Gus which just means kind that's all genre is a kind kinds of what well that's where Snider comes in because the most commonly understood genres are actually just marketing terms action horror sci-fi fantasy and romance for example are just marketing terms they to attract new potential IAL customers they do not tell us enough about storytelling ge

nres it's like the difference between early Tech adopters versus being an engineer one is an end user experience and the other well built the end user experience and so we must understand genre in relation to screen writing and Blake Snider distilled all movies down to 10 story types according to Snider genres have to tell you what a story is his categorization looks at what different stories have in common for example Jaws alien Panic Room and The Exorcist are the same genre which at first rais

es an eyebrow until you hear the name Snider picked for it monster in the house Star Wars Planes Trains and Automobiles Back to the Future and most heist movies fall on Golden Fleece Bruce Almighty liar liar and Flubber fall into out of the bottle rights of Passage and body love are fairly self-explanatory romance films fall on the body love as well interestingly enough Chinatown and JFK are not who done it but why done it the why is always more interesting than the who again this all relates ba

ck to the screenwriter not the audience Forest Gump Naruto and amadeos are the full triumphant The Godfather mesh and One Flew Over the cus Nest are all institutionalized here institution means anything that functions as well an institution be it a mental hospital or a crime family superhero explanatory as well and finally we get to my personal favorite where Die Hard Titanic and shinless list share supposedly the same genre it sounds crazy until you hear the name dude or D that with a problem t

hese are Snider's 10 storytelling types and you might already see where we are going with this genres are narrative sophistications of Primal and or civilizational elements you can take a caveman from 100,000 years ago put him in front of alien and he'll get what's going on it's a monster in the house or rather cave same goes for rights of Passage every society has them or it will suffer the consequences of a prolonged [Applause] adolescence we're leaving in similar fashion Golden Fleece is the

Primal quest for an Elixir the McGuffin to heal the lands only the hero finds thems during the journey there is also no limit to how many genres exist out there HP lovecrafts quaz micara captured what is basically the existential dread that sets in if there is no Elixir if you can't escape your own insignificance John Wood distilled righteous Vengeance and sacrifice into heroic Bloodshed even societies have genres look at the contrast between dignity cultures and honor cultures and the ecstasis

of both so the obvious question now is would wouldn't Halo just fit neatly into one of these genres Halo plot lines would not Halo as a whole I mean the Fall Of Reach novel alone would fit into Golden Fleece rights of Passage body love institutionalized and superhero that's the advantage of a novel you can dig much deeper compared to a 2-hour long movie and elements of the Bungie games fit perfectly into the full triumphant as well I mean you have to be a fool to undertake this sir permission to

leave the station for what purpose master Chief to give the Covenant back their bomb permission granted and succeed but Halo in its entirety does not fit into any single genre that Snider laid out remember what we're trying to do adapt Halo the video game franchise not the book franchise and one element that only video games have is gameplay only when we account for Halo's totality including the game gam play will we see the genre it took me quite some time to distill it into a name but here we

go Halo is a Paleo Cosmic epic it itss Opposite from cosmic horror interestingly enough I think there is a second franchise that exists within this genre of course there could be a few more that I'm oblivious to I will also highlight another game that managed to create its own genre as well because of gameplay games are uniquely positioned to crft narrative sophistications but for us to understand the Paleo Cosmic Epic we first must understand the people responsible for it I will only go into B

ungie's history as it relates to pre and Perry Halo post Halo Bungie is just a shadow of its former self not commercially of course but creatively the studio went from a whole somaro to Pure corporate gobleg to sell more life service crap with a pinch of casual racism the original bunge was something to behold the best way to describe it is lightning in in a bottle so many elements had to coales in the right place at the right time it might rekindle Richard Dawkins believ in God because it is th

e same as if a tornado swept through a junkyard and assembled a Boeing 747 the Boeing in question is Halo Combat evolve and the junkyard is Bungie with its ephos or work culture you see Bungie was what every creative Collective high on its own farts tries to be a truly free space to explore creativity I'm not going to call it a safe space because stupid bad or useless ideas were immediately discarded and the whole thing was playfully confrontational working with Marty is an effort in patience an

d restraint he's hilarious he's funny he's sharp he gets to [ __ ] like nobody's business about how much work he has and how little time there is we worked together really well he's the two of us together are the most unlikely couple for a variety of reasons he um I hate him actually it wasn't about living some supposed true self it was about finding the best ideas founded by Jason Jones and Alex copian in 1991 ban had the perfect balance of corporate and passion I was working on a game and Alex

was trying to start a company they attracted absolute Geniuses on both the engineering and creative front from Chris butcher lead engineer who began his first math and computer science degree at 10 bear in mind I'm not talking high school here but a college bachelor's degree to Jamie grima a philosophy student who went into game design instead of astrophysics as initially planned to the absolute unit that is Martin o' donnald this man could recompose fractured reality with a piano I count two s

