Halo on Paramount+: Episode One Review
I told myself I wasn't going to watch the new Halo series after its dreadful first trailer. Here's what I think of the first episode.
"Halo is being turned into a movie and/or TV show" has been the refrain of my entire life. I cannot remember a time when that sentence did not lurk somewhere at the back of my mind. The knowledge that somewhere, at some point, the Master Chief would find his way onto the big screen has been like the shadow of the Xbox OG generation's basest entertainment desires. As a twenty-something male nerd I know I'm not alone in saying that Halo is very important to me as a franchise. It among all other franchises dominated the playground discussions at Hermosa Montessori Elementary. It was Halo action figures, not Star Wars, that we wanted for our birthdays. When when were old enough, it was Halo books we read. We loved Halo--and we wanted nothing more than a Halo movie.
"Landfall" was our first taste. What proved to only be a marketing video for Halo 3 we felt certain was, at the time, a pre-announcement for the forthcoming Halo film. Headlines assured us we were right. First Neil Blomkamp was involved, then Peter Jackson. "Landfall" was so awesome. We wanted to see more, so badly.
But nothing ever came of it. Silence reigned.
Half a decade later, for the release of Halo 4, the miniseries/movie "Forward Unto Dawn" came out in pieces over YouTube for free. Now this was a real Halo series. I loved "FUD" at the time, aged 14; in retrospect, it's slow, on the dull side, but decent for what it is.
But still. It wasn't really Halo. It was just a kick-ass ad campaign.
The next attempt came out along with The Master Chief Collection: it was called Halo: Nightfall. I stayed up until two in the morning watching it with my brother.
Nightfall did not give us what we wanted. Nightfall is best left forgotten.
And so for the last eight years murmurings of a true, full-scale adaptation of Halo into a movie, then a television series, have remained constant. At one point Steven Spielberg was involved. Gates only knows how many pilots have come and gone, how many millions wasted on series stuck in development hell.
All that leads to March 2022. March 2022, where finally Halo (properly italicized as a stand-alone series, rather than the franchise) is television. The Master Chief. The Covenant. War. An adaptation.
The first official trailer released on my birthday. I watched it, cautiously excited.
Every single thing looked wrong.
Later it came out that the writers--allegedly, by the showrunner's admission--"didn't look at the game." This came as no great surprise. Halo would be yet another franchise ruined by sneering Hollywood elites, who have nothing but loathing for the source material and the people who enjoy it.
So after that trailer, I told myself I wouldn't watch it. I'm done supporting shit like this. I won't give money to people who hate me anymore.
Then I watched the first episode.
Let's Get This Over With
I see three levels on which to evaluate Halo: as an adaptation of its source material; as a military sci-fi TV series; and as a piece of televisual narrative. Based on the first episode, I grade it at D-, F, and D, respectively.
The best thing I can say is that it could've been worse. I was expecting it to be worse. There were a few moments that surprised me, a few touches that suggested at least somebody involved had played the games. There were also a lot of things that pissed me off so much that I wanted to stop watching.
I'm sure the internet will be awash with disgusting nerds like me complaining about all the things that were changed from the games for no discernible reason. I'd like to touch on only a few of them that stand out to me. This isn't just to complain, although that's fun too, but more to illustrate my impression that the writers are intentionally deviating from the source material just to irritate fans.
Take, for example, the name of Master Chief's team. In the books (and Halo 5: Guardians), the Chief is in charge of Blue Team. His subordinate Spartans are Kelly, Fred, and Linda. Here, their names are Vannak, Riz, and Kai. You may notice that Kelly, Fred, and Linda are mundane names; that is intentional irony on the part of the writers, given how extraordinary the Spartans are. You may also notice that Vannak, Riz, and Kai are not real names at all, but sound like noises made by a coffee machine which has just burst into flames.
By the way, they're no longer Blue Team, but Silver Team. Why Silver instead of Blue? What do we gain from changing colors? Nothing, but if you know that's wrong, you'll be annoyed--which I can only imagine is the intention. They want you to be annoyed, because if you're the kind of person who knows these things, they don't like you. You are deplorable.
