Goodbye Halo

 

There really has been some huge leaps forward when it has come to the representation of game franchises on the silver screen. Fallout for one has jumped leaps and bounds ahead to be a budding TV series worth calling the masses in- The Last of Us nailed one fantastic series and is currently grappling how best to craft a story out of the narratively confused sequel. And Resident Evil... well, the less said about that series the better to be honest. And in all that space there has been one show that thread the gap. One show that wasn't the absolute pits like RE, but paled in comparison to the source material to such a degree it almost felt like the team actively hated the game it was birthed from. Halo the TV series never could figure out where to land.

One on side you had some actually great snippets of action that felt like they came right out of the game, and on the otherside you have direct undermining of some of the core game's world design aspects in a manner that seemed to miss the point of the source material. Which is particularly perplexing as Halo is not a thematically complex franchise- you'd have to try to not nail it. In fact, some the ways that the show treated the relationships that the Spartans held with the UNSC, the presentation of the Covenant war, the presence of the Halo rings and even the relevance of Cortana seemed utterly perfunctory. Like these were skins placed atop an entirely separate sci-fi story in order to create the illusion that these series was somehow related to the Halo people loved.

The 'Silver Timeline' quote has done so much heavily lifting in this show's defence, irregardless of the fact that even alternate timelines should retain some vague spirit of the original timeline in order to be relevantly 'alternative' to begin with. There is a baseline to work off of, for goodness sake! But it seems that the original showrunners actively held no regard for video games as a storytelling medium and simply tried to leapfrog off the franchise to propel their own careers, and the later showrunners were just left with a faulty ship to try and correct. But there was little to be done. Master Chief barely resembled his video game counterpart- the Covenant somehow ended up as side-characters in their own war, the first Halo ring couldn't even make it into the first series. Reach fell far too quickly. Master Chief committed a sexual war crime- the ship had already taken on too much water before the new captain took the helm.

And it is within that light, and the vastly unimpressed reactions the series accrued, that I lack any surprise to the announcement that the Halo series has now been cancelled right in the middle of it's run-up to season 3. Paramount has cut ties to the franchise it spent nigh on five years trying to bring to life (maybe more) and right now the showrunners are left with the rights to shop around for a perspective third party to pick up and run with. Honestly it's what I expected largely, just as I honestly do expect someone to pick this up and try to do something new with it. I can certainly see Netflix looking around at the popular video game franchises going around and wondering why they haven't got their own yet. But the big question persists, should they? Should anyone pick this series up again?

First off; it seems that Halo doesn't gell with modern show creation inclinations. Halo is symbolised by it's faceless protagonist but the outwardly superficial and pretentious people who make TV nowadays simply can't fathom a TV series without a pretty face on the front of everything. Sure, Pablo and his team disingenuously discard the honest question of why the literally faceless protagonist series needs a mug whilst freakin' Star Wars managed to pull off the faceless protagonist thing with no problems- because the truth is they're scared to rely on the integrity of a product they aren't interested in trying to understand. And if even the basemost aspect, the most perfunctory accessory, of the brand you are attempting to work eludes you so fully- maybe you're out of your depth! Just a little.

All the hallmarks of generic fantasy are present and inseparable from this story. Overtly evil militaristic humans, badly implemented chosen one garbage- (even the real Halo started falling for this one around Halo 4, before abandoning it pretty much entirely for Halo 5.) and godawful enemies-to-lovers romance. None of which represents the franchise, all of which comes to odds with the fanbase- and most of which will need to be preserved in some fashion should this series be revived. Even if the best comes to pass and an absolute diehard takes control of the franchise- without pulling a total reboot- something unheard of in a TV series, it's going to go down the exact same route the previous two series' went. Disappointing everyone and then getting cancelled. Why waste the money?

At the end of the day when everyone is just sitting around waiting for the next action scene to pop up so that they can point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio- maybe you're better not making a story based series. It's kind of like The Acolyte for Disney. The action stuff is all great and does gangbusters reuploaded to Youtube- so maybe the special effects department are better off just throwing together cool compilations of action set pieces. Sure, maybe that will seem a little rudimentary to the minds of traditional film makers- but I bet that would generate a lot more interest, traffic and, most importantly, money than what they're currently committing to. If this has to persist- do it like that.