car repeat two scar Bungie had a through line a light Motif if you will the game is the story most Halo fans are aware of Bungie's 30 seconds of fun designing principle but way before that right at Ban's founding Jason Jones was convinced that games need a story this was very unusual at the time as the FBS genre was invented by what kids these days called Boomer Shooters and the people behind Boomer Shooters thought story is something Irrelevant for games which of course is nonsense because no o

ne cares about tech demos most people need at least the simplest Baseline of a story to play the game people confuse the fact that some video games can skate by with a story skeleton with irrelevance even Super Mario is the most basic story ever told Boy Meets Girl boy wants girl boy can't get girl cue the drama or level to complete this analogy we started who or what is the tornado assembling the boing [Music] well myth 2 was shipped with a bug that in the worst case would delete most of your h

ard drive when uninstalling the game Jason Jones had his thing called uh oh God what was it again hold on let me check you don't hear it often when talking about gaming CEOs uh right I got it I got it it's um in Integrity Integrity right Jason Jones had integrity and so they recalled 200,000 copies of the game this move ended up costing Bungie $800,000 Bungie's finances were precarious during Halo's development hence why acquisition was on the table and once they got in contact with Microsoft ga

me studios while Microsoft sent one of their demon people to seal the deal banie now had to turn Halo from a collection of loose gameplay and story elements into a finished product for a new console and this is where everything snapped into place creativity without deadlines is like a plant without water it might survive for a while but throw in a little deadline and that's where the magic happens I know this from my own experience when it comes to screen writing Eric Nyland was working with a t

ight deadline too he only had 7 weeks to write Fall Of Reach this means that the template for most of the Halo lore was also written in this short period of time but some of the key elements that make this Halo genre can be found in Bungie's first games going back to Marathon unfortunately Jason Jones is more elusive than the elusive man so I can't give you an explanation as to why this elements are there just that they make up the core of what Halo is my first bunge game was Oni which I loved a

s well but once I played Halo for the first time it was like I was put under a spell and this spell is still lasting it took me years to figure out what Halo story is kids these days do not know how big halo was by the time Halo 3 rolled around it was a global cultural event I grew up in Austria and let me tell you I cared more about the Halo release day than any other event throughout the year I remember arguing with one of my teachers why I came can't get the day off for Halo 3E he just looked

at me like I was speaking some foreign language as if I was the fool for asking get out of my goddamn classroom before I break my foot off in your ass insubordinate anyway I'm going to account for all the games including Halo 5 and some of the novels this includes the original series the 4Runner Trilogy the kilo 5 Trilogy and individual books like contact Harvest to name a few I have read everything released by 2015 and before Halo 5 my taste a little so I dropped off but peron's butchering of

Halo reinvigorated me with a new found hatred for this damn show if they knew what they were doing I would need to produce this video Halo's paleo Cosmic epic has four elements bear in mind other franchises have some of these elements too either identical or as a variation I'll explain each and every difference the four elements are techn mysticism hyper agency accelerated Extinction ISM and survivalism and the use of two dimensional characters in particular as a frine techn mysticism is just a

synonym for ARA C Clark's famous quote any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic if I were to use an analogy for how Halo's environments feel imagine being a medieval peasant and now you get a chance to step inside a recently finished Cathedral that took half a millennium to construct the people who drafted the plants are long dead so is everyone who set the first stone and now you're inside the cathedral you you have never left your village before and the tallest buil

ding you have ever seen is a horse stable the same feeling this peasant experiences is invoked by Halo's environments every player felt the same like this peasant this techn mysticism does not just relate to the Covenant and their religion or the various names and themes in Halo it also relates to its absolute Bonkers timeline Halo story starts at 10 million BCE uh BC c e BC M ah right before Christ era 10 million years have to be accounted for when writing Halo it's almost the average age of a

member of Congress Star Wars for example technically has well just mysticism the force would still exist in the Galaxy even if there was no technology but in Halo the mysticism is induced by technology the second element hyper agency is very unique to Bungie hyper agency relates to all the artificial intelligence constructs in Halo they act as hyper agents the easiest way to explain hyper agents is through the idea of ancient gods think of Aries as a hyper agent he acts through every Warrior or

rather his Essence does by cycling into a positive feedback loop that already exists within every human demons Angels or Gins are just a variation of an hyper agent and as a side note this is where I think large language models are heading you know those stories where someone's romantic chatbot goes wrong Rogue that happens because the model is a probability algorithm and it has a language map of every possibility related to romance and romance can also go very wrong so there is nothing that say

s we can't isolate the language map of war and talk to Aries Sauron for example is a hyper agent to he uses everyone's greed and lust for power to manifest himself and AI constructs in Halo do not just act as hyper agents they are also created from an Essence they are essentially a spirit in a techn shell four runners created fre for free Guilty Spark by digitizing the essence of an ancient human and tasked him with maintaining installation or four you know the very Halo ring we blow up in Halo

