Apparently a gamer called "Gearhead" managed to get his hands on a copy of Stu Beattie's 22 page treatment for the Gears Of War movie planned for 2009! Can you believe it? Sounds authentic to me. Check it out, but...
WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD...
"By what I read, it sounds like it is going to be one kick ass film! One of the reasons is not only because of Marcus Phoenix but heroic Latino character DOM SANTIAGO!"
Planet Sera. The Battle of Aspho Fields. The last battle of the Pendulum Wars.
We meet Sergeant MARCUS FENIX and Corporal DOM SANTIAGO riding pensively in the back of a Raven, one of hundreds ferrying in gears to assault the enemy headquarters. The Coalition of Ordered Governments could have simply burned the fortress to the ground with their orbital satellites, but a body count is needed for the big final COG victory and satburns have a way of disintegrating human flesh...
...this weighs on Dom's mind as enemy missiles start pounding the Ravens.
Several choppers go down in flames. Marcus keeps his eyes and his squad on the target. The Ravens touch down and the gears pile out into an insane hail of rocket and gunfire. Most Ravens never even back it back up. This is madness. Bodies are ripped apart. Wounded soldiers scream for their mothers. A grenade annihilates an embedded media crew. Nobody knows where he or she's supposed to be.
We find CAPTAIN HOFFMAN bullying gears to take up the fight, but the soldiers are scared and fear this whole mission is suicide. With the attack dangerously stalled, Marcus rounds up a small crew of gears and they begin to work their way forward towards the enemy bunker, defying Hoffman's orders to wait for back-up. Hoffman is livid, but Marcus' defiance of his authority is nothing new. The fighting is ferocious. Marcus and Dom pull along the less experienced troops with them. One of them wants to turn and run, but Marcus forces him to stay in his position. Gears never abandon their fellow men. Once the gears reach the bunker, the fighting goes hand to hand. Face to face. Chainsaw to chainsaw. Marcus is cold and emotionless. A professional soldier doing whatever is necessary to get the job done. He feels nothing, using corpses of other gears as cover without hesitation as they finally break through the enemy's last defenses.
Marcus busts down the bunker door where the ENEMY LEADER is hiding. But the man puts a bullet through his brain before Marcus and Dom can grab him. It's a sad and brutal ending to a sad and brutal battle. The only positive thing about it: after 79 years, peace will finally come to Sera.
We cut to Ephyra. A beautiful city in Sera. An enormous victory parade in progress. Citizens flock the streets and hang out of building windows to cheer their triumphant gears. We see Dom receive a medal for his part in the Battle of Aspho Fields. Embarrassingly for Hoffman, Marcus has not shown up to receive his because that's not why Marcus fought all these years. And right now, all he wants is to be left alone in a quiet bar where he can get drunk. An OLD MAN watches Marcus and eventually joins him. Marcus wants nothing to do with the old man who simply congratulates the young war hero and leaves. As the old man goes, Dom enters with his wife, MARIA, and several other vets who are with their women. The parade is over and the party has begun (this is a gears bar). We see that Dom really loves his wife. She's everything to him. Dom makes a bet with Marcus over the outcome of a thrashball game on the bar monitor. We see Number 83, Augustus "The Cole Train" Cole score and taunt his opponents. Marcus wins twenty dollars. Dom promises to pay him back later. Dom tells Marcus that he thought he saw Marcus' father just leaving. Marcus just replies that he has no father.
We follow the old man as he returns to the East Barricade Academy. He is ADAM FENIX and he is the headmaster here as well as a scientist of some reknown.
The labs are mostly empty. People are out celebrating the end of the wars and the beginning of peace talks. Adam grumbles to an assistant that perhaps now with the war over, the COG will finally allow him to explore the Hollow. But, as the assistant points out, exploration beyond mining zones has always been strictly forbidden...
...as the assistant walks off, Adam mutters under his breath. He taps into a COG motion camera in the Lethia Imulsion mine outside town. Watching the workers come and go, shift change.
We follow a small crew of MINERS starting their shift. They pass by Adam's camera view and take an elevator further down to their current digging site. Using a drill machine, they begin to dig into a wall of rock when all of a sudden it collapses, revealing something on the other side that makes all of them go still. Before one of them can say, What the fuck, his head is blown clean off his shoulders.
