Adaptations: Respecting the Source material

 Paramount hurt itself in it's confusion

By the time this is posted we'll have seen the first episode of the promised adaptation of the Halo TV show, and then we'll know right quick how much of a botch job the whole thing is. Early impressions are lukewarm to bad, so I'm not expecting great things any which way, but even by the modest feelings already established towards how the show, this team is looking to breed an atmosphere of unease and animosity between the show and fans of the franchise, and I just can't not talk about that! Because for the way that the show runners are planning to drum up excitement for the show, it almost seems like they're either severely incompetent, or actively trying to either cut themselves off from the existing fanbase altogether, or maybe they just establish and justify a layer of contempt from over videogame fans. And this, in broad terms, is exactly why I keep braying on about how video game adaptations are doomed to crash and burn; because the people running them never respect the source material.

When engaging in adaption it's so very important to recognise all the relevant avenues to the project that you're working with for so many obvious reasons. For one you want to make something that isn't stepping on the shoes of what has been before, else your project will feel trite and unoriginal. You want to take advantage of the unique subtleties of the introduced medium, whilst still keeping the recognisable strengths of the medium you're adapting from. And you want to make sure that the established audience for the property you're adapting, the inbuilt fan base who are the entire reason you are adapting this thing in the first place, will be able to see the value in the adaptation. It's just the very base level of one's responsibility to recognise the basic level of what they're working with. This isn't even some great secret I'm imparting right now, this is simple. This is one-oh-one. You'd have to be totally delusional to not only refuse to do this, but then parade around boasting about it as though that's some great boon of your approach to directing.

"We didn't look at the game." touts Steven Kane, Halo Showrunner, in the lead-up to the release of his Halo-themed TV show during an interview with Variety. Not even an ambush interview, no, he offered up this self assassination of his own accord. "We didn't look at the game. We didn't talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game." A little betrayal of our Showrunners attitude when it comes to the source material, is it not? Whether or not he meant to voice it, Steven has essentially just said that the books and supplementary world materials helped inform the series he is making, which is good because the series' tie to it's gaming routes are a weakness. The fact that he has kept himself clean of that, is a boon to the show. This, is what is known as 'disrespecting the source material'.

And it doesn't take a lot to familiarise himself with this world from it's gaming routes either. Last December I'd never played a Halo game save for Reach in my life; by mid way through January I'd blasted through the Master Chief Collection and now currently have more familiarity with the series than this show runner! If that isn't a problem, you tell me what level of franchise disconnect would be considered a problem. Does our show runner here even know what the Flood sound like? Has he heard the shrill wails of the choir mount as The Arbiter slips deeper into the heard of a Precursor ruin? Does he know what it feels like to be picked apart by swarms of dangerous bug mutants in a messy jungle assault? Has he felt the sacrificial nobility of the team that fell for Reach? Does he recognise any of what makes this franchise beloved to so many out there?

Because as much as I like to point out the vast differences between the games and TV industry, they share many similarities to. For one there's a large visual element to both mediums and they often lean on similar cinematic techniques to heighten the experience. Musical suites, set-piece moments, camera angles, scene timings, recorded performances: There's a lot of fundamental cross-over here. So as a show runner, would it not make sense to at the very least observe the techniques that the game has employed over the years? Just so that you know what this world looks like? Heck, maybe it will keep you from making a weird mistake like forgetting to make Cortana blue or making the Chief take his helmet off. At the very least, ignoring the games makes you totally unware of the significance of Master Chief's helmet and why removing it, before the games have even dared to, is a spit in the face to the franchise as a whole. It's saying "We are better than you and so don't have to abide by your most sacred traditions." It's hubristic.

And of course then there are the big lingering questions one must confront when recognising that the Halo we love isn't going to be addressed here; such as 'Which Halo are you even adapting here?' Because we all know that the Halo franchise hasn't been sunshine and rainbows when it comes to writing quality, and there's a clear distinction between era's of Halo storytelling that just isn't going to be apparent for people who only consume the books. Halo 1-3 is the golden age, where the characters and stories were most universally loved, even if they largely were not perfect, and 4-5 was the 'reimaging age' where new heads took over and tried everything they could in order to make the series into something it really wasn't cut-out to be. Halo: Infinite is the drastic course correction to bring things back to the heyday. Which Halo is this show taking it's inspiration from? Does our Showrunner and his team even know the difference?

On the other side of the spectrum there are numerous examples of games who adapt from other properties and go to great lengths to be respectful and provide something that fans of those media can recognise and love. Just recently there is the Hogwarts Legacy game that painfully recreates the sets of the movies and expands them into an uncanny world space. There's a clearly apparent reverence for the source material there, propagated by a love for those movies and books by a staff who consulted both frequently in order to hit the nail on the head as often as possible. There are the years of Star Wars games that warped themselves to fit around the ever increasing expanded Star Wars universe, before Disney stepped in and shrunk everything down. There's the beloved Ghostbusters video game which served as a third movie which was never made, thanks to the work they went to in order to bring back the cast and write in an adventure that fit neatly within the films that existed. For the most part there's a decent amount of source material respect on our end, (if we don't count those years of god-awful low budget movie games that studios used to commission) is it too much to request the same both ways?

Right now the general consensus seems to be that the Halo TV show is an alright space show that squanders it's budget and doesn't seem to really take advantage of the material it's dealing with; and can we really be surprised? A fan might know when to take into account the small stuff, like the role of marines in key events, the rigid stoicism of Chief that keeps him to-the-letter until Halo 4 shakes that up a little, the major difference between how Chief is described in all the media against how he actually is in combat, heck, even the shape of the reverence around chief himself. What we're getting instead in a story set in it's own canon, which is fine, but which parades about with a superiority complex that existing franchise fans are going to find nauseating. So for their sake they better work fast on drumming up that normie audience; else this show is going to go the same way as the Forward Unto Dawn.