Combat Evolved later Guilty Spark acts as a religious hyper agent through the Covenant the humans create AI through similar means they dissolve adona's brain into a connectone which will come back to life in a digital framework and throughout every game Cortana was the player's hyper agent you do not take a single action in the games without cortana's influence could we possibly make any more noise I guess so even when separated like in Halo 3 your mission is to reunite with Cortana and to give

you a quick contrast remember the Star Trek computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer shut up here the machine is just a tool the humans in Star Trek are perfectly capable of exploring the Galaxy without the computer not in Halo large vessels like the pillar of autumn can at best be guided into a controlled crash without AI help if you wanted to have a Star Tr

ek type show in Halo where humans venture out into the final frontier with a mission of Discovery it can only be Halo if those same humans are Guided by a spirit of Truth and Discovery in AI form that's the difference in other words Halo is re-enchanted sci-fi we had LSD induced Enchanted sci-fi in the' 60s and '70s Star Wars with its mysticism is a remnant of that later SciFi became more grounded more science less Mystique less Soul if you will every now and then we get a re-enchanted Sci-Fi st

ory arguably the Matrix trilogy is one Neil looked like a priest for a reason and outside the Matrix he looked like a mendicant mendicant mendicant where did I ah right mendicant bias the Forerunner AI task with protecting their home world he was characterized by his creator as a beggar after knowledge a virtue that would later turn into a vice opening the gates for the cosmic horror there is the flood this is also why the entire plot of Halo 5 was such a mess and made no sense rampancy is not t

he same as an AI Uprising because it was written by people who do not understand Halo like the Paramount show don't worry we'll get to it soon enough next is accelerated Extinction ISM and survivalism this is where our Paleo In paleo Cosmic epic comes in the Paleo is twofold it's not just referencing all the really ancient constructs in Halo and how they're still playing a crucial role in the present the Paleo refers to the state nature and environment of humanity besides the 10 million year tim

eline there is another number that needs to be kept in mind when writing [Applause] [Music] Halo 42 no but we're getting close it's 23 oh I forgot a few numbers 23 billion that's the human death toll of the human Covenant War have you ever wondered why there is no propaganda in the Halo games like something you'd see in Starship Troopers and let's set aside for a moment that one is a deliberate satire and yes I know of the militarization propaganda during the interplanetary wars prec Covenant an

d also post Covenant as laid out in the kilo 5 Trilogy I'm targeting the games only as we try to adapt those even though these two have been compared a few times so why is there no propaganda because 23 billion people are dying you don't need propaganda even the last vestage of the insurrectionists cannot really Garner support by blaming the war on the UNC everybody is noticing that 23 billion people are getting wiped out when human settled systems have only 39 billion people spread across them

space in Halo mimics the parameters of prehistoric man look I know it sounds crazy that's why I've enlisted the unai Hartman to give us a quick rundown through the life of prehistoric man listen up you chirping meat bags I'm here to gu guide you through a journey before your cushy air conditioned lives if you think Asian man is a hard difficulty try the prehistoric man set ever Ponder why your kind has spread across the planet like crabes in the 1960s commune hunger my friends for millions of ye

ars your ancestors roam the Earth on the Eternal Quest for grub and a decent roof over their heads meanwhile every predator Critter plant or gust of wind could have been your demise nature wasn't handing out participation trophies my friends it was a ruthless Survival game and Humanity was just trying not to get wied out like a speack of dust and if that wasn't enough your fellow sapen would bashing your Noggin for access to a puddle of water but hold on to your space helmets because Here Comes

The Game Changer fire when your Genius ancestors discovered that Sparky thing they didn't just light up the night they kindled the flame of human survival suddenly they weren't just praying they were the apex predators toasting meat on top of the food chain yet don't get too comfy Mother Nature wasn't ready to retire as the ultimate boss Humanity's numbers dwindle down to a mere handful less than 10,000 resilient Souls who faced to Extinction it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows it was a gritty b

attle and only the toughest made it through so next time you complain about your WiFi being slow remember your Ancient King had bigger concerns like not becoming fertilizer dismissed this is why it's different from an Extinction event Humanity in Halo can survive extinction events if one planet is hit by an asteroid that's not going to wipe out all humans in the Galaxy but the extinction ISM mimics events like the Toba eruption Theory where human numbers dwindled down to between 3,000 and 10,000

