Halo: My Thoughts

This is not going to be the traditional review that I normally do on this blog.  First of all, we’re dealing with a TV/Streaming show.  Unlike my Game of Thrones reviews, I’m going to condense this first season of Halo into one post.  What is Halo, exactly?  Halo is a video-game franchise which debuted on Microsoft’s original XBOX console back in 2002.  Halo was a launch title that helped sell millions of consoles.  It’s a science fiction first-person shooter that takes place in the year 2552.  It involves a war between humanity’s UNSC(United Nations Space Command) and an alliance of extreme religious alien fanatics called the Covenant, whose goal is to wipe humanity from the face of the galaxy.  The Covenant believe that a ring-shaped world called Halo would aid them in destroying humanity, when in truth said Halo was a superweapon with a far more sinister purpose.  The UNSC employs a group of genetically modified super-soldiers called Spartans to fight the Covenant.  The lead Spartan in this fight is called Master Chief.  Paired with a sophisticated AI named Cortana, Master Chief leads the battle against the Covenant.  Story-wise, the game is incredibly interesting, and it gets even better with Halo 2 and 3.  As a gamer myself, I didn’t get into Halo until the show started, and even then I was unsure.  So, at that time, a collection of the first 6 games of Halo was available on PC under the title of Halo: Master Chief Collection.  I got hooked pretty quickly.  When the show was announced back in 2013 by Steven Spielberg himself, people got excited.  Not just because this was an adaptation of their favorite franchise, but because it could be one of the best videogame-to-movie adaptations ever.  Well, here I sit having watched all 9 episodes of the first season of Halo.  It’s a promise that remains unfulfilled.

As a relative newcomer to the entire Halo franchise, I don’t find myself hating this show.  I know there are hard-core fans out there that were expecting great things, but didn’t get them.  But I also know that there were fans that hated the show long before it started airing on Paramount Plus.  THAT group, I don’t understand.  Hating something before you’ve actually seen it strikes me as very counter-productive.  Now, for those that have seen the show and don’t like it: I get it.  I understand why you don’t.  I didn’t spend 20 years being a fan of Halo, so I don’t have that kind of investment in the franchise.  But even as a new Halo fan, there’s a lot of problems with this show.  Halo suffers from the exact some problem that plagued so many videogame-based movies:  A lack of understanding of the source material.  The problems started when the showrunners came out and admitted that while they briefly looked at the games and the spin-off novels, they decided to go in another direction for the show.  Is it wrong for the show not to focus on the games’ storylines?  Not particularly, but it would’ve been a lot easier to do so.  Look, deviating from the source material is almost required in EVERY adaptation.  You can NEVER do a straight adaptation and expect it to work the same way as the source.  Different mediums require different approaches.  The games had the players being directly involved with the storytelling by inhabiting the role of Master Chief as the main character.

Let’s talk about what DOES work in this show.  First of all, it LOOKS like Halo.  From sets and models to character designs, this has Halo written all over it.  Even Master Chief’s design looked like it was ripped straight from the game.  The ships look great, and the aliens look pretty damned menacing.  The weapon designs are pretty much spot on.  For a show that was made for about 90 million bucks, it looks really damn good.  The guy they got to play Master Chief was a pretty good choice.  Pablo Schreiber is pretty damned good.  He’s got the physicality down and he has the right attitude as the legendary Spartan.  I also have to give credit to the actors that play the rest of Silver Team, particularly Kate Kennedy as Kai.  I think the showrunners got the right folks to play the Spartans.  For the most part, the acting is pretty solid across the board.  I really like the dynamic that occurs between Master Chief and Catherine Halsey, the person responsible for the creation of the Spartan program.  The show does take things from the book about how Spartans are…recruited.  So, yeah, the acting is really good for what the actors have been given.  They even got Jen Tayler, the original voice for Cortana to come back and voice the character for the show.  It’s a pretty good call back to the games.  The action is also pretty damned good.  In fact, I was surprised at how brutal the first episode was in terms of its violence.  People got blown to pieces.  The best part?  You could see what was happening, which makes it better.  The best action moments happened in Episodes 5 and 9.  It was literally like something right out of the games.  It was spectacular.

