'The Beach' author hired for Halo film?

Seems unlikely, but...

Alex Garland, award winning novelist behind the tropically vivid novels The Beach and The Tesseract, as well as the screenplay for 28 Days Later, has been hired by Microsoft to pen a Halo film script; so rumours a new report from Variety Magazine. The deal for the script is said to be worth a million-dollars, though Microsoft have refused to comment, merely denying that any official movie announcement has been made. Which we'd gathered, anyway. Whether this vague response indicates some truth to the gossip of course remains very much to be seen; but we're hoping it does.

As a fan of his novels, I'm personally enthused by the prospect of Garland working on such a project, and his input would undoubtedly symbolise Microsoft's hopes for the movie - a far cry from the unconvincing likes of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. I won't even begin to dissect Uwe Boll's various game-turned-movie 'efforts'. Of course, this tittle-tattle could be idle nonsense, but seems almost too unusual to totally dismiss. Here's hoping for news on Halo's big screen debut soon, then.

By Luke Guttridge