Shortz: Ope, I Was Right About 'Halo'

I was really hoping I was wrong about this one.

Not only as a longtime Halo fan, but just as someone who doesn't want media to be bad. Well, that's not entirely true, sometime things are so bad they're good, and that can be great fun, but unfortunately Paramount's 'Halo' is not that.

So 'Halo' has had its season finale, and we've gained...what, exactly? The show isn't canon, so there's not really anything to be upset about, but even so, why is the show the way that it is? What was the point of this new take on characters that have been established for 20 years? What was deconstructed, or learned, or satirized, or enhanced by fundamentally changing characters that fans love into unrecognizable cardboard cutouts with their faces on them (or in the case of Master Chief, a cardboard cutout of some guys face)?

The entire show was unfocused, confusing, criminally uninteresting, and at times just straight up...weird (not only did I never need to see Master Chief's ass, I DEFINITELY didn't need to see him have sex while the editing implies that Cortana is watching him. They knew what they were doing). A few decently realized action scenes just can't pull this show up from the depths of extreme mediocrity, especially when the action is constantly derailed by the, at times, astonishingly bad CGI, ESPECIALLY during that final fight. And yes, I do actually mean BAD. I don't mean "oh this wasn't composited super well" or "oh the lighting is a bit off here", I mean "it's 2022 and this looks like the CGI from Blade II". This show had a decently similar budget to Game of Thrones or the Mandalorian, I don't understand why it looks so cheap.

Between confusing character stories, awkwardly written and paced dialogue exchanges, and plot lines that just don't seem to be going anywhere, I'm left wondering why this show needed an entire season to tell this story. This seems like the kind of story that would've made a cool little half-hour CGI short, like 'Halo: Legends', about a random Spartan trying to help a random human, who goes on an emotional journey that doesn't derail the entire plot of the game series, but instead we got a full length Master Chief soap opera. I mean, who was this even for?

My theory? Paramount+ was struggling to find its own identity in a world where Hulu, HBO, and Disney+ are really the only streaming services worth having. They got their hands on a brand new sci-fi IP but decided it needed some brand name recognition, so they just slapped the iconography of Halo onto the story (which just made it confusing). Simply adding the Halo brand to this show has made it infamous enough to at least draw attention to the fact that the platform exists, I suppose.

This show doesn't leave me feeling an overwhelming amount of excitement for the future of live action video game television shows (especially with one of my all time favorite IP's, Mass Effect, next on the proverbial chopping block), but at least it made me appreciate how simple and focused the story in the original Halo games is. How many times do we have to make the "appeal to a broader audience" mistake?

What a bummer.