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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://shows.acast.com/vicegamingsnewpodcast/episodes/waypoints-51-halo-the-tv-show
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Great episode, relevant to all my interests.
I ate up Halo, despite agreeing with basically every criticism levelled at it. It makes arbitrary deviations from the source lore that donât add anything to the narrative, characters make baffling decisions that are neither interesting nor fit with their character arcs, and the show does feel cheap despite all the money lavished on its production. And yet, here I am, a little Grunt gremlin nomnomnoming this shit out of a trough.
I guess what kept me going with the show was its unmistakable Halo-ness. The Warthog, Pelicans, and other vehicles maintain almost a pixel perfect recreation of the games and the Spartan armors are all great looking. I didnât even mind the obviously CGIâd combat sequences, because it followed the logic and tactics of actual Halo combat. And I was a sucker for the first person sequence in the Doom movie, and that has not changed here, although I agree thatâs a matter of taste that Iâm in the minority on.
Iâll keep watching when season 2 comes out. Thereâs enough here that I think they can right the ship if they want to. The actors playing John, Kai, and Miranda all seem to be having fun and Iâd love more screen time with them. And while the version of Cortana they have looks very âoffâ it does not stop Jen Taylorâs magnificent voice performance from coming through. Seriously, she carried Halo Infinite and is doing so much with so little here. Maybe keep her physical appearances to a minimum and up her quips in the helmet, because a snarky Cortana remains awesome.
The one episode they uploaded to YouTube for free absolutely looked the part. Even the CG Covenant characters looked pretty good. It was the plot that wasâŚcertainly a thing
As much as I agree that any Halo adaptation will have hard time making Master Chief interesting in a long-form format like TV, I canât help but think that the primary audience for this show arenât people who want to watch a show about new and interesting characters in the Halo universe. They want to watch a show where Master Chief does Halo stuff.
I got ankle-deep into the YouTube Halo community just before the launch of Infinite, and now my YouTube recommendations are full of 30-second show clips titled âfinally the Halo TV did something coolâ or âthis isnât how master chief would reactâ. The former are just clips of all the major battle scenes, and the latter are clips of Pablo Shrieber acting.
None of these fans care about the broader political or cultural implications of the Halo universe, or even the notion of a character arc, in this format. They want to see the Halo guy do the Halo stuff.
And hereâs the thing: is there anything particularly wrong with a TV show thatâs just Master Chief killing Covenant along to the same paper-thin plot of the first game?
There is, if youâre making a TV show. You canât stack a TV show with wall-to-wall effects and stunt-work. Even Game of Thrones had to spread that stuff out to maybe one big action sequence per season. It doesnât make financial sense.
From an adaptation standpoint, Halo just doesnât make sense as a TV show if it stars Master Chief, which it has to in order to get people to watch it.
Itâs sort of the perfect Catch-22: you need it to star Master Chief in order for your target audience (Halo fans) to watch it, but youâd need to fill out Master Chiefâs character in ways that run against canon in order for it to work as a story, which would annoy your target audience.
The answer is The Fall of Reach the TV show. Youâve got the setup of Chief with the lore the fans actually like, and you can tie in all the military sci-fi stuff from the game.
Halo is a much more successful vehicle for stories when it embraces the military sci-fi character of its universe, rather than the straight up science fiction that 343 embraced for the Reclaimer games.
The rebuttal to that is that The Fall of Reach is too much material for a movie, but not enough for a TV show and all the ways you would pad that story out to a 12 episode reason are boring and awkward compromises.
Adaptation often boils down to either a distillation or extrapolation of the source material, and games are super problematic because they require writers to distill the multi-hour play experience while extrapolating the lore and plot into something engaging in non-interactive format. Iâm at a point where I think that the best game adaptations are those CGI Resident Evil movies or Final Fantasy Advent Rising, because they are complimentary to the games themselves. They canât stand alone, the creators know that, so they just make movies where Leonâs hair is shiny and a dog splits in half.
Iâm so Halo-ignorant that you could have made a show starring any guy in a big armor suit and called it Halo and I would thought âyup, thatâs Halo Manâ. (Similarly, Samus is just Lady in a Suit with Big Shoulders, 99% of the time.) The fact they had to make the show âstarâ Master Chief was my strongest indication that this was going to be a disaster and I havenât watched even a minute of it.
I donât think my instinct was at all flawed.
EDIT: Not sure if anybody needs to answer this, but why is the Halo composer specifically not a friend of Waypoint?
If theyâre talking about Marty OâDonnell, I stopped following him on Twitter several years ago after Gillette had that commercial in the wake of MeToo where they were like âBeing a man means you respect other peopleâ and Marty was like âHOW DARE YOU POLITICIZE RAZORSâ which gave me a little window into his politics.
Marty OâDonnell is a right wing ghoul, more or less. Not much else to say on the matter. He composed some really iconic soundtracks, but yeah, he kind of sucks as a person.
I only watched the first couple episodes and stopped because it was very bad. This podcast made me feel comfortable with that decision.
I do have sympathy for the creators. They have to deal with the fact that âHalo fansâ are an incredibly broad spectrum that ranges from people who played a bunch of Halo 2 multiplayer in college to people who have read dozens of novels about ancient aliens and the military-industrial complex. And as Ren alluded to with the discussion of Starship Troopers Halo really suffers from the âwow cool robotâ problem. A lot of fans, including those who have read all the books, donât really get or are uninterested in the seriesâ subversive themes. Creating a work that appeals to all those people is difficult, especially when itâs also the flagship IP of one of the worldâs largest tech companies.
Iâm not really sure what the solution is, but neither is 343. I have played all the game and read a couple novels (a 4 on the Halo scale if you will) yet I have no goddamn idea what the hell is happening in Infinite. I also went back and played some of 5 after Renâs defense during the previous Halo discussion. It did not change my opinion that the game sucks. The new characters are dull and the Prometheans, both in concept and visual design, are terrible.
I recently ethered my Twitter account to stop myself from doom scrolling but am now bitter for having no large place to repeatedly yell âCado play Ocean.â
Marty OâDonnell is also a major part (maybe founder?) of that studio that is trying to resurrect Six Days in Fallujah if thatâs any indication of what the Halo music guyâs whole thing is now.
I for one expect some guitar heroics and gregorian chants while some jarhead called âAceâ puts a 40mm grenade through a school wall.