Near the end of the first action sequence, an Elite has his head blown off. I haven't seen anyone else reference this moment yet. Halo fans who wasted their youths dumping magazines of ammo into dead Elites may notice something strange: once this Elite is dead, the stump of his neck dumps gore out onto the ground.
Red gore. Human colored blood. As in, normal, not Elite blood.
Elites have bluish-purple blood. Not red. Why give Elites red blood? Either no one knew better, which seems unlikely given a few references to the games elsewhere in the script, or the showrunners intentionally wanted those of us who would know to be angry. Because they hate us, because we're bad people who like games like Halo.
One of the things I won't complain about too much, though, is the tokenization of the cast. Even as a kid, it always bothered me that everyone in the year 2552 was either Mexican, or a white dude from Southern California. Halo needed some diversity. If I were the showrunners, I would've done casting colorblind. That's fine. A realistic, live-action adaptation of this series needed Asians, Indians, and Africans; it needed not just racial diversity, but cultural and linguistic diversity. I think the series did a decent enough job of this in the pilot. Even when you're in Africa in Halo 3 you never meet anyone except Americans and Mexican-Americans--that needed to change.
What I will complain about is that they've blackwashed the main cast...and cut out the only black character, Sergeant Johnson. Is that progressivism? Put the white people in blackface and pretend the black people don't exist? What? Personally, I think keeping the white characters and cutting out the black ones is just a little bit racist!
That won't bother you, unless you like Halo. Then you know about Sergeant Johnson. You'll miss him, because he's awesome, because he kicks ass. But this series isn't for you if you've played the games. If you've played the games, this series is against you.
I don't know for certain, but Sergeant Johnson's cut is likely due to Aliens similarities. Johnson is, basically, just Apone. A real adaptation would have grappled with this fact and come to a satisfactory solution. Halo's showrunners decided not to try and cut the character altogether.
It also bothers me that while tokenizing half the cast, they've left Master Chief as some white guy (or maybe Hispanic). I don't know why, it feels so phony. Maybe Keyes will do something interesting in this series. Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. But if you want to be actually progressive, why don't you make the lead a black guy? Why don't you do something actually controversial? At least that would make a statement. Besides, it never really mattered what Master Chief looked like. I always thought it was dumb they specified a race for him in the books and comics anyway. I'll discuss whether or not they should have revealed his face later on, but making the guy who gets turned into an alien goopmonster and dies black, and not the lead, seems like slacktivism to me.
There's plenty more to complain about. Maybe I'll get to that in subsequent episodes, if I endure past #2. For now, I want to move on to the series as it stands alone.
They're Not Even Trying
The first third of Halo's pilot takes place on the "water extraction planet" (????) Madrigal. Some aliens show up. Some kids get blown to pieces. Master Chief and Silver Team arrive, but do a shit job of saving the day, leaving only one survivor. The fight goes on for ten or fifteen minutes.
A lot of Halo fans online are praising this sequence. They say it's cheesy but fun enough, but with a handful of nice touches--like these first-person sequences.
The visual effects artists clearly knew the games. The weapons look right. Sound effects from the games are used. We hear the right active camo noise. The Elites are wrong, and I'm not a fan of the new Spartan designs, but there is a certain feeling of Halo here.
But this whole sequence has a big problem: it's fucking terrible and makes no sense.
The Elites land outside town. They then walk to town, knock down the gate, and storm inside...on foot. Master Chief & Friends show up, drop down from a pelican dropship, and fight the Elites on the ground. Nowhere, at any point in this sequence, do we see:
Any air support;
Any ships in atmosphere;
Any artillery;
Any reinforcements;
Any vehicles;
Any non-Elite Covenant infantry (Grunts, Jackals, etc.).
