The first episode of the long awaited/dreaded Halo TV series. The first episode is equal parts surprise and disappointment for fans: surprising, because the action and visual aesthetic are excellent. Disappointing because everything else looks exactly like what the fans were dreading: woke Hollywood screwing over yet another beloved franchise.
In case you’ve never heard of it, Halo is easily one of the biggest videogame franchises in the history of the genre. They are both massively popular (one of the highest-grossing franchises in any media, of all time) and critically acclaimed. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re limited to simple shoot-’em-up mayhem: the games themselves have complex stories and a deep lore that’s expanded in dozens of best-selling novels (featuring some big names in SF literature, such as Greg Bear and Eric Nylund), graphic novels, animated features, and more. To get an idea of the sheer breadth of Halo novels alone, watch YouTuber Brian David Gilbert tackle every single book:
To summarise, though: in the 26th century, humanity has spread to the stars. As the story opens, civil war is spreading among the human colonies, as breakaway insurgents fight to free themselves of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC). To quell the insurgency, the UNSC secretly kidnaps specially selected children and subjects them to a brutal regime of military training, augmented by genetic and technological enhancement — with often fatal results. The survivors, though, become the Spartans: a group of elite supersoldiers encased in massive powered armour. Leading the Spartans is Master Chief Petty Officer John 117, known to fans simply as Master Chief or The Chief. Most of the games are played from Chief’s point of view.
But then humans find themselves at war with the Covenant, a highly-advanced, multi-racial, theocratic alien empire. The Covenant declare humans heretical and dedicate themselves to obliterating our species. The Spartans suddenly become all of humanity’s last line of defense and only hope of survival.
So, what does the show — at least, its first episode — get right? The action. The action is fast-paced, brutal and bloody. The towering Covenant Elites are suitably terrifying to the first humans in the show to encounter them.
But no tv show can be all action, all of the time. Eventually, story-telling has to take over, and here Halo, the tv show, falls apart. Again, it’s difficult to tell from the first episode alone, but the show seems to be basing much of its plot on elements of Halo 5: Guardians, widely regarded as having the worst story of all of the games.
You’d think, with such a vast body of lore and established stories to fall back on, successfully adapting Halo to tv would be a doddle. Did anyone say Rings of Power? But then, Hollywood just took a hugely successful videogame franchise, all-but-made for an action movie adaptation, and churned out the awful dreck that is Uncharted.
Most notable of the elements that makes modern Hollywood such unwatchable trash is their obsession with identity politics quotas: and Halo has that in spades. Characters are race-swapped with abandon, most notably Captain Jacob Keyes (Danny Sapani) and his daughter Miranda (Olive Gray — who racks up extra intersectional brownie points for being “non-binary”). Compounding the annoyance for fans is that Sapani is a dead-ringer for the beloved Sergeant Johnson. Admiral Parangosky has also been race-swapped, apparently for no other reason than making a lackluster imitation of Shohreh Aghdashloo’s excellent portrayal of hard-as-nails politician Chrisjen Avasarala, in the acclaimed series The Expanse.
Mercifully, Chief himself has been spared the blackwashing, although they’ve changed a character explicitly described as sandy-haired and freckled for a distinctly swarthy and Semitic actor (which, lest anyone get their knickers in a bunch, is not a slur on Jewish actors: after all, the also-Jewish Jon Bernthal is everything a Punisher fan could ask for, even if the canonical character is Italian-American). It’s also not a slur against Pablo Schreiber’s portrayal, which, on the limited evidence to date, is suitably stoic.
But the biggest problem with the show’s debut is simply that we got to see the Chief’s face at all. Like The Mandalorian or Judge Dredd, the Chief is famous for never taking his helmet off. The genius of Karl Urban’s portrayal of Judge Dredd is that, unlike Sylvester Stallone in an earlier adaptation, he clearly lacked the ego-driven need to have his face constantly on show. Likewise, in The Mandalorian, Dave Filoni understood the fandom well enough to make Jyn Erso’s eventual face-reveal a Big Moment of the final episode of the first season.
In Halo, the show-runners clearly couldn’t get the Chief’s helmet off fast enough — and it stayed off. This may seem like a pettifogging detail, but it’s as ham-fisted and clueless as making Peter Parker a macho, cool dude. This one, simple detail is a bright red flag that the show’s creators simply don’t understand the material they’ve been entrusted with.
Another minor quibble for fans is that, in a franchise with such a strongly-established timeline, all of the major characters are about 20 years too young.
Leaving aside such race-politics and fan-pettifogging, the other glaring weakness is that so many of the characters’ actions and decisions simply make no sense. Why on Earth would the UNSC opt to eliminate their poster boy hero and greatest military asset at the first suggestion of disobedience?
Who knows, maybe the show will get better. Plenty of shows have recovered from dud pilots to go on to greatness, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to Seinfeld. But this is modern, woke Hollywood we’re talking about. Best not to get our hopes up.