surviving individuals the story of Halo mimics this framework in an accelerated Fashion on a cosmic scale granted the firing of the halo rings is the only real Extinction event that can wipe out all biomatter in the Galaxy but most people are familiar with this one plot point and less so with the extinction ISM aspect which honestly was perceived by some people as jingoistic mostly because of a very superficial reading surrounding the Marines and Johnson in particular but it's not jingoism it's

being the underdog Humanity's role in Halo was always that of an underdog from the ancient humans and their fate to the modern humans fighting against the Covenant and the flood humanity is the cosmic Underdog that's a key feature of Halo and there is a simple reason for why Marines crack jokes or why Johnson makes up ridiculous comparison when I joined the cor we didn't have any fancy schmancy tanks we had sticks two sticks and a rock for a whole platoon and we had to share the rock they are a

ll facing extinction and the human mind has a choice go down in despair or fight with hope that was the point of the games and look I am aware of the UNC Shenanigans in the lore but remember what we're trying to do adapt the video game franchise with the Master Chief and this is where Hollywood starts to struggle on two fronts Humanity as an underdog and what to do with the master chief you see Halo is everything Avatar isn't and Avatar is the product of the current Hollywood Zeitgeist having li

ved and worked with writers in La for 2 years I'd summarize it with one simple but consequential sentence human beings are a disease a cancer of this planet you are a plague avat is born from this very thinking it views Humanity as a virus ha views Humanity as a savior as the reclaimers the underdog here to save the Galaxy social credit deducted and look the irony is not lost on me that the man who influenced Halo's Aesthetics would end up making the most anti-h Halo film imaginable life can be

funny I guess this interplay of all the elements is what makes Halo Humanity does not survive by being in touch with nature last time we did we almost got wiped out we survive through human Ingenuity be it persist hunting with bow and arrow or civilization and Industry and it's always Guided by some Spirit Christian or not and the same dynamic or symbiosis is exemplified by the Master Chief and Cortana as I said before it happened by accident banie needed a guide post for how and where to send t

he player there's no time get out of here find Keys stop him before it's too late but they inadvertently replicated the exact dynamic mankind has with technology just as a quick contrast it's not the same as transhumanism it's a symbiotic relationship not a merger and this symbiosis is what saves Humanity multiple times in the games it even makes for the best moments in weer Halo games like Halo 4 I am ordering you to surrender that Ai No Sir yeah I'm going to stick with the space virgin and his

Spirit of foot fetishism they have a proven track record in the fall of reach novel it's established just how outgunned humanity is every space battle is at best airic Victory the UNC only wins by sacrificing countless vessels to Corner the Covenant Fleet and any ground game is immediately offset by the Covenant retreating and glassing the planet from orbit this is why the UNC Infinity becomes the very symbol of humanity survivalism it tells the whole galaxy that you do not mess with the underd

og and the flood well they're my favorite part for a reason the flood in Halo is the most biblical Cosmic horror I've ever seen it's truly aptly named because the flood only wins by utilizing its enemies hubis and shortcomings Halo 2 literally spells it out for us I am a to all your sins and this is why I think that warham of 4 dek shares this genre with Halo I do not know enough to confirm this but judging by what I have seen and what I know about the lore I'd say yes but let me know in the com

ments if you agree or disagree oh and the other game that invented its own genre Minecraft there is a reason Notch is a billionaire who spends most of his free time insulting people on Twitter I mean X don't say Twitter free times or Elon appears behind you Minecraft scratches that reptilian part of every boy it's the part respons for setting civilizational foundations Minecraft is an accelerated play on the years between 13,000 BCE and 10,000 pce now why is all this so important why do we need

to define a genre to write a Halo movie because that's the process of adaptation we want to adapt the gameplay element the lore element and the pros element of Halo into a visual medium that's why we're doing this because it's going to tell us what to put in the screenplay and what to emit this is why the landfall short is such a and favorite Neil Bloom Camp instinctively understood how to portray some of these elements because he played the damn games this is not jingoism this is Humanity's onl

y chance at survival remember 23 billion people are dying so of course the war machine goes into high gear and with this almost rhythmic beating way it's filmed Neil managed to capture the essence of some Halo elements every fan immediately recognized them I truly believe we would have gotten the right Halo film from Neil Bloom Camp well as long as he doesn't write it this man is a great director but a horrendous writer and the first mistake Paramount did was to turn this Halo Epic into a TV sho

w you do not stretch an epic into 17 episodes Game of Thrones has epic elements but it's not an epic it's a grounded and dirty fantasy drama most of us tuned in to see who's next on the chopping block and with that that we can take on the last and most important element of Halo and the Paleo Cosmic epic you cannot make Halo without getting this one right and it's what Paramount butchered the [Music] most the master chief is the easiest and at the same time the most difficult element to get right