This is a firefight between two hyper-advanced space navies...and we never see a single plane, let alone a ship, in the air. In fact there are no ships ANYWHERE in this series. None. They're all missing. When anyone wants to travel across the galaxy, they hop into dropships and fly there...just like that. No Forward Unto Dawn, no Pillar of Autumn, no Truth and Reconciliation. We do see High Charity, but there are no Covenant Corvettes anywhere around it. Later on, when we visit Reach, there isn't any kind of orbital defense network: the atmosphere is completely barren. There are no flying cars or ships in the atmosphere. Everything is empty. Compare this even to the much cheaper "Forward Unto Dawn," released FOR FREE in 2012, or ANY SINGLE CUTSCENE FROM ANY OF THE GAMES, and you can see how fake and phony it all looks.
This problem I'm highlighting, which is a big fucking problem for a supposedly science fiction series, is exemplified in this opening action sequence. It just feels lazy. It reminds me of the Star Wars Prequels: the showrunners wrote, "Master Chief and the aliens fight, fin." Then some hack choreographer was brought in. The VFX artists had to figure the rest out in post.
Seriously. The Elites barge down the front door. Chief drops down from the sky. He shoots at them. They die. In fact it's even worse than that: when normal humans shoot at Elites, their weapons do nothing, deflected by energy shields. But when Spartans shoot at Elites, they die instantly and effortlessly.
The moment to moment action in and of itself isn't terrible, but as a whole, the sequence feels half-assed and phoned in. A single CGI phantom in the air, a handful of banshees, and a pelican performing a strafing run--that would have fixed everything. Instead, we have a stale, nonsensical, pointless battle, which serves no purpose but to establish the deaths of our female YA lead's family and friends.
I'm trying hard not to merely list things I dislike, but the extent to which none of the writers are trying must be further noted. FTL communication is, apparently, completely free in Halo. No constraints at all. Anyone can talk to anyone else anywhere in the galaxy whenever they want. This makes no sense whatsoever and would ruin the plot of the first two games if it were true, but okay. What about the dynamic between secessionists, the UNSC, and the Covenant? Well, you'd think an existential genocidal crisis might pull people together, but actually the insurrectionist at the beginning says, "Oh my god, I thought the UNSC made the aliens up!"
You know. The aliens who've been destroying planets left and right. Yeah, they were just made up.
And why does Master Chief show up on Madrigal just in time? What was he doing there? Why was he saving insurrectionists? Why did the insurrectionists think Spartans were going to show up and kill them? Was that just a coincidence? And WHERE ARE ALL THE SPACESHIPS?
I don't want to think about this trash anymore.
The Master Chief is Legolas
In my Halo 4 review, I talk extensively about the Master Chief's characterization in the first three games, and the ways in which all subsequent Halo titles have fucked him up. I had no expectations that they'd try to capture the "real" Chief in Halo, but I hoped they might do something with him.
They didn't.
After their opening battle, Chief and Silver Team walk into a "cave" (cutely quipped as "not a natural formation," which would have been far more charming if they'd let Cortana be the one to say it) with a Forerunner artifact. Chief retrieves it, then secures the limp body of YA Asian Girl on his condor dropship.
Touching this artifact does...something. Restores suppressed memories. Makes him more human. I guess. Then, fifteen seconds later, a directive comes from not-ONI (because fuck you fans) telling him to execute YA Asian Girl for some reason. But because Chief has such a good heart, he can't do it, and he goes rogue.
The Master Chief goes rogue, 40 minutes into the new Halo series.
I watched this with my parents, neither of whom know anything about Halo, and if I hadn't been there to tell them that Spartans were genetically engineered super soldiers, they wouldn't have known. Chief acts just like a normal friendly nice dude in power armor. He's such a swell guy! Nothing in specific is set up. Despite the fact that all canon is seemingly defenestrated, there's no exposition anywhere in this episode. We know nothing about Chief when he makes this decision.
Now let me be serious for a moment.
The first thing we see from this version of Master Chief is insubordination. This is despite the fact that his character is a child soldier slave who has no agency. Our baseline for the Master Chief, before we've seen him do anything else in this series, is rebellion. So where, I must ask, is the Master Chief going to go? What is his arc? Where can he progress from this point?