So we say goodbye to bad rubbish with the end of Halo- yet another sacrifice at the altar of 'bad adaptation to superior material'. There really is no winners when these unfaithful diatribes into self indulgent trite are allowed to proceed and their agonising decline hurts literally everyone- the runners, the fans, the very industry itself. Maybe a little more scrutiny should go into place deciding who gets to make these products in the long run so we can avoid another disaster like this. But then again, that would also necessitate we avoid another disaster like Resident Evil- and I'd loathe to miss out on that!

Promises kept

 Promises made

The other day I penned a blog talking about the rigorous betrayal of promises broken upon the altar of lies. The consequences, the lingering stink of breaking oaths. The inevitable drunken festering of staring eyes, and pointing fingers that inevitably blossom next- the poppy harvest of composting dreams. But what if I just throw that on it's head and talk about the total opposite. Promises kept. "Why, that's got to be the font of endless positivity, right?" Well, well, my hopeless optimistic friend, you might think that but I counter- what about a threat? That's a promise too, is it not? And a threat kept is a danger realised. Do we celebrate merely for the prophesized reaching fruition? Of course not, we scream and panic and cry and woe the day that Paramount ever decided it was going to be their turn to spit on the institution we call video game TV shows.

Halo is indeed going to be receiving it's season 2. As little as we all want to accept it, there's not a dang thing any one of us can do. The show created by a team of people who actively laughed at the source material and believed themselves to be such an 'heightened' form of creator that they could rewrite the very basic essence of everything the games were- they've got themselves a sequel. So now our helmet-less, rebel-rousing, sexual war crime committing, Master Chief can disgrace the name of his position once more with a narrative deeply confused about what Halo was originally about. It's space military fiction with a touch of space fantasy rubbed on top. (A lot more space fantasy as 343 took over, but I was told we had time before the story went down the Halo 4 pit.) Now they have got themselves a new showrunner, but if that will lead to any improvements I don't know. The show already put itself in a bizarre trajectory and even being teased with an actual Halo installation for once isn't enough to wash all that gunk out of mouths. But hey, they promised a season 2- and here we are.   

You know who else was a fan of making promises? CDPR. They made quiet a few in the lead up to Cyberpunk, albeit many in implication. Afterall, they didn't technically say there would be significant choice and consequence throughout the game, they just presented a level with tons of it and coined that ignoble get-out-jail-free-card "And that's just one mission!" They've made great strides since then living up to the spirit of the advertisements. Still it's quite astounding it took several years after launch for an actual crime system to be implemented into a game that had a line of adverts that literally led with "In Night City; what makes you a criminal?" Two years of post-game support, apparently. But on the otherside of all that we can actually say that the promises kept, or rather 'made up for' have gone a significant way to repairing CDPR's quite tarnished reputation and image.

Still is there any boon quite as fundamentally effective, quite as world breaking, as the decision to actually add in the missing train stations to the world? Because that very first shot we ever saw of the game running 'in engine' was of the Monorail rolling above Night City. It's exclusion kind of felt like a slap across the face. Bringing it back after all these years kind of feels like that final moment of truce being declared before the first villain of the anime arc turns around and embraces the protagonist. Enemies to Friends. You know how it goes. There's apparently some work also thrown into making the bike handling a little better and throwing in Romance-partner hang-out sessions- but who cares about that when I can ride above the denizens of brokeville and laugh at that lowly ineptitude compared to my high flying ways! Grovel for me, ants- GROVEL!

Where was I? Oh yeah: Grand Theft Auto VI. Now that game isn't out yet, so the only promises we can talk about is the promise that Rockstar has made to the industry in general by warrant of it's station. You see, for all of their painful backwards overprotectiveness regarding past developers sharing stories and hunting down harmless fan-made mods for their single player games- Rockstar are trying to maintain this magical image of theirs. This image of the 'mysterious big developer' who comes by generationally to totally rewrite whatever direction the industry is currently heading in and remind them what a true superstar is. Because as big as the games industry has become, as overwhelmingly popular as some of the best games of all time are- no one else in gaming is pulling 100 million Youtube views in 48 hours. It just doesn't happen unless you're Rockstar.