Marcus drives Dom and Maria back to their home in their truck. They're too drunk and horny to get behind a wheel themselves. Hopefully, the kids are already asleep however, as they arrive, Dom's kids come running out of the house to see him -- effectively killing his chances of having sex tonight. Marcus watches Dom and Maria put their children to bed, abating one child's fear of the boogeymen who come up from the ground and snatch people. Dom insists that they're just stories made up to scare kids.
Dom sees Marcus out, telling him to find a good woman and settle down now that the war's over. Marcus promises to start making calls to girls he knows first thing tomorrow. Dom suggests he calls girls he doesn't know apparently, Marcus has never ended a relationship well.
But as soon as Marcus is alone again, we realize that's not what's on his mind. He walks through the city of Ephyra - electronic billboards spout the benefits of Imulsion, a cheaper, cleaner fuel. COG insignias are everywhere. COG motion security cameras on the street follow Marcus from block to block, but he routinely ignores them.
Marcus reaches a magnificent house by a lake. He punches the code on the gate and enters the expansive grounds, staring up at a light in the windows. He almost goes inside. Instead, he hurls his empty beer bottle against the window and walks back out the gate. A moment later, we spot Adam peering out the window. He sees nobody, only the gate slowly swinging shut. A sad look sinks onto his face, he returns to what he's doing, which is carrying his dinner on a tray through his huge empty house, down several back stairways to the basement cellar. He opens a hidden door to reveal a secret lab filled with computers and exploratory robots (geobots). Partial maps of the Hollow fill the walls. We realize that Adam has been secretly exploring the Hollow for years. A live feed is coming in from his geobot that is ever-so-slowly mapping every tunnel and crevice.
All of a sudden, Adam spots something. He stops the geobot and zooms in on a rock ledge, leaning into the monitor to get a better look. The image is grainy, the geobot deep in the Hollow. But there seems to be the remains of some human bones. Ripped apart and broken. Adam stares at the bones and marks the location.
Marcus returns to his barracks at the vast Jacinto military complex which is built on a huge solid granite mesa rising up next to Ephyra. He seems out of place, even here in his own “home”. Marcus is a warrior, civilian life is not for him, he flicks through different news services from all around the globe. The message is the same all over Sera: World Peace is finally here. Marcus mutters under his breath, "Shit."
The next day, Adam has an official meeting with leaders of the COG in the House of Sovereigns in the center of Ephyra. Careful not to reveal his secret, Adam asks them to finally send exploration teams into the Hollow. He suspects there's something down there other than Imulsion. Something that is not friendly and that needs to be studied. But the COG leaders are skeptical. Humans have lived on Sera for five hundred years without ever encountering any hostile organisms. Adam argues that five hundred years is a speck in the grand span of Time.
The COG turns down his request and privately suggest that he enjoy the coming peace and prosperity as the rest of them are. Adam lashes out, claiming that the COG are bound to get rich off the Imulsion-laden countries they now occupy. Before the COG leaders can respond, a messenger enters to tell them that some kind of disturbance has broken out at the Lethia Imulsion mine. Adam is promptly dismissed.
Adam hurries into class late for his lecture at the East Barricade Academy. The students are already waiting. They stand as he rushes in. A prototype of the Hammer of Dawn is sitting on the front desk. Adam begins to instruct the students on the hammer, the first hand held weapon with the ability to target orbital satellite beams. A student up the back scoffs loudly, “Could have done with that, like before the wars ended.” Of course, it’s Marcus. He’s quietly snuck into his father’s class. Though neither man reveals their filial bond, both of them snipe at each other until finally Marcus breaks off and walks out. Adam watches him go.
Adam finds Marcus waiting for him outside the classroom after the lecture is over. We begin to learn how Adam's wife walked out when Marcus was just a boy. And how Adam then effectively abandoned his only child in favor of his work. Adam had once said that he would explain everything to Marcus once the Pendulum Wars were over. Well, Marcus fought the war and now it’s over and all Adam could manage in that bar was a paltry: "Congratulations, soldier". We see it's difficult for Adam to talk about this. He never actually thought the Pendulum Wars would end. He asks Marcus to leave the military and join him in his work only through years of exploring the Hollow together can Marcus truly understand why Adam was such a poor father. Before Marcus can respond, Adam gets paged by the COG. They want him to report to the Command Center at Jacinto ASAP. He obviously wants to stay and talk things over with his son, but duty calls him away. Marcus storms off, vowing never to speak to him again.