when adapting Halo easy when you know what you're doing and very difficult when you don't like the people who came up with Jimmy rings hey look I'm not missing out on any opportunity to crap over jimmmy the video game industry always struggled with narrative in Parts because of the way development Cycles work the narrative is usually just slept onto the game instead of building it ground up with the game and the game play and one thing the industry never understood is the silent protagonist or

the player Avatar they don't understand what both actually are because the master chief is the same as the Dooms Slayer or James Bond or one punch man or even the gang from its always sunny it's a basic character type that I broke down in my video the storytelling of Doom and how to improve it and while that video was related to video games the lesson is the same when adopting a video game for the screen so let's take a quick look at what I said there are only two basic types of character and pe

ople tend to confuse the two all the time these two are also mutually exclusive and it's the two-dimensional and threedimensional characters most people conflate a poorly written threedimensional character with a two-dimensional character they're not the same thing what makes a threedimensional character is their internal flaw it is the reason the hero went on a journey to begin with another way to think of three dimensional characters is that they have a character spine a threedimensional chara

cter has a need and a want but only when they overcome their need will they get their want so internal change is at the core of a threedimensional character now they don't have to change Michael Corleone doesn't change he keeps his flaw at the end of The Godfather and becomes the devil conversely the two-dimensional character lacks a flaw and their spine is underdeveloped but they still act as a catalyst for change the difference is that the change is external this is why one punch man and the G

ang from its Always Sunny are the same thing one punch man broke his limiter he exists outside the hero's journey and in the infinite that's the joke not again all it took was one punch Dam it so everyone around him goes through the hero's journey instead in similar fashion to gang's narcissism and self-absorption is a bottomless pit they can't go anywhere else but lower so everyone around them changes instead too this is precisely why two dimensional characters make great vehicles for primordia

l archetypes your Noir detectives your man's man your Psychopaths your Ultimate Warriors your Killer Robots and for that matter any killer in a slasher film a constant does not change but a constant will necessitate change around it that's why you can build a dramatic Arc with two dimensional characters and the master chief is just a two-dimensional character and what the writers of the Paramount show tried to do is turn him into a classic threedimensional character by giving him a cheap knockof

f RoboCop Arc of self-discovery they turned the culmination of human Ingenuity and evolution into a teenager with mommy issues of all the things they could have done this was the stupidest I mean Jimmy rings could have easily just stormed off the battlefield and I don't know go to college and try slam poetry makes as much sense Cynthia Cy Jesus died for our cynas and they did the same with Kai oh I'm so happy you're discovering yourself like a college girl exploring her sex uality while 23 billi

on people are dying I'm so happy you're getting some Jimmy while 23 billion people are dying look getting mad at him for having sex is just a meme at this point the problem is that there is a human Covenant member to begin with the Covenant wages a war of extermination because they view Mankind's existence as a heresy and they only keep a human around to activate forun a techn ology for them if too much of the cover and finds out it threatens the entire structure and religion as has happened exa

ctly in Halo 2 especially when it comes to the arbiter's character Arc go ahead do your thing the sacred Rings what are they weapons of Last Resort built by the forerunners to eliminate potential flood hosts thereby rendering the parasite harmless and those who made the Rings what happened to the forerunners after exhausting every other strategic option my creators activated the Rings they and all additional sentient life in three radi of the galactic center died as planned would you like to see

the relevant data I know what they try to do it all comes back to the first mistake they need to fill enough episodes with drama that has nothing to do with Halo to justify the episode's existence what they should have done instead is keep the Master Chief and all Spartan twos as two-dimensional characters that act as a vector of change for all threedimensional characters H if there was only a a recent example of a larger than life two-dimensional character who forces all the threedimensional c

haracters to change and adapt and the whole story became a massive hit with global audiences hm oh well any reflection on experienced trauma comes after the war funny enough the company responsible for mishandling Halo the most understood this instinctively but it took them three attempts until they learned how to do it the Master Chief in Halo infinite acts as a two-dimensional Vector of change for both the weapon and the pilot it's one of my favorite moments in the game crushed broken beaten u

seless enough when when is it enough Chief then we're in there because that's where I belong in there with them I'm worthless you should leave me here with the rest of the carpets we all fail we all make mistakes it's what makes us human I'm sorry Chief but how have you ever failed I should have protected Cortana stopped everything from going wrong I failed her I will not fail you and they didn't need to take off the helmet they didn't need to introduce unnecessary drama no fancy camera work or

staging it's just two dudes talking in a firstperson shooter and it's better than anything the damn show has done it worked because they put the two and the threedimensional character into the correct relation and that's why most people cared about the pilot and nobody does about Quan and with that we have arrived at the most infuriating aspect of the show the fact that Jimmy rings keeps taking off his helmet I will give you reasons across the board why that is nonsense from a screenwriting poin

