2/12 ForReel Score | 1/5 Stars

Full disclosure: I am not a gamer, and it’s no secret that my interest in gaming peaked with Nintendo 64. I do, however, remember as a teenager watching my brothers play the original Halo video game on Xbox. Filled with intense action, interesting characters, and a striking score and theme, Halo emerged at a highly impressionable time for me and I didn’t need to be a gamer to understand the cultural impact that game had. At a time when Lord Of The Rings was illuminating the magnificence of epic cinematic storytelling for me, Halo was demonstrating the same for video games. You can, of course, imagine my excitement in the mid 2000’s when Peter Jackson was attached to the development of a live action movie adaptation of the game.

Alas, that film was never made. Instead, over 20 years after the original Halo game was released, we get the Halo TV series on Paramount+. Created by writers and producers Steven Kane and Kyle Killan, the Halo TV series is a long overdue effort to bring Halo from the video game realm into live action entertainment. So after more than two decades, is this the live action Halo we’ve all wanted and have been waiting to enjoy?

Judging from these first two episodes in the series, my answer is an emphatic “no”.

There is a lot to take in with the narratives that are established in these first two episodes, “Contact” and “Unbound”. The show opens on the story of Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), a brazen and audacious teenager living on the planet of Madrigal. Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) enters the story with a team of Spartans - highly advanced combat fighters - via a bombastic opening action sequence in Kwan’s village. Though a mysterious artifact he discovers, he begins to realize there may be more to his past than he knows. Then, there's the United Nations Space Command, bent on imposing even more control over their Spartan supersoldiers, whom Master Chief is one of.

The show tries feverishly to plant the seeds of what people expect to see in this live action Halo universe and establish the conflicts that will ultimately shape the narrative of the show. The result, however, is what I would expect from high-end fan-made production on Vimeo or YouTube, placing Halo characters in Star Wars-inspired settings in an overzealous and underdeveloped effort to build exposition for TV. These episodes often play like a knock-off version of The Mandalorian, with very little (perhaps even intentional) effort to distinguish settings and characters from those in the Star Wars universe.

What’s worse is the spirit of Halo is inexcusably minimalized for this episodic experience. That striking, ominously choired Halo theme is practically an afterthought shoehorned into the end of the first episode. Instead, this show spoon feeds too many oversimplified storylines and elementary level characters to viewers in a frustratingly generic fashion. How the show is written demonstrates a very rudimentary style of storytelling that values embellished dramatic flare over an authentic episodic experience.

For example, in that opening action sequence of “Contact”, Kwan witnesses the carnage being wreaked by the invading alien force from the safety of a fortified shelter. She leaves this shelter, however, exclaiming that she has to do something to aid the losing defense brigade - a valiant proclamation if she had anything of benefit to offer the battle. Instead, she proceeds to spend the rest of the sequence simply watching the carnage from other hiding places.

Or in “Unbound”, when Master Chief, Kwan, and ally Soren-066 seek answers about the mysterious artifact Master Chief has. They engage with an eccentric character who divulges an abundance of information about it. However, when an unexpected event occurs that indicates a revelating understanding to this character of who Master Chief is, his dialog is reduced to uncharacteristically cryptic exclamations and shouting - a contrived and reductive effort by the script to be enigmatic and dramatic in how it reveals information.

It’s this kind of lackluster writing that gives Halo an unacceptable sense of cheapness. Giving characters real motivations for their actions or decisions is too big of an ask for the script - even Master Chief’s decision to accept Kwan as a pseudo-sidekick is a head scratching moment. This is entertainment where many narrative choices have less to do with a natural progression of events and more to do with what will make intended plot points work. The result is a disingenuous effort to meld overly simplistic and digestible storytelling with marketable scenes and sequences.

For some, just seeing Master Chief and other familiar components of the game on live action TV may be enough to give this show a pass. And perhaps this is the unambitious bar Halo is aiming for; that while consumers hope for highly developed cinematic experiences at home, recognizable characters paired with excessively violent action sequences will do. There’s an audience for that, but based off of these two episodes, that bar is too low for me to appreciate.

Of course, two episodes is not enough to judge the trajectory of where Halo’s narrative may end up. The foreshadowing of high-profile aspects of Halo like Cortana and “the ring” means that there may be compelling cards the show is waiting to play. But while streaming services like Netflix, Disney, and Prime have committed to making their popular action properties thoughtfully written with compelling narrative hooks, these first two episodes of Halo position the show in a substandard light - certainly not compelling enough to supersede better programming elsewhere at this point. You don’t have to be a gamer to recognize that Halo is the kind of turn-your-brain-off episodic entertainment that a live action version of this franchise could have and should have been better than.

SXSW 2022 | EPISODIC REVIEW: "Halo" Episodes 1 and 2 Set A Shoddy Stage For Overdue Adaptation