Adam goes to Jacinto and reports to the COG leaders who are gathered in the Command Center, a “mission control” station from which all top secret military matters are directed. We notice a young attractive Lieutenant Colonel. This is ANYA STROUD. She and Adam know each other. She asks if Adam knows how Marcus is doing. Adam replies, “Same as always.” The COG leaders ask him what he knows about the Hollow and show him shakey footage from the Lethia Imulsion mine where workers are scrambling to collapse shafts behind them and disable the elevators.
There are glimpses of humanoid creatures of some kind. There are bursts of machine gun fire. There is an unknown language spoken and shouted. Adam gazes at the footage, a trickle of fear running down his spine.
Meanwhile, Marcus joins Dom and his family for a picnic in a picturesque city park. The wars seem like a lifetime ago. Dom is leaving the military to get a job working for Maria's dad in an office in Ephyra. Marcus isn't sure what he's going to do. Teach new recruits how to do a job they know they'll never have to do? Dom asks him about his father and he just offers his friend one piece of advice: be there for your children, no matter what. Dom takes this to heart and the two men share a toast to family and peace...
...all of a sudden, the earth starts trembling.
Marcus is the first to notice it. Tremors in a cup of tea sitting on a nearby table. The trembling builds, like an earthquake, which is exactly what everyone thinks it is. Dom and Marcus rush to Maria and the kids. Fortunately, they're in a large open park which is the best kind of place to be during an earthquake only this isn't that. It is, in fact, the simultaneous tunneling of hundreds of emergence holes all over the city.
Cars and trees sink into the ground. It's as if the very earth is sucking people and other things underneath. Dom's children disappear in an emergence hole that devours playground equipment. Dom's hysterical, running for them.
But now the LOCUST HORDE burst out of the emergence holes.
DRONES lead the attack, firing their Hammerbursts into the crowds of people. DRONE GRENADIERS are right behind, firing. This picturesque setting instantly turns to hell. Marcus and Dom are unarmed, like everyone else. They run and duck. Dom turns his attention to protecting his wife, Maria. Marcus turns his attention to getting a weapon. What follows is sheer adrenaline-pumping chaos. We see Marcus make the first kill, luring a Drone and then beating it senseless. Taking the creature's Hammerburst and fingering out how to use it. Meanwhile, DRONE SNIPERS take to the building rooftops and unleash more gunfire down on the panicked citizens of Sera. One of the snipers strikes Maria, they've got to get her to a hospital.
Meanwhile, Adam watches in horror from the Command Center in the Jacinto military complex as battle stations are sounded. Adam gets forgotten in all the confusion as he gets his first good look at Locust warriors on the television monitors.
Back in the city, Marcus helps clear the way as Dom carries Maria. They get cut off by the sudden emergence of a gigantic CORPSER which is armed with a number of death-dealing claws and -- as Marcus quickly finds out -- a bulletproof shell. Barely escaping this beast, Marcus and Dom finally reach a nearby hospital which is under siege itself with hundreds of patients flooding the different levels. Marcus and Dom know how to patch Maria up, but they're too late. Maria succumbs to her wounds and Dom cries over her dead body. He's lost his entire family in the last twenty minutes and he'll never be the same again. Marcus is haunted by this, but finally is able to pull his friend away. Dragging him outside. They've got work to do.
Marcus and Dom fight their way back to Jacinto and push through the mass of terrified civilians clamoring at the gates for protection. We notice AUGUST COLE showing up as a volunteer, ready to inflict some pain. Another volunteer, BAIRD, takes an instant dislike to him, the COG guards allow only men like these to enter.
In the Command Center, news reports are cascading in about similar eruptions all over the planet. Nobody knows who they are or what they want...other than the death of every man, woman, and child on this planet. They are still pouring out of their emergence holes. Adam likens them to "the biblical plague of locusts". The name sticks, the Locust Horde is now the enemy of the COG and all other human governments. All of humanity is once again at war.