t from a film making and editing Point down to the lore and gameplay of the games so let's quickly address some of the pro helmet off arguments number one he does it in the books did you know that he takes off the helmet in the games [Music] too tell that to the Covenant has already [Music] begun you know what we don't see his face because banie understood there is no face on earth that could give this character justice so they just don't show the face as any Halo movie should the main reason of

course is that every player can see themselves in the master chief so remember what we're doing adapt the video game serious Halo in the books characters also monologue and we accompany them through their inner thoughts that's the advantage of pros and the advantage of film is that it's a visual medium which gets us to number two you get emotional scenes with faces No you get emotional scenes with good screenwriting also let me quickly address the real reason why Jimmy rings keeps taking off hi

s helmet it's because Pablo's agent lob beat successfully for it because Pablo is using Halo as a platform to boost his career granted it's every actor but he picked worst possible franchise for doing it I don't want to see his mug anywhere else again because it's just a monument to his sins and I already showed you how Halo infinite managed to invoke emotions with good screenwriting Godzilla minus one does the same which gets us to editing do you know why both dread and the first season of Mand

alorian worked because of the kishu effect and it's one of the oldest and best editing techniques out there the coolish of effect like many things in the early days of film making was discovered by a Russian LA cishop to be exact and he realized that audiences derive more meaning from the interaction of two backto back shots than from one shot in isolation if you show the same reaction shot followed by a different insert people associate the sequence with different meanings and emotions Alfred H

itchcock demonstrated this wonderfully as well in his own way and the most frustrating thing is when you combine a coolish of effect with good film making with good blocking composition Lighting and Sound design you get a much more potent effect than any of the supposed drama in the show you do not even need to edit the shots I'll show you why again with Halo infinite because it's exactly here that free for free finally cracked the code of what to do with the chief the others the Spartans did yo

u I'll find them Echo 216 all channels can you hear me I repeat can you hear me how can I ever know what's what going on in his head none of the elements tell me enough not the slow camera not the mood set with the lights not the sound [Music] design big guy your motion tracker isn't moving come on come on give me anything Chief I respond please did you find the source of the signal whatever is down there either has to come with us or be left behind can you hear me his inner turmoil is just a my

stery a dig site on the ring this Conservatory must be some sort of Forerunner installation what do you suppose they're after it's time to go I can't even hate watch this show it's like their main mission was to butcher every element that makes Halo Halo I mean for crying out loud they cucked the hyper agent in this show you couldn't make it more anti-h Halo if you deliberately tried the only thing Hollywood keep keep surprising me with is how some people can keep their jobs I'm saying this as a

n indie screenwriter and as someone who has pitched his own shows and feature scripts the worst thing to happen to Hollywood's creativity is the rise of the creative executive it's the type of producer who thinks they know better what the audience wants than the audience themselves and the creative in Creative executive is the same as Patriot in Patriot Act Frank Zappa had some thoughts on this type too not hip young guys these were cigar chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and

said I don't know who knows what it is record it stick it out of it all right we were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young Executives you know who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace the biggest mistake they made was to ignore the games and it was a deliberate one but you cannot adapt Halo without playing the games you need to get the feel for Halo to properly translate it into a purely visual medium there is a reaso

n Halo spawned a genre of failed Halo clones or supposed Halo Killers Halo's gameplay was so unique and successful that a horde of developers failed to copy it this is also why the show gets some elements right it's like a pain job derived from Reading summaries or lore entries but they have no clue how all these elements are supposed to relate and play off each other that's why Bloom understood because he played the games and that's why randomly selected YouTubers who play the games have a bett

er understanding of what Halo is and where the show went wrong Master Chief's character has been completely and utterly assassinated by Paramount plus and 343 Industries half the season was taken up by a cringy ansty teenager subplot that no one was interested in and they might come up with the excuse of well this is just a a different timeline this is the silver timeline alternate reality it's not Ken a different Universe blah blah blah whatever you called him Master Chief okay this is your ver

sion of Master Chief you know the funny thing about it is that they had people around to give guidance on Halo law 343 hires Riders to do that but they basically have these people there at the S of the TV show to tell the director the basics of Halo stories just for them to respond yeah that's cool now shut up I'll do it my way uh about 10% of it has actually felt like it was based on Halo and everything else is just [ __ ] you could swap in any generic sci-fi Universe story or plot and it would

be the exact same nothing about what makes Halo special and interesting is present in the show that's so unbelievably out of character for a Spartan 2 a Spartan 2 would not prioritize a personal Vendetta over quite literally saving Humanity from the Covenant do the showrunners not understand the impact and Legacy of Master Chief's face and what revealing it actually means it's it's almost a joke how often he tries to not wear his armor the master chief was literally always intended as a faceles