As much as it's becoming hip for Right Wing Social Media creeps to virtue signal about being unable to stand the franchise because of it's flagrant romanisation of violence against the police- (yes, that's real. Elon said he couldn't bare to shoot a cop in GTA V and now they're all conjuring up falsehoods about virtual blue-live solidarity.) the truth is that Grand Theft Auto is one of those culture phenoms that shapes culture in a variety of ways. Everything that exists about Grand Theft Auto VI seems to indicate that Rockstar have once again upheld their unwritten bargain with society itself, to ride as it's zeitgeist with every new entry. Whether or not the actual game itself is fun or a mismatched hodgepodge of openworld cliches butting heads in a desperate attempt to appear 'innovative'- well, we have couple of painful waiting years to find out. But as of so far- in marketing alone the company have done their part.

And do you wanna know who else kept their promise this year? Square Enix- in their promise to make that atrocious looking NFT 'game' they peddled during the height of that short lived trend- 'Symbiogenesis'. Remember that mess? After the crypto market fell off a cliff and every NFT market was systematically arrested for being various levels of illegally scammy- one would expect outstanding NFT projects to be quietly swept under the rug and all marketing to become gaslighted phantoms of a bygone era. But not Symbiogenesis- oh no! Not only is Square still making the project, but they've already started releasing some to the Etherium chain. And to put some icing atop the cake- to match their soulless and impressively bland art style, according to 'Decrypt.Co.' they've even been named as though entirely by an AI. We're talking NFT characters with names like 'Condiment', 'Wart', 'Egg', 'Starvation' and... 'Cockscomb'? Hmm... got brave with that last one, did they? So if you were wondering whether or not Square were interested in putting effort into this revolutionary, industry redefining concept of theirs... umm, no. They're not. Good day.

A promise made is a vow. And sometimes we don't really want to see what happens on the otherside of that proclamation. In some ways the yearning to see the fruition is itself the meat of the meal- as though purpose is defined by the struggle to achieve it. But given how that sounds like the sort of drivel that spikey haired, Welsh-dubbed, JRPG protagonists would wax-poetic over just before climbing up the last staircase to kill god- or worse, something that Kojima would say on his Tw-X account, I'm choosing to spit in the face of that. A journey unfulfilled is a waste of the single most precious commodity this life gives us- time; and those that can't reconcile the thrill of an escalator taken in place of a arduous hike might as well be philistines waving their fists at the construction of the Library of Alexandria, wishing we'd all just go back to the age of purely spoken knowledge. Or whatever the Philistines were moany about, I can't be bothered to look it up.

Halo: The Series still doesn't get it

Start looking at the man in the mirror.

So not too long ago the pitchfork wielding mobs of the Internet banded together in order to cast down the live action Halo TV series and ensure it burnt down in the fiery pits of Beelzebub where it des- oh wait, there's a season 2 which was greenlit before the show began... So the show creators have one more shot to prove their worth before Paramount Plus just moves on with it's dozen other actually successful and well-received shows, pretty much setting the studio and Pablo Schreiber's performance in a 'Last Stand' position where every single slip up could very well be his last in the iconic green armour. And how are the studio handling this pressure? Not every well if the recent interview that was conducted with Pablo and the series' executive producer is anything to go by. In fact, fitting the title of this blog, if what they say is indicative of what they believe; I'd very much have to say that these guys literally have no idea what it is that made Halo such a great property to begin with, let alone how to make that translate onto another platform. And now, lo and behold, I have the perfect tool for quantifying the problem for you today.

Let me start by saying that though it was kind of GAMINGbible to frame the backlash The Halo Series received as 'mostly mixed'; they're not doing the creators any favours by lying to their face. The show was battered by critics both professional and audience goers, with the overall reviews on sites generally aggregating to the middle only because of some truly sad individuals who have felt the need to balance the table by giving it a 5 out of 5 in revenge. (You know the review is probably not all on the level when the contents of it discusses how other people feel about the product rather than how they do.) Lets not beat around the bush; it was hated, disgraced, divorced by the fans and thrown into the trash. A lot of people aren't even going to bother show up for a Season 2 unless they're told how everything has changed and Master Chief is back as the man we love; but I'm not sure we're even heading in that direction after what we've heard.

