"As a gaming fan, I'm excited to bring Halo's premise, action and settings to the screen with all the specificity and reality today's technology can provide," said Jackson. "Fran and I are intrigued by the unique challenges this project offers, and we're delighted to be working again with our friends at Universal, and with our new ones at Fox and Microsoft. I'm a huge fan of the game and look forward to helping it come alive on the cinema screen."

This marks the first time Jackson and Walsh's have provided such services in a film Jackson isn't physically directing. Throughout production, the duo will provide creative counsel on the film via WingNut Films, and Weta Digital and Weta Workshop (the companies who worked on Lord of the Rings) will develop Halo's creatures, miniatures and visual effects. Seeing as how Jackson's set up shop in the heart of New Zealand, it comes as little surprise Halo itself will actually be shot entirely in Wellington, NZ.

Comments from the above post:

Unlike most FPS videogames, Halo actually has a rich, engrossing storyline that is awash with complex characters, interesting relationships between those characters, and a surprising amount of historical and mythological references.

If you want to look at all the research that fans have done relating to the Halo story, I can highly recommend.

http://halosm.bungie.org/story/news.html.

#: 10:31 AM posted by Marty

Yeah, the plot holes were ridiculous. Don't be such an art major, Marty.

Rich and complex? Faceless cyborg (or whatever) goes to a ringworld, fights a bunch of aliens, everything blows up, only cyborg guy escapes alive. Halo isn't that big on character development...

#: 10:34 AM posted by KD

Halo has a deeper story than, say, Doom. And if that can get made into a movie, why the hell not Halo I guess?

Regardless, it will do fantastically. Even I will likely see it now at least to see what WETA can do.

Even without that, it would have done well. Halo's prime audience is college males. Particularly the ones who like to angrily shoot things and aren't the most discerning in tastes. These people would buy enough movie tickets because they "loved that AWESOME Halo game".

As far as the game itself.. Well, it wasn't terrible. For a console FPS it was one of the better. And it had quite a nice score, which I could see making it into the movie.

#: 12:09 PM posted by Vamino

Oh god, not another big movie being made in New Zealand. I'm already sick of them.

Btw, as others have commented, ST wasn't supposed to be a serious movie. This should have been particularly obvious in the way that Rico gets promoted so quickly, compared to the idealism of the real world where people who get promoted earn it etc, he was just in the right place at the right time.

Also, Halo had a fantastic premise and setting. My jaw just dropped when you land on the Halo in the 2nd level of the game.

The actual storyline however was pretty standard. First you're trying to meet up with all your human budies, and you get pretty far, then you discover that the Halo is some kind of mega-powerful weapon (or perhaps this came first) and so you go to track down the source of this power so you can stop the convanent using it, or use it yourself.

Along the way you discover the Zerg rip-off "flood" who basically assimilate sentient beings into their fold and multiply extremely rapidly. Then you discover that all of Halo is infested with the flood and that the Halo is actually some kind of quarantine system for them (as well as being a weapon that'll destroy all sentience over a 25 light year radius, or something, hitting Earth), so it becomes a race to escape the flood while destroying the Halo before it can be used as a weapon.

Which is what happens.

I haven't played Halo 2 but I've read the plot for it, and it's pretty meh.

There's a big backstory that's been developed about exactly who Master Chief is etc etc, but you don't see any of this in the game, just in the novels that sad teenagers buy.

#: 1:37 PM posted by Lanthanide