5. Not Finding A Solid Beginning
For all its vastness and almost limitless amount of knowledge, Halo is, in its own right, a franchise with no proper beginning, but of multiple beginnings instead. With over a dozen years of providing a constant supply of information to the fans and scholars, Halo has become a franchise with so much going on inside its own universe that to find a true beginning would require constructing a quarry inside a vast sandbox with no end, hoping to find the bottom, or source for this matter. With so many starting points and branching paths, the odds will be insurmountable to find that proper beginning through the film format. There have been ideas thrown around that the project should begin where the series originally began back in 2001, at the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved. Others strongly agree to focus on the Fall of Reach storyline instead, where the story of humanity is firmly cemented with the inception of the Spartan II program and the beginning roots of the Human-Covenant War, where Reach itself comes under assault by an entire armada of Covenant, inevitably ending with the destruction of one of humanity's best-kept planets. There's also the possibility of starting off on Earth, where Halo 2 focused for a while, and begin from there. How about an original story about some Marines ending up stranded on a Halo installation, fortifying themselves and launching a counter-offensive against Covenant troops? Now if the film did come to fruition, one of these beginnings would seem plausible to start off with...or so one would think. The major problem here isn't choosing the proper beginning that fans themselves are most familiar with, but finding a
solid beginning. In terms of
solid, I mean looking for common ground where not just the fans understand what is going on exactly, but those that haven't experienced Halo before are in complete sync with the events currently happening, where they don't need to question what the film is about or what is happening. Now, for those that have stuck with Halo for its entire lifespan, we know just how far down the rabbit hole the series goes. There's so much to learn and understand, and so many beginnings in the entire franchise (Reach, Halo, Earth, Forerunners) that locating that sole solid beginning would be near impossible to find, at least one that everyone can understand. The rabbit hole of knowledge almost knows no end; it's virtually an endless data stream of infinite knowledge. If and when a Halo project officially goes into development, this will be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for the writers. When the project was first green-lit, Alex Garland first wrote the script, but later got a revision from D. B. Weiss, whose own script has yet to be revealed. So currently, there is no working script and no way of determining where either Garland or Weiss decided to start the project. We can all assume there is no official beginning as of right now. If that is the case, then whoever lands the enormous job of handling a script for the film would most likely inherit the same mess. Regardless of whether they know the series or not, finding that one solid beginning is going to prove quite the challenge for their careers.