And now the movie kicks into high gear. We watch the massive COG response to this invasion, the shock and awe of this time and place. Sleek COG fighters and bombers take to the skies, battling endless waves of REAVERS. Bitter dogfights ignite the skies.
Gigantic hidden SEEDERS launch NEMACYST ambushes, combining with the Reavers, soon overwhelming the small COG fighters. THERON GUARDS ride on the back of more Reavers to take out COG artillery positions with their deadly torque bows.
Finally, we see huge BRUMAKS trample through COG armor and shoot down COG missiles. Nothing can stop these creatures. Anya directs satellite burns from her station.
Though these prove effective at first, Reavers begin inking the sky, blotting out direct line of sight. The satellites are now useless until the ink eventually dissipates, with no sat-cover, the COG ground units are vulnerable. Adam's watching all of this carefully, but keeps an extra close eye on the progress of Marcus' unit which is now being dispatched down in Ephyra.
Marcus and Dom join the assault in tanks which deploy them against thousands of amassing Drones. BOOMERS appear to take on the COG tanks while the gears battle through the city streets. The once beautiful Ephyra quickly becomes a hulking ruin. Dom is driven by rage and almost gets himself killed because of it, but Marcus is able to reign him back just in time and save his life. We notice Captain Hoffman directing his troops, taking down several Drones himself. He is supremely pissed off, calling the creatures “grubs”. The street battle is devastating for both sides. Several new gears crumple with fear. The Locust Horde takes no prisoners and delivers no mercy. It's brutal warfare. Kill or be killed.
We see Marcus coldly use his chainsaw bayonet on a Drone and kick its mangled body over. The blood dripping off his face. Through sheer guts and determination, Marcus and Dom push through the Locust lines. Just as it appears that the COG ground units have miraculously retaken this part of the city, a furious pair of Corpsers appear and tear most of the gears to shreds. Colonel Hoffman orders a retreat, but Marcus and Dom can't get to the Ravens in time, the two men are now trapped alone in a city swarming with angry Locust.
By the end of the day, the COG air force has been effectively wiped out. As has most of its armor units and a good share of infantry. Billions have been killed all over the world. Adam realizes that Jacinto has been spared because of his solid granite base. The Locust can't tunnel through it. The COG leaders order the gates open and begin calls for all survivors to retreat to the complex within the next twenty four hours. What the COG is planning is unclear, but Adam doesn't like the sound of this. We see that he's genuinely worried about his son who is still stuck out there somewhere, unable to get back.
Marcus and Dom weave their way back through the city towards Jacinto but are suddenly discovered by the Locust just before sundown. They run. An unstoppable swarm of Drones and Boomers follow them. No way they can outrun these things forever. They decide to make a stand, go down fighting. Cutting down more than their fair share of creatures when their position is finally overrun. But then, just as they're about to get butchered, the sun dips below the horizon and the Locust Horde mysteriously backs off and disappears into their subterranean warrens. Marcus and Dom are confused, shocked to be alive. Citizen survivors begin poking their heads up everywhere. Are they gone? Is it over? And then, something shoots up into the pink skies - a dark streak of wings. The sound of a thousand bat-like creatures, baying for blood. Marcus hasn't got a good feeling about this. They watch the streak twist high in the sky, then nose dive towards their street, enveloping several survivors, frozen on their feet. Their horrific death screams trigger mass panic. Everybody runs from the lethal KRYLL, but few escape -- these things are like flying piranahs.
Marcus and Dom drop a scant few of them with their Lancers,but there are thousands of these things. They run again, timing their ducks as the Kryll swoop over them.The single twisting streak branches out into dozens of smaller streaks. The Kryll smash through windows and break down doors, leaving trails of blood in their wake. It seems impossible that anyone could survive this. Marcus realizes these things came when the sun left. And he notices that they're avoiding pools of light. People are only getting killed in the shadows. He finds a working street light, huddling under its shelter with Dom, and the Kryll breaks off their attacks on the pair. Marcus and Dom call out for other survivors they can see, beckoning them into their light. Some make it. Some don't.
A small group of survivors band together with Marcus and Dom, sheltered closely in the flickering street light, praying that it doesn't go out. The Kryll also attack Jacinto, shredding anybody who's not standing in direct light. Refugees. Guards. Nobody's spared.
