Review of the Halo series, a sci-fi action film based on the video game of the same name
The adaptation of the famous game series with a noticeable change of emphasis: instead of epic battles with aliens - the internal drama of a super-soldier
The distant future. Humanity has already mastered planets throughout the Galaxy. A teenage girl, Kwan Ha (Erin Ha) lives on Madrigal, one of the so-called "outer colonies". Her father is a rebel: along with the other inhabitants of the planet, he wants to separate from the UNSC, humanity's main political force. One day, while walking through the forest, Kwan Ha notices a strange spaceship. The spaceship contains not human beings but terrifying aliens that soon attack the rebel fort and exterminate every last one of them. The girl survives only because a squad of "Spartans" - UNSC super-soldiers led by the legendary Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) - arrives to kill the aliens.
Master Cheef discovers that the Covenant, as the aliens are called, came to Madrigal for a reason. In a cave dug by aliens, he finds an ancient artifact of unknown origin, touches it and sees images from the past, seemingly long erased from memory. The soldier takes the girl with him and flies towards UNSC headquarters, but on the way he receives an order: to eliminate the little rebel. Master Chief, who has always followed the orders of the higher-ups without question, refuses. He disables the tracking systems, switches the ship to manual mode, and flies away. He must find out what the artifact's secret is and save Kwan Ha at the same time.
A series of sci-fi shooters Halo attempted to be adapted back in the mid-2000s - then the project was handled by Peter Jackson himself and his protégé at the time Neil Blomkamp (the adaptation did not work, but they used some of the work for "District 9" later). Since then, every now and then there were rumors of a feature-length adaptation of the famous video game franchise, which had grown to eight full parts and became, in fact, the equivalent of "Star Wars": with a whole slew of supporting novels and game spin-offs, several distinctive "eras", similar problems with fanservice and lack of fresh ideas. While Hollywood has turtle-stepped its way to Halo, it has grown an insurmountable array of storylines and slightly lost the trust of players - though still beloved by hundreds of thousands of gamers.
A TV series adaptation - with Steven Spielberg himself among the executive producers - could breathe life into the franchise and, ideally, attract new people to the video game series. In terms of sheer numbers, everything seems to be working out: Halo started breaking viewing records in its first week. On the artistic side, though, it's hard to imagine that a film adaptation would seriously get anyone interested in the world of the game. All the identity of the Halo universe in the series - at least in the first episodes that came out - was replaced by an epigone of fantastic proportions. The very image of the Rebels, which was not in the game, was written off from the same Star Wars. Master Chief became a typical hesitant frowning warrior, which was the Mandaloretz, and a hundred other similar characters. In the second episode, there was a location that acted as a kind of "hub" for the scum of the galaxy, something we seem to have seen in about every other space sci-fi movie, including the conditional Guardians of the Galaxy.
Of course, the series has time to ramp up: we haven't yet seen the Halo ring planet itself or many other key details for the franchise. But from the first few episodes, it looks like the most standard sci-fi show imaginable. A little bit of interstellar politics, a little bit of sad flashbacks. Even the action - the main virtue of the original games - is not particularly impressive here: it's not badly thought out, but the shortcomings of the computer graphics are very cutting to the eye. Apparently, this is why the second series, for example, has no action at all. We focus entirely on the inner torment of Master Chief, trying to rethink his soldierly existence and deal with feelings he has never had. The first sign that you've done something wrong: In your adaptation of an epic sci-fi action movie, the most interesting part is the suffering of the unemotional hero.
This article was sponsored by Jonathan Higley
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