Oh, and I'm not going to come up here and tell you that the people in charge are clueless. (even if that might be the exact opinion I've shared in the past) because I've decided they're not: they're just misguided. The executive producer on this show with her incredible name, Kiki Wolfkill, (Seriously; that is easily the coolest name I've ever seen.) has been with the series in her position ever since the franchise jump from the hands of Bungie to 343 in Halo 4. And yes, out of all the Halo games that I've played I did in fact say that Halo 4 was the worst in terms of story, enemy makeup and level design; but at least she's been with these games long enough to identify what makes a bad Halo portrayal and... act on that? Hopefully. I don't know. I see her standing behind every decision here and it makes me cringe, but I can't really hate on someone called Wolfkill, because that sounds like the kind of person who holds very violent grudges; so I'm just going to say that she and I have a: Difference of opinion on this matter.

Much as I have surmised in the past, Kiki and Pablo both confirmed over this interview that the goal of removing Master Chief's helmet was to sever the intrinsic relationship between the player and the character that has been there since John's inception. He was created as an Avatar for the player, obviously, and when that relationship was moved to the show that had to come with a sacrifice of the closeness. But I disagree that this was the way to do it. It's funny actually; the way that Kiki explains it, she makes it sound as though Chief was an entirely lifeless and emotionless chunk of rock to be manipulated by the player during the events of each game, which is why the show felt so jarring when it approached an angle of the Master Chief 'discovering his humanity'; but that is either a wilful lie, or a selective truth; because Master Chief, lo and behold, actually did have a personality.

From the very first moments aboard the Pillar of Autumn, Master Chief was establishing himself as an obedient, occasionally wise cracking, vaguely cocky, symbol of duty who pushes himself to extraordinary lengths to try and 'complete the mission'. Later he would come to care about the AI who wormed itself into his hand and heart, to the point where it came into direct contrast with his intrinsically dutiful nature and led to a personality schism. Perhaps the only part of Halo 4's writing which wasn't a total dog's dinner was the way in which Master Chief had to act against a direct order for the first time in the franchise and it felt like a natural collision between personal and professional duty. The game doesn't linger on the moment, because that's not the sort of franchise this is, but instead allows the significance of that choice ring in the narrative, organically.

I think a great modern example that Kiki might examine to see this sort of dynamic adapted and portrayed perfectly is the reimaging of Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Cloud was largely mute in the original game save for some very rare dialogue choices with even rarer actual consequences, whereas the Remake gave him both a voice and an independent personality beyond just being the player's avatar. And that played out into a personality much the same as Master Chief's only with a heightened degree of being emotionally stunted when it comes to expressing to others. As if harkening back to those times when Cloud spoke once in a blue moon, FF7R Cloud expresses how he feels through action, such as committing to helping Avalanche in order live up to his promise to help his childhood friend Tifa who told him that she feels trapped. Or that moment where he, rather adorably, tells a meadow of inanimate plants to 'learn how to speak' to Aerith upon noting how they're the only outlet she has to speak openly to. It's a very physical window into the way that Cloud feels about the people in his life which non-verbally communicates that intent to the viewer, all the way keeping totally true to the mute nature of the character's origin. 

The problem with the Halo show, and Master Chief's depiction within it, is that as a character he feels totally divorced from the person in the video game. He doesn't act like Chief, to even a base fundamental level. He has no sense of duty, more an obligation forced upon him by an evil tyrannical fascist government which he actively tries to free himself from, he's never playful with Cortana in a manner that underlies their deep bond to one another, and he doesn't maintain that detachment from other humans and Spartan's which makes him more of a symbol to be admired from afar by his peers than a drinking buddy to split your woes with. The show itself seems to barely cover the Covenant war with Humanity, and even throws in a human Covenant member in the mix, (probably to save on the animation budget) and Master Chief sleeps with her. Which is just... such a misstep in character writing I have trouble quantifying my total feelings in word form; it more deserves a primal scream of pain, if I'm being honest.