Daylight's returning, dawn only moments away. Marcus keeps his eyes on the streaks of Kryll which are still whooshing through the air high above. Waiting until they disappear back into their emergence holes just as the sun reappears. The moment they're gone, Marcus and Dom get the survivors moving. Who knows how long before the Locust return? Besides, they've got orders to get back to Jacinto before the end of the day. They lead the survivors through the deserted, war torn streets. All they see are the bodies of gears, civilians, and even Locust stripped to the bone by the deadly Kryll.
But as the sun rises, the Locust Horde returns. And with them comes a new figure. Clearly, he's of some importance. Larger than the other drones. And more terrifying. This is GENERAL RAAM. He looks around and surveys the destruction, finding a human skull on the ground. He picks it up, studying the features a moment before casually crushing it in one hand and tossing the fragments. Raam barks an order to his commanders and they all move out.
Marcus and Dom huddle in some cover with their growing band of survivors. Boomers and Brumaks patrol the streets, searching for survivors who are all summarily executed. Both men know that the COG has been brought to its knees. The survivors wonder what the COG leaders will do. Marcus knows that they just spent decades fighting for the territory they'd just won. No way they're going to just give it all up now and the countdown is ticking. The COG urging all survivors to Jacinto before the appointed hour, but without saying why.
Adam now figures out the COG plan. They're going to scorch the earth with their satellites and deny the Locust the territory they've taken. Adam stands up to the COG leaders, reminding them of the millions of humans they'll kill along with the Locust. But the COG has made its decision. They’ve given their people twenty-four hours which are now almost up. Anya reluctantly begins the task of aligning the satellites above Sera.
Time's run out for Marcus and Dom. And they know it. They find an abandoned junker and load the survivors aboard. Starting the engines alerts the Locust. Drones shoot at them from both sides. General Raam notices the junker pass in the distance and orders a squadron of Reavers after it. A Brumak also joins the chase. Marcus drives wildly while Dom fires, going through all of their ammunition and now Anya gets the official order to scorch Sera. The COG leaders broadcast their final warning to their citizens, apologizing for what they're about to do. The COG appreciates their sacrifice and vows to continue this fight to the end. And now, chemical fire rains down from the skies.
We see Sera from space as dozens of tiny specks light up in orbit and blast particle beams down at the planet surface. The powerful weapons wreak divine-like havoc upon the cities of Sera. Locusts and humans burn together in the holocaust, a horrible solution. General Raam flinches, but doesn't get killed by the blasts. Marcus dodges and weaves, the Brumak zapped behind him. Dom takes down the last of the Reavers as the gates of Jacinto open before them. More sat-burns ignite the ground at their heels as they escape into the complex grounds. Adam sees his son pile out of the junker and sighs with sobered relief as more and more beams lay waste to this beautiful planet.
Apparently the story picks up 10 years later. Many thanks to latinoreview for reporting this story initially. I think the storyline is excellent and the movie is definitely something worth waiting for. Huh? What was that? Sounded like an idling... CHAINSAW!!
~HAPPY FEET 2 will be in 3D! I will not refrain from expressing my enthusiasm for this sequel because I LOVED the first one - the soundtrack was superb. Release is pegged for November 18, 2011.
~Peter Jackson's Weta is spawning a new working group called Transfx, headed up by Sebastian Sylwan who was previously the Director of Technology at Digital Domain and CTO @ the FX shop Lumiq. They will seek to bring a pragmatic edge to the new tech that Weta has developed by working on AVATAR and TINTIN: Making their FX reuseable/malleable for other projects.
~GEARS OF WAR still in the works! MTV recently spoke to Chris Morgan, screenwriter for GoW: "A draft went in and we’re talking about it now and we’re budgeting it out,” Morgan told MTV. “It’s looking incredibly good." Len Wiseman is still attached to direct. "It’s huge,” Morgan declared of the project’s scope. “One of the things they’re really talking about now is the budget of the film and how big of a spectacle this is going to be. My argument is, look at the underlying material. Look at the game and the scenario — the fact that the world is being taken over by the Locust, it has to be huge." Still no official word on this being shot in 3D - but, sometimes you just KNOW. Wiseman likes the idea. :-)
