After seeing the primary episode of Halo, I’m totally on board. I’m a Halo lore hobbyist, that means that while I’ve enthusiastically experienced the campaigns of Halo’s Combat Evolved thru Guardians, move on regular Halopedia wiki dives, and very own a well-cherished copy of Eric Nylund’s The Fall Of Reach, I haven’t consumed the whole thing the Halo universe has to provide. (Ghosts of Onyx, I swear I’ll get to you in the future.) But based at the Halo memories I do understand, I assume Paramount Plus’ collection offers a much greater compelling look at the Master Chief than anything the games have performed thus far.
Spoilers for the first episode of Halo below: It’s tough translating video games to movie and TV. It’s best lately been carried out proper with Arcane, Castlevania, and the Sonic film. And the commonplace thread for these types of a success titles seems to be “chuck out every mounted tale the audience is aware of and inform a brand new one.” Halo’s showrunner Steven Kane stated in an interview with Variety that “We didn’t have a look at the game. We didn’t communicate approximately the sport. We pointed out the characters and the arena. So I never felt confined by it being a game.” His comments drew criticisms from Halo lovers on social media involved that this show changed into going to appearance nothing like the video games. It doesn’t, and that’s what makes it actually right.
I love that the valuable premise of the first episode has slightly something to do with the combat in opposition to the Covenant. It might had been very smooth to make a show about the Master Chief with his Blue Team buddies jogging up on the Gravemind or 343 Guilty Spark. Instead, the whole first episode is all approximately the friction among the Chief and his UNSC masters — a subject that wasn’t even broached till Halo 5: Guardians and, even then, handiest within the context of “I ought to keep my AI lady friend / mother, and also you gained’t permit me.”
The showrunners have been genuinely correct in their desire to “not observe the games.” The end result is a story that asks us to grapple with the very cause Spartans have been created: as weapons for the suppression, repression, and subjugation of humanity — a premise the video games have almost by no means requested us to interrogate. Spartans have continually been those superhuman human-killing machines without emotion, but we have never had the risk to peer how the Spartans themselves experience approximately that. That’s the promise of this show, and I’m terrific invested in the conclusions it’ll draw.
That’s not to say I loved the whole lot approximately the show’s first episode. I am befuddled by the creation of a high-ranking human inside the Covenant faction, and, as my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore alluded to in his Halo evaluation, it’s a piece too ugly. Halo as a recreation was in no way like Gears of War. You shot the Covenant, and they fell down — they by no means exploded in a cloud of pink mist. Maybe that desire became created from consideration for the game’s scores or a few other unknown, however I constantly felt that desire made it such that after grotesque matters do appear (like That Scene in Halo 4), they hit harder. The bloody violence of the Halo display appears to lack that identical gravitas and comes across as a reasonably-priced-feeling Game of Thrones-like gratuitousness.
I’ll additionally say this: Master Chief is already the chosen one. In the video games, Cortana actually chooses him based totally on nothing more than her notion of his “luckiness.” So I discover his additional “I am a very unique boy” modifier inside the form of his preternatural connection to the show’s mysterious artifact a little demanding.
Ultimately, this is handiest episode one. There’s nonetheless time for the display to devolve into an “oorah permit’s kill us some aliens” fest. But if it continues alongside the path this primary episode has charted, I suppose the show might be a clean entry inside the Halo canon.
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