In summation, this isn't a Halo show. It's a generic sci-fi fantasy plot with an impressive looking coat of Halo scene slathered ontop of it. The action scenes look good, heck I think the finale scene is genuinely fantastic, but they wanted to go deeper than just a string of action cutscenes and in doing so failed their character's at every single turn. And that is why this season 2, which was greenlit before the first season was done, isn't going to get any better. These creatives stubbornly refuse to accept the mistakes they made, or the valid criticism that actual fans who recognise the franchise which is being tarnished, have offered them. In their eyes it's all "Nah, those guys just don't understand our genius", which is why the quality has been circling the drain for so long and just begging to fall totally into it. I would end on a plea to Save Our Halo; but the truth is there's nothing left to save. I just hope that the next video game show learns well from the mistakes of this one.

So how is the Halo TV show going...

 Do you like the Halo TV Show?

The early episodes were a little too: 'mind numbingly dull and gut-wrenchingly off-the-mark' for my tastes. But then episode 8 came out for the penultimate episode in season one since their original tenth episode was delayed into season 2, and I think the show really came into it's own, both creatively and artistically. The whole show has this stink of cheap corner cutting with crappy low-effort scripts that demand the least amount of CGI and set dressing possible despite this show apparently being a Sci-fi, awful insert characters that contribute nothing to the overall richness of the world or narrative and exist purely to annoy the viewer, and an apparent allergy to showing off Master Chief donning his iconic armour and helmet for more than sixty consecutive seconds an episode! The show's been compared to the sensation of downing a tincture of Fluoroantimonic acid and waiting as it burns the very hydrogen out of your organs and rips apart your stomach lining like a sheet of A4 paper in a rainstorm; But I think the Halo TV Show has a much more caustic and destructive effect on the human body when consumed!

Hey, why are you giving us such a hard time for not following the story of the games despite the fact we've insisted that this is a separate silver canon totally distinct from those games? What are you, some sort of Halo fanboy? 

No Paramount.

Wait- what's that you've got in your hands. Is that 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection'?

Yes it is! I think the show's magnum opus has to be the stomach churning, vomit-inducing, 'romantic' sex scene between Master Chi- I mean John, and 'covenant spy woman' Makee; a scene so abrupt and outside the the scope of what a Halo show should be, that most people didn't even bother to pay attention to specifics of what that scene represents. But they should. Because it's not just a transparent attempt to throw in an ill-fitting love scene in order to justify the copious errant shots of various character's colons throughout this brain-rotting series; it's also a perfect demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt these writers are, to have to sink to the lowest common denominator in order to push the plot forward!

Hey Paramount?

WHY DIDN'T YOU PLAY THE GAMES YOU LAZY, IGNORANT, HACKS?

Ahem. So maybe that little performance play there will tell you exactly how the Halo show is shaping up in it's current form, with one season down and another inevitable follow-up already green-lit and on the way. And it brings me absolutely no pleasure to tell you that for some incomprehensible reason there are, presumably real, people out there in the world today who like this show. Or at least people who say things like; "I think the character interactions are good." As though they've literally never seen a scripted show before in their lives. They'll happily accept mediocre on their plates and call themselves lucky for being fed, totally ignoring the wealth of gourmet show-content available at everyone's fingertips twenty four-seven. If you like character interaction, go watch The Wire. Halo shouldn't be a show where the only thing worth a damn is that when two characters sit and down and talk to each other it doesn't always descend into a messy free-for-all of verbal projectile diarrhoea. Stick that quote on the accolades trailer! 

I just keep coming back to how obvious this disaster was before the show even launched and keep wondering why no one reached out to stop them. Should I have stopped them? How? Maybe I should have conspired to acquire the position of the Head of Streaming Content' at Paramount in the month before the show aired so I had to the chance to pull it and save the gaming community. (Darn, I really missed the boat on that one. Actually, looking at their management board I can see that I clearly wasn't white and generic enough to be a division head there anyway, some disasters can't be stopped.) There should have been an alarm bell ringing across everyone's head the second the team revealed- no, they didn't just 'reveal', they lauded the fact that they didn't play the games and represented it as some sort of inspired creative decision on the part of the 'visionaries' writing the show. Apparently, they needed to be totally free-range to pen their pure magic. Well I've seen the product of their free-range rearing; and it's just bare basic farm-variety manure. Brown and clumpy.

