Apparently my Paramount+ subscription, which cost me $0.99, had two days left before expiring on Saturday. I made up my mind after last week that I wasn't going to renew, but since Episode 5 of Halo was allegedly the one with the series’ major action set piece, I decided to give the show one last try.
It is no coincidence that second battle is in the fifth episode, right as the resubscription window arrives. This show is not paced according to artistic needs or the demands of story structure; it is built to scam you out of your money, because they know that action is all anyone ever wanted from Halo.
So How About That Fight Sequence?
This episode is only ~35 minutes long. The writers couldn't even stretch it out to a full hour. Yet at 35 minutes, it was still so boring that I could not get through the whole thing. I had to turn it off before the end.
This review is not about the episode. It is about how lazy the action in this series is.
In the first episode, I stated that the battle felt like it had not been written into the teleplay, but assembled by editors and VFX artists in post.
This second battle gives the same impression, but much more strongly.
For the first time in this series we see the “covenant” that forms the Covenant. There are Jackals, Grunts, and Brutes. There are also Banshees in the sky, and ships over the battlefield. This is an improvement over Episode 1.
But I have no more praise to offer.
When Cortana says that a Slipspace rupture has been detected, Banshees are swarming the air literally instantaneously. They apparently needed no time to deploy. A Corvette, or something that looks like one, appears in the sky. It doesn’t warp into place but appears like magic, as though it loaded in after an asset error. It then starts deploying drop pods into a single quarry.
Like before, the location of this battle makes no sense. Why are we fighting over a quarry? Why is everything neatly contained inside the quarry? There are no Jackal snipers on the ridges, because that would be out-of-bounds. Both sides must deploy into the quarry and charge at each other suicidally. No cover!
This is the first time we have ever seen Grunts or Jackals. We have had no indication of their existence at all until now. How are they introduced?
They drop in, and the fighting starts. There is no introduction. We get no reveal, no exciting moment where smoke clears and we witness the might of the Covenant. The aliens are simply thrown at us without any sense of cinema, in the blandest way possible.
No effort was put into this sequence. Someone wrote in a teleplay:
EXT. QUARRY
The TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION warps into the atmosphere. It drops pods. The pods land. GRUNTS and JACKALS come out. They fight the MARINES.
CUT TO:
There is no narrative in this sequence. From whose Point of View are we experiencing the action? In whose perspective are we grounded?
The answer is no one. The camera flies around and cuts with abandon. We go back and forth seemingly at random. We see things from Halsey's PoV, then Dr. Miranda's, then Captain Keyes, then John Halo, then Kai, then random Marines, then Grunts, then back to Marines, then over to John Halo, then to Halsey again: there is no logic to the editing.
We can, if the writers so choose, swap between the perspectives of the various characters within a given action sequence. Our grounding PoV doesn't even need to be a person; it can be a place. But we cannot change perspective in the course of a single scene. We need to finish with John Halo, then go to Halsey; finish with Halsey, then go to Keyes. Each transition should follow some kind of logical dramatic arc.
This cutting is utterly incoherent. It's information thrown at us without being digested. There is no way to understand what you are seeing. You cannot comprehend why any outcome occurs the way it does.
I want you to compare Halo’s action with this sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, where The Interceptor and The Black Pearl come broadside-to-broadside. In this sequence, we see establishing shots of the ships loosing their cannons. Then we cut to individual characters that we know and care about, and we watch their reactions to the fighting. We see both sides, one at a time. We know what each side wants. We know everyone's objectives.
Crucially, in Pirates, we know what is being fought over. The area of contest is the ships. Everything makes sense. When Will dives into The Interceptor’s hold, we know it’s to look for the medallion that Elizabeth lost. We only need to see seconds of his searching to understand the action.
When we cut to Halsey in Episode 5, what is going on? What does she want? What is happening?
The bad guys are fighting the good guys, because the bad guys are bad, and the good guys are good.
It isn’t fair to compare Pirates of the Caribbean to Halo. One is the best adventure movie ever made; the other is diarrhea. The score alone is utterly transformative. But my point is that the real reason Halo sucks is that it is badly written. It is, in fact, not written at all. I would guess that this episode’s teleplay is fewer than twenty pages long.
I am really done now. I will not watch this show again.