Early Halo TV Series Review: 2 Premiere Episodes is an intriguing mess

At E3 2013, Steven Spielberg announced that he and Microsoft plan to turn Halo into a TV show. Nine games, nine years, a network switch and loads of memes later, and gloriole finally premieres. The Paramount Plus show debuted two episodes on SXSW Monday ahead of its broader streaming premiere on March 24.

From the start, the talent involved has resisted calling it an exact adaptation, preferring instead to think of it as a world built upon the framework of the Halo games: an interstellar war between the religious extraterrestrials who known as the Covenant, and the United Nations Human Space Command. In the midst of it all are Spartan soldier Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and insurgent Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), both of whom find themselves at odds with the war raging around them.

With only two episodes shown to critics, it’s hard to know which ones gloriole hopes to be at that point, especially as the franchise goes through its own self-assessment. But there are certainly plenty of threads to pull in the show’s first two appearances. For example:

Is it halo or not halo?

gloriole is like a video game series adaptation as handled by someone who once played a few levels of it in college. Or maybe he was just watching his friend play, he can’t remember exactly. There’s definitely a guy in recognizable green armor, and he’s definitely fighting some aliens, but beyond that it’s a bit blurry. There’s some kind of relic, it may or may not have something to do with a ringworld, that could also be a weapon. It’s really hard to say.

This is a show for people who have, at best, a passing familiarity with the games. There’s little to no real explanation as to who or what’s going on, so you know the Master Chief and the Bund better. But it’s also not a show for people who know too much, otherwise you might get confused as to why none of this matches the history of the games that have been released over the last 20 years. It’s a very narrow window.

In other words, if your idea of gloriole is a guy in green armor who does space shit; Congratulations, you finally have yours gloriole Show. —Austen Goslin

More aliens please

As my colleagues have pointed out, these first two episodes of are quite difficult to absorb gloriole and find a reason to keep going. Even for those who, like me, are more than willing to sign up for 40 minutes to an hour of anything as long as it’s some cool looking space shit. Unfortunately, the place craps in gloriole? sub par. Not very legendary. A real overheated plasma pistol, if you get my meaning.

What’s particularly amusing, however, is how intent they are on making Halo’s armor and aliens look as true to the game as possible in environments that require none of the imaginations showcased in Bungie’s games. It’s all gunmetal and concrete corridors, alongside a few crowded space station sets that look like they’re huddled together The wide‘s leftovers. In contrast, the Master Chief’s immaculately recreated armor looks hilariously funny, and the Prophet Mercy has a quirky caricatural look, as if the pesky Orange himself had just appeared on an otherwise normal TV show. Elites have also been slightly redesigned to look bulkier, like jawed linebackers, and less like skinny warriors. This could all happen in any sci-fi series. —Joshua Rivera

The CBS of everything could be a feature, not a bug

The followers for gloriole made one thing very clear to fans: Paramount Plus’ path into the material would be different on its own game of Thrones, The Witcherand other mega-series defining the tentpole era of television. gloriole looks like NCIS, criminal thoughtsand other CBS content littering the platform — which will grate people who wanted to see the epically scaled franchise get the $300 million-a-season treatment.

But keep in mind that I’m warming up to the election. At a time when direct-to-video action films can pull off smarter stunts than Hollywood’s spectacle-driven blockbusters, and when digestible shows dry up after a hard day’s work, the choice has to be made gloriole A real CBS show could work to their advantage in the long run. The story is a little blurry at the beginning, but you can imagine Halo clicking into you gossip go moldy or even go really crazy in Paramount Plus mode. diabolical. Neither show was held back by budget or the traditional hour-long drama aesthetic that defines network TV.

If anything, it helped the character sides of these stories become more relatable and genre-changing pop elements. This is not the gloriole I expected the show, but it could be this gloriole Show I keep watching, hoping I’ll cling to the characters and low-key plot-of-the-week drama of it all. There’s also room for being trashy and still entertaining; shows how Babylon 5, all-rounder, Xenaand this Post Office-The next generation Trek shows thrived in a genre-slinging mode with lower rents. Maybe Halo could do that too? There’s enough character-driven plot babble and adequate production design to believe it. —Matte patches

Master Chief bears the brunt of the bad writing

Master Chief has always been a thin character; his whole thing is intentional. He’s taciturn, deadly, and gets down to business. There might be a joke in there, but most of the time he’s there to get our point across, so he doesn’t risk much in terms of his personality. In the pilot of gloriole He’s doing what he’s never done before: disobeying an order. But without the broader Halo lore, it’s difficult to get a sense of who we’re supposed to think he’s up to this point. An obedient soldier, certainly, but everything about him (and his emotional journey) is told to us rather than being laced through his actions. Almost as soon as he is introduced to the audience, he is rocked by a vision of ordinary life and then rebels against a system to which he has (perhaps?) been subjected all his life.

Nowhere in it do we get a sense of who cares enough, and the sci-fi story he directs feels as generic as he does. There’s little urgency or color in the world that balances Master Chief’s wooden mannerisms. When he takes his helmet off, he’s not a mutant child soldier, he’s just a dude. gloriole‘s Master Chief is all stiff dialogue and tortured looks, but the pain behind it is lost in translation. —Zosha Millman

Episode 2 is promising

My opinion is that gloriole is best served as a series there The show is not exactly adapted to the games. I don’t want to retell shot by shot what I’ve already seen or read. I want to love gloriole to live in a new way and to live in parts that I have not had the opportunity to do before. While the first episode was a bit lackluster, the second episode actually picked up some steam. In my opinion Master Chief is really one of the least interesting characters for gloriole deal with it; As a longtime Halo player and book reader, I know a lot of about the Master Chief. The newer characters are the most interesting for me – I want to learn more about the politics in Madrigal and the chaos in The Rubble.

The world of The Rubble, a renegade society built from asteroids, is more alive and darker than anything else in the pilot. I appreciate seeing a part of the Halo world that I didn’t know before and Bokeem Woodbine (Ghostbusters: Life After Death) is fantastic as Soren-066, a former Spartan who escaped from training camp as a kid. The other thing is that if I remember correctly, Episode 2 doesn’t have any scenes through the Spartan vision. There’s a lot of that first-person video game point of view in the first episode, and that’s a confusing decision. —Nicole Carpenter

You selected the wrong Halo theme song

Anyone who’s been anywhere near Halo knows what the soundtrack sounds like. This theme song and its subdued, angelic “Ohs” chorus will whisk you right back to the loading screen. While this iconic number plays at least once in the first two episodes of gloriole, it’s fighting an uphill battle and not just playing it over the credits to really get us in the mood. —ZM