What comes back around to whack me in the head time and time again is just the gall of it all, wrapped on the backhand of their greeting palm. This whole play that "We're really inspired by the love and passion that the Halo franchise has evoked and we just want to capture that for the TV" which clashes neatly with this prevailing miasma of "Well these games are puerile kids stuff obviously, and by chucking out the bits we don't understand we're just making the show more mature and thus better for more evolved TV audiences." They really do think we're scum, make no mistake. Why else would they not only claim ownership of Master Chief's face from the fanbase, but go our of their way to strip our icon of the armour that defines him as much as humanely possible, to punish us for flocking to these symbols by tearing them down on a multibillion dollar budget?

But the catch is; they end up missing the point of Halo altogether. This series has focused on the most ancillary of the ancillary lore under the vain belief that they're breathing life fluid into a tragically underdeveloped part of the Halo world, the human rebellions; not realising the morbid jokey intention of those snippets of the lore being a footnote. The rebellions occurred before the events of any Halo media and act as the impetus for the secret creation of the Spartans in the first place. Tools of a fascistic ruling body that were bred to crush human dissent, it was pure cosmic coincidence that humanity would stumble upon the Covenant during this time and become the targets of a holy war. The Spartan program that was designed to be weapons for oppression suddenly became symbols of defiance against an otherworldly threat and the dark origins are just swept under the rug. That is the dark joke of this corner of the law, these noble Spartan super soldiers were meant to be a sledge-hammer to a teacup and ended up becoming humanity's last hope. That's not even something you have to play the games to pick up on, making it seem that these creatives didn't really look too much at the ancillary source materials like they claimed; you know, given how the Covenant are total footnotes and that fascism is the real threat in this series.

What playing the games would have conferred onto these ignoramuses, however, is the quiet sanctity of the Master Chief character. Drunk on the hubris of imagination-devoid show runners, the Paramount executive decreed that Master Chief would take off his mask and leave it off for 80% of the runtime, mope about his tortured past which he can't really remember and fall in love with another victim of a brainwashing program that intends to use them as a weapon. I'm not a bore, I can see the obvious strings of their basic plot; it's just not anywhere near as clever as they think it is. Whatsmore, it ignores the huge potential for actually atypical storytelling which would have been available if they'd stuck more to the model of the games. In the games Master Chief is stoic, but not because he's a no-personality avatar for the player and not because he has a emotion dampening chip shoved up his rectum. He is stoic because he was fashioned to be a symbol of hope that others first rely on and later draw influence from. He carries the weight of hope, and hope doesn't need a face. As the games went on Master Chief even learned to love, in a way, his stowaway AI who also knew how it felt to carry the responsibilities of an entire species on her back and the underplayed mutuality of their relationship is exemplified in the way that the human looks and acts robotic whilst the AI mimics a lively personality together reaching deeper interpersonal insight than a traditional couple could and thus achieving a higher synthesis. (My god I'm seeing the strings of rudimentary probably totally misassigned Hegelian Dialectics again! I knew I shouldn't have tried to crash-course myself on a topic hardly anyone actually understands; I've ruined me!) In a post Mandalorian world, you'd have thought executives would have learnt the promising value of a faceless protagonist and the range of emotion which can be conveyed by the right actor in the right suit, but I guess a crappy video game adaptation project wasn't worth that small modicum of actual effort, huh.

It is astounding that Paramount thought their embarrassingly generic 'tough military amnesiac tries to uncover memory' core plot was going to be more compelling. And even more gobsmacking that the whole fascist military overarching plot is taking precedent over the namesake of the entire series! There wasn't a single Halo ring shown off in the first eight episodes; and whatsomore, in the vague exploration of the Halo rings, the writers inexplicably ruined the twist of the rings by outright telling the audience that they are weapons. Why? The mystery of the Rings is an ideal hook to draw in new comers to the franchise! It's like this show is being cobbled together by the efforts of a room of monkeys with typewriters, but even then they'd have to be on a particularly bad streak to make this many consistent dumb decisions. (Maybe they're lobotomised monkeys...) So all-in-all the show's going great, can't wait for Season 2.

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.