s mute who only opens his mouth for wise cracking it's a character for the player to project onto but people want to make emotional stories therefore Master Chief must be made into an emotional character who shows his face especially since some [ __ ] human is hanging out with them and like their whole mission is to exterminate every single human ever it it makes no goddamn sense it's like Halo is constantly being put in the hands of people who want to make anything but Halo and that's exactly w

hat went on behind the scenes it seems to be Hollywood's montra for the past five years if not more I have to be honest I was not very steeped in the comics I didn't I didn't read any Comics or do any research I wasn't familiar with Comics I wasn't familiar with the movies we didn't lean into a whole lot of the history of the comic books yeah candidly we were not enormous um comic fans I wasn't super into superhero comics when I was kid I read a lot of like Indie press stuff first thing thing I

was told is don't read the comics really as a Creator they put you in a bubble they don't let you talk about any of the other projects right you know they're they're up for anything we ultimately decided to redefine it for the series and thought that it worked uh better for the story that we're trying to tell did you ever read the did you you never heard the com when the DVD comes out I'm going to read a Thor Comic Book and just see where we went wrong these are the faces of writers who never ha

d to build an audience they got an audience handed to them taking it for granted but one should never take anything for granted people thought the Soviet Union would never collapse and now its most esteemed symbols and icons are added to a Funko Pop collection in some tankes basement as I said before life can be funny and looking at Hollywood's box office numbers I'd say they'll find out soon enough that no audience can be taken for granted plenty of people have discussed every detail wrong with

this show so it's time to switch it up and with the groundwork laid out we can finally write Halo it's time to finish the fight in one final effort to write the Halo epic properly we'll utilize free vehicles or templates well we'll take elements from each and combine them into what we need John tr's designing principle from anatomy of story will help us capture the vast timeline and the 23 billion death toll John Yorks into the woods is great for two-dimensional characters and it will help us w

ith the Master Chief and finally save the cat will tell us how to structure all the complexities so that most audiences can follow along in particular how to utilize all the lore and plot for the story beats in the script we got our genre and for the title I will stick with Halo Fall Of Reach the first novel is Ground Zero for the lore and everything else Falls in place from here next is page count I would gun for 180 pages so roughly a three-hour epic with the base parameters you can start sele

cting your what how and why those are the premise designing principle and fi let's start with the what the premise as Humanity faces Galactic extermination by an alien religious hemony Two Soldiers must find and secure an ancient artifact on Humanity's military Nexus called reach the reason you should try and keep this down to one or two sentences is because it's the thr line connecting everything next is the designing principle our or how this is the basic action your hero will take through the

course of the story this is where the internal conflict and change should already shine through two soldiers one is an odd raced on harvest by insurrectionists the other abducted by on into the Spartan 2 program designed to crush the insurrectionists must work together in a Race Against Time as human military command is overwhelmed by alien forces with this we should be able to replicate a very Dynamic I explained earlier I would create a completely new character just for the movie adaptation t

his way we can create a dramatic Arc with an emotional core where the master chief stays as we know him but acts as a vector of change this interplay between Master Chief stoic determination and a resilient Outsider creates a dynamic and emotional Journey weaving together themes of sacrifice camaraderie and the high cost of War next we got theme and boy is this a tricky one on two fronts a we need to encapsulate everything the vast timeline all elements of the paleo Cosmic epic all the factions

and all the layers of conflict have to be reflected in one ftic through line you can have multiple sub themes played out through the course of the story but we need one specific to tie it all together and B we need to avoid ma allegory I call it Ma allegory but John trouy would just describe it as preachy or sanctimonious writing it's when the allegory becomes the point of the story for a political gacha trouy defines theme as moral argument so you have to write your fee as if you are on both si

des of it and you let the characters duke it out but this means that you must be able to write from both perspectives and a lot of writers simply view the other as evil whatever the other may be the most infamous example of this is Ellen Moore and rosack Moore is a good writer and he gave rosek a proper dramatic Arc but he also projected everything he hates onto roek and he's wondering now why people like the character so much even though it should be obvious because Moore gave him a classic ful

l triumphant Mar alari Moore inserted a resilient fool steadfast in his principles into a sea of mass murdering Psychopaths yeah it's such a mystery why people relate to him simplest example are two anti-war movies imagine two screenplays one says War happens because of nationalism the other says War happens because it's part of the human condition now which one is closer to the truth and more interesting because you can get rid of nation states and people will go to war for their tribe you can

get get rid of tribes and people will go to war for their family in group you can get rid of humans altogether and chimpanzees will step in and go to war as they already do that's how deep we need to go with our theme and so what I came up with to tie everything together is the following the society that separates its colors from its Warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and it's Fighting by fools this should tie everything together the UNC utterly incapable of dealing with the Covenan

