That Time They Made A Secret 'Halo' Movie

Most people probably don't know as much they should about director Neill Blomkamp, but that's because his genre-defining sci-fi epic Chappie only won the Oscar for best picture in the bizarro universe. Blomkamp gained notoriety in the early '00s for forcing transformers to humiliate themselves in order to sell cars years before Michael Bay did ... 

… and for some legitimately awesome sci-fi shorts …

…oh, and this:

These got the attention of many big wigs. Director Peter Jackson really liked this guy (probably the first symptom of that nasty The Hobbit virus) and set Blomkamp to direct the Halo movie adaptation. The hype surrounding the project was enormous, but the number of cooks in the kitchen was higher still, so Halo ended up not going anywhere. But Blomkamp seemingly just felt Halo was his destiny, and no one would take that away from him. Right after District 9, his directorial debut, he made Elysium.

Nowadays, Elysium occupies exactly zero space in our collective pop-culture recollection, but let us help you. When it came out, Elysium occupied the place of the movie everybody made fun of for depicting a world in which the rich would allow their world to burn just so they could prevent the poor from accessing easily affordable health care. Haha, what a ridiculous universe that movie is set in. Anyway, lost in all of that is how Elysium seems to be trying hard (and failing) to be Halo.

Y'know, starting off by how Elysium is a straight-up Halo.

And before someone rushes to the comment section with the defense that Halo didn't invent the concept of a ringworld, which surprisingly came from the Ringworld series of novels, well, we aren't saying Blomkamp was going to make a movie adaptation of Ringworld; we're saying he was making a movie adaptation of a ringworld. And, unlike Ringworld, Elysium's ringworld is named after the place where John-117, Master Chief from Halo, was born. 

On top of that small thing, everybody in Elysium has cool guns and wears high-tech armors …

… which aren't full-body armors probably because that'd probably be too on the nose and because they need to sell that sweet neckless Matt Damon face. Though that didn't prevent them from making a flipped but still near copy of Halo 3's poster. 

Blomkamp then regained his footing by going back to direct awesome web shorts – which means it's all going to happen again … like some sort of circle, right?

Top Image: Microsoft Studios, Tri-Star