Sadly, as with any show just starting out, the first season’s always going to have it’s stumbles.  Halo stumbles quite a bit here.  First of all, the show has Master Chief taking off his helmet…a lot.  He does take off his helmet in the games, but we never really see his face.  It’s always obfuscated by something in the way.  I guess the reason is that so we can have more of a connection with Master Chief.  Here’s the thing, though.  We really don’t.  Take a character like Judge Dredd from the comics or the 2012 movie.  If he doesn’t have his helmet on, his face is hidden in shadows or blocked by something.  There’s a reason for that.  Judge Dredd was never meant to be a three dimensional character.  He was as he was meant to be: The face of the law.  In Halo, Master Chief is supposed to represent humanity’s best fighting force, so there is an element of mystery to the character that should’ve been maintained, but wasn’t.  On the Covenant side, we have Makee, a human woman who was captured by the Covenant when she was a child.  This is where the showrunners lack of understanding the source material comes into focus.  The Covenant NEVER took human prisoners.  EVER.  For them to take this one girl captive because she has a special quality makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever.  On the human side, the UNSC is portrayed as this oppressive and unethical machine, yet incredibly incompetent at the same time.  Why?  I mean, I get that every science fiction story has to have some form of corruption within certain government elements, but it didn’t need to be THIS blatant.  The UNSC came off as villainous more often than not.  That’s bad writing.  Don’t even get me started on the character of Kwan Ha.  I don’t hate the actress, I hate the character.  The character is a snotty, whiny little brat that never should have been in the show.  It would’ve been one thing if she was written better, but she wasn’t.  If the intent was to have the audience sympathize with the character, they failed.  Nobody likes her.  Even the shows staunch defenders don’t like her.  I will admit, against my better judgement, that her final episode in this season was pretty good, but the focus never should’ve been on her.

As a matter of fact, focus is probably this show’s biggest issue.  It’s all over the place.  When the show isn’t focused on the conflict between humanity and the Covenant, the show grinds to a halt.  Whenever we deal with Kwan and Soren on the planet of Madrigal, it feels out of place.  I understand that there’s more in the Halo universe than just Master Chief and the UNSC, but the entire subplot of Kwan’s quest for independence from the UNSC feels forced, and it doesn’t add anything to the overall universe, at least not until Kwan’s final episode.  Even then, it feels incredibly tacked on and superfluous.  A big complaint that a lot of people have been having is Master Chief not having his helmet on for most of the show.  I’ll be honest, I don’t actually have an issue with that.  What the show does with Master Chief is the problem.  Apparently, he’s one of two people that can activate certain alien artifacts by touching them.  The other is Makee, the human Covenant person.  Why is this the case?  The show never answers that question.  Also, what they do with Cortana is…bizarre.  In the games, Cortana is an AI that chose to pair with Master Chief because of his intelligence, his humanity, and his leadership.  The relationship between Master Chief and Cortana develops a lot over the course of 4 games.  It’s a very compelling relationship, even though it’s purely platonic, but it works.  In the show, she’s used as a spying tool initially for Dr. Halsey.  I don’t like the way that Cortana was handled here.  It’s great hearing the original voice actor play the role again, but the writing is just…wrong.

The pacing is uneven.  The pilot episode started off pretty strong with a brutal action sequence, but then it slows to a crawl by the time the episode ends.  Episodes 2,3 and 4 are slow.  In fact, some of the episodes in this show are nothing more than filler.  Truth be told, though, I don’t necessarily mind the slow bits, especially when it focuses on Master Chief and the UNSC’s political issues.  That’s very interesting to me and I think the show delivers on that part, but it doesn’t really propel the show forward.  In fact, Halo doesn’t really start picking up steam until Episode 5.  That’s half-way through the season.  That’s not good for an action-oriented science fiction show.  The writers also have Master Chief doing things that he really shouldn’t be doing…like having sex with a Covenant spy.  Yes, that happened.  No, it’s not awesome.  It’s antithetical to who and what Master Chief is.  Also, for a show that’s called Halo, there’s no Halo.  It’s glimpsed at in visions, but they don’t actually go there.  I guess they’re saving that for season 2.

There’s a lot of problems with Halo.  A lot of it stems from world-building issues, but also questionable writing decisions.  I noticed these things, even as a new fan of the games.  That said, I did find myself enjoying the show for the most part, warts and all.  While the show feels derivative right now, there’s some real potential in this show going forward.  If the showrunners and 343 Industries can clean up a lot of the writing, and refocus the show on the actual human/alien conflict, then Halo will be in a much better place.  I want this show to succeed.  We’ve had very few videogame adaptations that were any good.  Very few.  This could break the curse, IF it’s handled correctly.  That means jettisoning unnecessary characters and subplots, and bringing the show into line with what the franchise is about.  My final thought is this: Halo is a very flawed show with serious pacing and writing issues.  The stuff that works is amazing.  The stuff that doesn’t is painfully apparent.  It’s been very inconsistent, both in terms of episode length and quality.  The episodes that I definitely recommend are 1,5,6,the second half of 8, and 9.