I Find 'Halo' Very Upsetting

You think I'd be used to video game adaptations being bad at this point.

I'm going to try and be fair here because I don't believe in reviewing single episodes that are part of a larger whole, as they're being released. That said, what I'm upset about regarding 'Halo' the TV series aren't things that I think will be fixed going forward; it's problems are more fundamental, and are very much on display just in its first episodes.

Halo exemplifies a lot of things that I dislike about live action video game translations; it looks cheap, it ignores the established, and celebrated, story of its video game counterparts, and it generally has the air of something that was created for money, not for the fans.

I know that probably sounds cliché, I mean businesses don't do anything if it's not for money, but is it too much to ask that the content you put out at least be high quality in return? Watching the first episode of 'Halo', and reading the interviews with the creators, it just feels like they do not understand, or even like, the property with which they've been trusted.

Pictured: This shows terrifying version of Cortana. Alternatively, me watching this show.

To start things off, let's look at the story premise of the very first Halo game:

Humanity is in what very well could be the final days of a years long war with an Alien faction known as the Covenant, a war that humans are swiftly and unequivocally losing. As the fanatically religious Covenant view humans as heretical parasites, humans are killed on sight and their worlds are burned without hesitation. Chased from one of humanity's few remaining strongholds into an unknown region of space, the last human Spartan (a super soldier kidnapped and genetically modified as a child), Master Chief, whose face we never see, and his AI companion must unravel the secrets of a massive, mysterious alien object that the Covenant worship in order to survive and continue the fight.

Alright, pretty straightforward. We have a clear goal, a clear antagonist, and a protagonist with just enough depth for us to get attached to him. We don't know until later his backstory about being kidnapped as a child or exactly what it took for him to become a Spartan, or what happened to the rest of his kind. Those are stories for another time, and as humanity is desperately fighting for its very survival, the ethics of the human military don't really come into question right now, because that would really muddy things up.

Compare this to the story that Halo, the show, sets up:

Like the games, Humanity is fighting a losing war with the vastly more powerful Covenant. Unlike the games, humanity discovers the alien technology they worship much earlier (so they can use it as a literal plot device, and so the humans can learn about Halo, which essentially removes the plot of the entire first game), and it apparently gives Chief visions of his past that make him question the motives of the UNSC (human military), a plot point that they just kinda made up. This eventually leads to him going rogue in the first episode to save another human, which would probably be a more relevant plot point if a) this wasn't supposed to be a story of humans fighting for their lives against an unstoppable alien menace and b) if the UNSC wasn't so mustache twirlingly shady in this show. No longer do we have the plot about ragtag humans uncovering the secrets of Halo, now we just have the setup for a plot about government shadiness during, again, humanity's extinction. Oh, and there's a human villain that works with the Covenant which, if you know anything about the games, would never, ever, ever, ever happen. Ever.

Did that paragraph read like a mess? That's because the show's plot is an overcomplicated mess compared to the simple premise of the games.

My major problem with this is pretty simple: Halo does not need secondary, human antagonists. They tried this with Halo 4 and 5 and it DID NOT WORK, which is why Infinite reset the status quo. Halo started out, and is at it's best, as a story about humanity working together to survive in the face of impossible odds. Anything beyond this is over-egging the pudding, and Paramount over-egged the absolute shit out of this particular pudding. Reading interviews from the creative team, I should not have been surprised. Says showrunner Steven Kane: "We didn't look at the game. We didn't talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game".

Let's unpack that statement, yeah?

How, on Earth, can you adapt the world and characters of a game without the context of the game it's based on? Based on what I saw in the first couple episodes of Halo, the answer is: You cannot. Yes, they have the basic world and characters from the game (kinda), but they bear such little resemblance to the characters and the world that Halo fans, who would ideally be the intended audience for this show, cannot recognize them. This just...isn't Halo. It's a new science fiction IP that happens to have the Halo brand name and iconography slapped on top of it. This isn't Halo for Halo fans, it's a flaccid attempt at mass appeal Halo and, for me at least, it falls flat on its face.

This is before we even get to how it looks. While the creative team has done a reasonably good job at capturing the aesthetic of Halo, in the look and feel of its weapons, armor, and aliens, the whole thing just looks so...cheap. Mediocre CGI (in a world where shows like The Mandalorian exist), shots that are too busy and visually muddy, lazy fight choreography (they do that thing where the enemies never shoot at the main characters so that they can have a cool fist fight), and glaring editing mistakes (such as forgetting to paint the CGI textures back on your cardboard gun prop. We all saw it.) just make the whole affair seem low-effort and rushed. I'm sorry to be this guy, but hell would freeze over before you convince me that they spent the alleged ten million dollars per episode and it came out looking like this. There's no friggin way. The 'Halo: Landfall' video series that Neil Blomkamp put together 14 years ago looks better and is infinitely more engaging than this generic, bloated TV show.

Unfortunately, the characters fare so much worse than the visuals. The UNSC (United Nations Space Command) have gone from Chief's primary, reliable allies and human heroes, to comically compromised secondary antagonists, whose callous disregard for human life in the face of humanities end just plays so incredibly wrong. Catherine Halsey, the creator of the Spartan program, is less "morally compromised and cold, but well intentioned" and more "mad scientist Girlboss(tm)", which removes a lot of the depth her character had in her original incarnation. The Spartans themselves don't strike me as the almost supernaturally-deadly fighting force we've come to know them as, coming off more like generic brutes in power armor, and Master Chief gets it the worst.

No longer the stoic, badass leader of few words, Chief now comes off as a confused, bumbling soldier who gets by on "luck" (see: alien technology plot armor), whose storyline seems to be heading in the direction of discovering some mystery about his past (which was never, ever a plot point in the games or the books), and I'm dreadfully concerned that they're going to make him related to the main human antagonist who's allied herself with the Covenant because modern TV shows have to have their twist. He's more like Frankenstein's monster than humanities savior. Chief is no longer the hero who would lay down his life to win this war, instead being 100% prepared to turn his back on the human military during an extinction event because god forbid a show just have a single f$@king plot line about humanity and its hero banding together in a time of crisis. I have a hard time imagining an ending to this show that wraps up all of these plotlines in a way that works, and if rewriting the entire narrative of the series is what it took to make Halo a viable show, then maybe it wasn't worth it.

Halo, like many video game adaptations before it, almost seems to be ashamed of its roots. Instead of appealing to fans of the series, like myself, who would have welcomed a worthy, live action adaptation with open arms, the show attempts to find a broader audience through fundamental changes to the story and characters that fans love, making the EXACT same mistakes that Halo 4 and 5 were already panned for almost ten years ago. I'll continue to keep an eye out as the series progresses but as it stands I'm unimpressed, to put it generously. In a series where the writers only had to do one storyline right, they instead try to do multiple storylines wrong. A clichéd, overstuffed, and worst of all, boring start to a television show that doesn't seem to have an original bone in its body, that somehow has trouble finding its identity despite having the entire blueprint for its story already laid out almost 20 years ago. Like so many of its ill-fated counterparts, Halo attempts to come out swinging, but ends up collapsing under its own weight because of the creators refusal to just keep things simple. I'm seriously hoping time proves this article wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Oh, and they really should not have done the Master Chief face reveal. That was only ever going to work once, and you flubbed it.

1.5/5, Master Chief might fly pretty good for a brick, but this show can't even manage to take off.