t to Dr halls's role and every grunt on the ground as well as the Covenant side in particular the role of the Orbiter and the prophets and yes I am aware that this quote is often misattributed and misquoted which is very ironic given the fact that this entire genre exists by accident might as well use an accidental quote as its theme with this you got your what how and why now we can write the screenplay and for our opening scene I'm going to steal from the best like qu in terano does we are goi

ng to rip off 2001 A Space Odyssey because it's the perfect way to capture a vast temporal frames I would open up with a herd of roaming wooly mammoths from 100,000 BCE a group of cavemen tried to take one down but they couldn't penetrate its hide with their primitive Spears one lonely caveman has been working on a new invention a sturdy a spear with a stone tip we cut to the next scene and witness how a massive Mammoth succumbs to its wounds Death By A Thousand Cuts as the Beast is pierced by c

ountless Spears the caveman who invented a spear approaches the dying Beast we can see him reflected in a mammoth's eye and with each blink he comes in closer he raises the weapon High creating a long beat before the spear comes down blood splatters across the ground as it seeps into the Earth it forms a title Halo Fall Of Reach a trail of plasma fire follows the title until it's thoroughly burned the Glass Lens burst into a black void like a slipstream Rapture and a small vessel emerges from sl

ipstream space we basically pick up where chapter one of the fall of re novel begins and the entire First Act should be focused on the Spartan 2 program Chief's induction is contrasted with a farm boy let's call him Marcus or any name will do actually who grows up on harvest the first Contact World our farm boy is raised by insurrectionists but after the glassing of harvest Marcus enlists with the UNC and as the First Act progresses as the Spartans grow we see less and less of their faces with e

ach scene they turn more into lethal ghosts that even their train lead of Franklin Mendes is scared of we break into the second act with the glassing of harvest and the entire buildup towards the midpoint so our first half of the second act is Humanity's futile fight against the Covenant it's one lost battle after another and even after the Spartan twos are deployed even after winning the ground game Humanity's ultimate demise lies in orbit next we got the midpoint and I gave this one a lot of t

hought it needs to be vast and big as Halo but completely tied to character hence why I would do a 10-year time skip right at the 90 page or 90 minute Mark what precipitates this time skip Marcus is sent on leave he's on Earth visiting what's left of his family they live a sheltered life ignorant of the losses and sacrifice in the war some members of his family even blame the UNC for the war which causes a falling out between them this Fallout leads to the time skip we jump 10 years ahead right

on reach here the second half plays out both the second half of the second act and the entire third act you combine elements from both the novel and the game to create this Vector of change I described earlier the 10year time skip allows us to explore how both Marcus and the chief have changed as everything comes together in one final effort on planet Reach Master Chief and cortana's relationship has to be part of a few beats the ringing of the bell in particular has to be in the movie it's the

first time John and Cortana work together on an insane obstacle course and they managed to deflect their scorpion missile because of how well this symbiosis is by deflecting I mean the master chief [ __ ] slaps a missile and this interplay needs to be part of the climax as well this way you have a laser focus on the core elements from the games instead of cramming Everything at Once into a first season for example this is the movie we should have gotten about 12 years ago like the novel this mov

ie would have set everything up and primed audiences for any sequels or spin-off shows after this movie you can explore the halo rings and any political and cultural Shenanigans within the UN see and the Covenant I am 100% convinced we'll see some of these elements in season 2 because you can get some of them right by just well reading the lore or a synopsis but never the totality of what makes Halo and the entire thing is just SED for me because we are not dealing with the master chief we are d

ealing with Master cheeks they wanted to have a threedimensional character which means they have to repeat this process they need to give him a new character spine so in any case we either get more of the nonsense from season one or they try to recreate this two-dimensional character but it's not going to work because it's still Jimmy rings inside the suit how do it feel to have lived long enough to see all of your favorite franchises go down in flames feels great so will we ever get a proper Ha

lo adaptation on screen I doubt it honestly I'm not even sure Hollywood will survive this new age of entertainment but who knows crazier things have happened in the meantime let me know in the comments what you think of my assessment do you think Halo does exist within its own genre if so are there any elements I might have missed and are there any other franchises that could fit into this genre I'm happy to adapt the Paleo Cosmic epic for more accuracy in any case remember kids I only know one

thing for sure life is suffering but chiap helps you transcend it through heart [Applause] disease [Music] what happened I'm not sure when Halo fired it shook itself to pieces did a number on the ark the portal couldn't sustain itself we made it through just as it collapsed well some of us made [Music] [Music] it but you did it truth and the Covenant the flood it's finished it's finished I'll drop a beacon but it'll be a while before anyone finds US years even I miss you wake me when you need [M

usic] [Music] me