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Plot: In the year 2552, humans on the planet Madrigal have been fighting for independence from Earth, but a fatal encounter with the Alien Covenant complicates things. Master Chief John 117 and his super-soldier “Spartans” join the fight. After the battle, Master Chief heads to his home planet of Reach with a Madrigal survivor and a mysterious object he discovered on the planet. But a controversial order has John questioning his mission, and himself.
Review: A live-action adaptation of Halo has been in development for over fifteen years with everyone from Steven Spielberg and Rupert Wyatt to Peter Jackson, Neil Blomkamp, and Guillermo Del Toro involved. After a decade of failed big screen attempts, a television series was ordered by Showtime who eventually passed it on to Paramount+. Now, we are finally seeing the series debut an all-new canon of storytelling featuring Master Chief, Cortana, The Covenant, and all the other hallmarks of the long-running Xbox video game series. With a substantial budget and marketing push behind it, Halo premieres with a second season already greenlit and only critical and fan reaction left to decide its fate. Premiering with two episodes at the SXSW festival, Halo emulates everything from The Expanse to The Mandalorian but pales in comparison to both.
If you are expecting Halo to be as action-oriented as the video game, you will be a little disappointed. Outside of the first act of the premiere episode, most of the first two chapters of the series are spent orienting the viewer to the factions at war. Rather than set up this series with title cards or even an introductory voice-over, we are dropped right into the middle of the story on the planet Madrigal and have to pick things up on the fly. Learning about the UNSC and Covenant is key to trying to figure out what is going on, something fans of the video games will have an easier time with than the casual viewer. Fairly quickly, we meet Master chief (Pablo Schrieber) and his squad of Spartans who are viewed by the inhabitants of Madrigal as the enemy. The masked warriors are more than a little similar to the Mandalorian warriors on the popular Star Wars series on Disney+. Master Chief, who has become a symbol of modern video game culture and the de facto mascot for Microsoft and Xbox, has been associated with his helmet and I wondered how quickly he would reveal his face.
The answer is less than an hour. By the end of the premiere episode, we get to see Schrieber’s face and begin to learn more about Master Chief (aka John 117) than many gamers learned in the first three video games put together. Like The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin, Schrieber plays Master Chief as stoic, emotionless, and of few words. When his interaction with a Covenant artifact changes things, the series deviates dramatically from the plot of the Halo games. As John-117 begins to discover the truth about his past, he protects a young girl named Kwan (Yerin Ha) as he searches for answers. This pits him against both the Covenant, led by the human Makee (Charlie Murphy) as well as UNSC command and scientist Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone). Halsey desperately wants her hands on the artifact as it will help her burgeoning Cortana project which could shift the war in favor of the UNSC.
Watching these first two episodes, I went immediately from excited to underwhelmed within the first twenty minutes. All of the supporting players we meet in the early going feel like they are spouting awful dialogue and do so stiffly and without much passion. Pablo Schrieber, who was fantastic as Mad Sweeney on Starz’ canceled American Gods, just doesn’t fit Master Chief. Yerin Ha is quite good, as is Natascha McElhone, but the most passionate performance comes from Burn Gorman whom we only see briefly in the first episodes. Too much time is spent with military leaders having meetings and Covenant elders having meetings and eventually Master Chief having meetings that you may be left wondering if there was an entire set of side missions in the video games focused on bureaucratic processes.
It was widely reported that Halo would deviate from the canon of the video games rather than existing within it and that may mean that many fans will be left disappointed by the narrative decisions in these early episodes. Series creators Kyle Killen (Lone Star, Awake) and Steven Kane (The Last Ship) have taken the existing mythology of the franchise and tried to tell a new story with a mix of legacy and new characters with Cortana actress Jen Taylor the sole person reprising their role from the video games. Kane and Killen nail the military elements of the story but struggle to provide any level of urgency or energy to the rest. Both of the episodes made available for this review were directed by Otto Bathurst, whose 2018 Robin Hood showed some prowess in filming action sequences. Bathurst does what he can with the material provided, but it just never feels all that exciting.
Something clearly is lost in translation from game to cinematic adaptation. Much of the opening action sequence takes place in a walled outpost which limits the visual geography and makes the scene feel like a choreographed show at a theme park. Master Chief and his fellow soldiers look realistic and tangible, but the Covenant aliens look like they were plucked from an early Halo video game with mediocre graphics. They all look animated and out of place while some of the actual spaceflight sequences are more than convincing. The iconic Halo theme song makes some brief appearances and series composer Sean Callery provides solid musical cues, but it all feels like too little for such a highly anticipated adaptation. Considering the fact that this series cost $200 million to produce, I am very disappointed in the finished product.
I was expecting a lot more from Halo and maybe it is unfair to weigh this series against what we could have had with Neil Blomkamp or Steven Spielberg behind the camera. But, the first two episodes of this series feel about as far from the video game as possible while teasing the potential to someday get there. A show like this will only work with character development and lots of narrative exposition, but that only can be forgiven if it is at all interesting. I don’t see much in these early episodes to make investing in a full season worthwhile, but maybe there is something seven episodes to come that may change my mind. For now, Halo does not come remotely close to any of the other sci-fi or fantasy series out there and represents yet another mediocre video game adaptation.
Halo premieres on March 24th on Paramount+.
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