Any competent writer approaching this series would have set everything up as it's set up, then had Chief blow YA Asian Girl's brains out instantly as instructed. Because he's a slave with no agency. That's who he is. Then, over time, he'd learn to think for himself. Cortana would teach him to be more human. It would be like Robocop. It would be, in other words, something. That still wouldn't be great, but it would let you turn him into a character.
But from here-on out, I have legitimately no idea what they're going to do. I see only disaster in Halo's future. The writers have given themselves no space to grow.
But that was inevitable, because the Master Chief is not character material. The Master Chief is Legolas.
Consider the above scene. Legolas, who rarely says anything, takes the spotlight for ninety seconds. He does something unbelievably awesome: single-handedly slays a mumakil. Then, like the support character he is, he fades back into the ensemble. Occasionally we see him murder an orc, but for the most part, he's just in the background, trailing after Aragorn. We know he's there, but he is not the lead.
The reasons for this are obvious. Legolas is an elf who's 3,000 years old. He's hard for us to understand. He doesn't think like we do. He sees time differently. He's an interesting part of this world and, when the time is right, he's kickass to have around. He can make for a great action sequence. But he's not the lead character of The Lord of the Rings. He plays a supporting role.
There is a reason why Frodo is not a badass elf.
The Master Chief has much more in common with Legolas than Frodo. He's fucking awesome. He kills shit. Imagine, for example, this scene as a parallel for the one from The Return of the King:
The ultra-cool Spartan singlehandedly clears out the scarab tank. We see him blast the shit out of aliens. He then walks out into the open like a badass, smirking behind his visor, surrounded by flames. Everyone stares at him and goes, "Whoa." The other characters know, diegetically, that this isn't a guy to fuck with.
But after the smoke clears, the Master Chief isn't who we follow home. That's Captain Keyes. That's Cortana. That's Sergeant Johnson. That's even, God forbid, YA Asian Girl.
Like Legolas, Master Chief is always close at hand. Maybe we even see him out of his armor sometimes, back on the Pillar of Autumn. He has a wry sense of humor and can outdrink anyone. He's amazing at math and can run circles around all the officers intellectually. He's a chess master. There's tons of fun stuff I can think of to show a Spartan's character contrasted with that of a normal human's, just as how Legolas was contrasted with Gimli and the Rohirrim in The Two Towers.
But Master Chief is not your perspective character. Do you get it? He's not the lead, not until literally everyone else is dead and there's no one else to follow.
THE MASTER CHIEF IS LEGOLAS.
For this reason I reject the idiocy of Polygon and the showrunners as exemplified by this article. For what they're doing with Chief in this series I don't mind showing his face, but this whole impetus to turn him into the lead, into a relatable character, is misled from the start. They shouldn't have needed to show Chief's face, because we don't need to see Legolas without his bow--not more than once or twice, anyway.
STOP MAKING MASTER CHIEF WHAT HE ISN'T. HE IS LEGOLAS, NOT FRODO.
I Could Write a Better Halo TV Series
I prophesy terrible things in Halo's future. I suspect it gets worse, not better, from here. Regardless of what you think about the story taken on its own, it isn't Halo. There are a few surprising touches that suggest more care for the games than I expected--"this cave is not a natural formation," sound effects from the games, first person sequences--but, on the whole, the writing suggests active antipathy toward fans of the franchise. Much like The Last of Us: Part II, it is my belief that the showrunners not only have little interest in the games, but dislike the kind of people who make up its fans. I also think the pilot demonstrates phoned-in writing, half-assed action, mediocre, lazy VFX, and has nowhere to go long-term.
In short, while Halo could probably be worse, it's still bad. I don't recommend anyone watches it. I think it's so bad that I can easily write something better.
So I'm going to.
A pilot, anyway, or part of it. We'll see how far I get. Within the next few days I'm going to upload it to this blog, and you can see how awesome a direct adaptation of Halo: Combat Evolved could have been. Alas, that's not even close to what we received. But at this point, I don't think you need me to tell you that.
Update: I Did It
Told you so. Here it is:
