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!

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.

The Mystery of World War Z's Game of the Year

Do the depths of human depravity never cease to sink!?

Did you know that there's a World War Z game? Well clearly you should, because afterall not too long ago Saber Interactive dropped their ultimate version of the game for everyone to see; 'World War Z: Game of the Year edition'. That's all the extra content, characters and campaigns all rolled into one easy-to-digest package, but that's beside the point right now- this was 'Game of the Year' guys! Don't you remember? When Geoff Keighley opened up that envelope to reveal his award winner to be... 'Control'? Oh right, maybe it was the Golden Gamestick's award. No, that went to Resident Evil 2. (Clearly their judges are gentlemen of sufficient culture.) But then, where exactly is WWZ's Game of the Year Award? Who awarded it and, more importantly, why? That is the mystery I intend to solve today, ladies and gentlefolk.

As I feel there might be a significant chance that you don't know, I'll be explicit; World War Z is a video game that was created from the same source material as the Brad Pitt movie, only this game chose not to quite forsake the 'anthological ' routes of the original. In gameplay it was essentially just a rip-off of 'Left 4 Dead' in the modern age, but seeing as how Valve had shown no interest in making one of their own; all's fair, no? Players would take part in chains of missions that would follow different survivors and their stories as they attempt to escape the Zombie hoards, often taking place all over the world and with very diverse casts for each 'chain'. Of course, there wasn't much in the way of story for this game, so the different cast for every mission-thread didn't really benefit the narrative, but it did provide a framework for slightly tweaked character archetypes which encouraged diversity in it's player base. And this was the sort of game that required a player base. Although I believe the title had offline play, it was really built with 4 player co-op in mind and that was certainly the target audience in all of their marketing.

And the game was... pretty good. It wasn't exactly the revolutionary ground-shattering game of the generation, but for a sleeper title that popped out of nowhere it was a decently good time. Around the weeks it debuted, one wouldn't be shocked to see it popping up across the Internet as a good time killer, with people enjoying it's benefits for what they were. But I feel it's safe to say that the title lacked staying power given that the wider world seemed to have forgotten it existed for several months now. But no more, evidently, as this title apparently won enough hearts and minds to secure a Game of the Year award, thus warranting the studio to stick it on their box. That is how it happened, isn't it? Because otherwise I'd have to give the rallying call of 'Shenanigans!'

Now the cynical amongst you will likely be saying something along the lines of "What's the big deal anyway?" (Presumably in the exact same angsty voice that cool kid from a 2000's high-school drama covets) "'Game of the Year' Awards are meaningless anyway. Every outlet puts out their own award list, is it so hard to believe that one gave their 'best' award to World War Z?" And, quite honestly, my answer is 'Yes. That is exceedingly hard to believe'. Now, not to insult the talented team behind World War Z (Here it comes) but no outlet in their right mind would celebrate that title over the packed year we had in 2019. In case you forgot, that year saw the release of Resident Evil 2, Death Stranding, Control, Apex Legends, Jedi Fallen Order, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Outer Wilds, The Outer Worlds, Devil May Cry 5, Disco Elysium, (which I still haven't played but I hear unendingly good things about) Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, Super Mario Maker 2, Kingdom Hearts 3, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and about 30 other games you'd think about before thinking of World War Z in a list.

So what's the deal? Have World War Z's developers fabricated their Game of the Year in order to sell their re-release? Woah now, that's quite the accusation to make off the bat without any evidence! Besides, I'm sure this is a huge misunderstanding that will be resolved the second we look at the wiki- Oh wait, there's nothing there... Maybe google then- nope, all that pops up is the name of the new release. (Almost as though this was an intentional move to obfuscate the SEO...) What about the official website? Nada. Okay, I'm grasping at straws here, guys! I want to give the benefit of the doubt, I'm trying really hard to find any mention of an award show that so much as sniffed some attention towards World War Z, but I'm coming up blank. Seriously, even 'RAID: Shadow Legends' got a nomination!

Okay, so perhaps I'm being a bit presumptive about things. Maybe when the say 'Game of the Year', they don't actually mean 'GOTY' but they mean to allude to their win for another 'best of' category. (Like 'best of clickbait'...) Okay, so the big Game Awards show from last year with Geoff Keighley and the build-up? Never even mentioned the game, so that's off the table. I've never watched a Golden Joysticks award ceremony in my life but I can browse through their winners. Nothing, nothing, nothing, wait a minute... 'Days Gone' won best storytelling? In a year wherein KH3, Metro Exodus and friggin' Death Stranding released? (Death Stranding was basically all story, and intriguing, mind-bending story at that! And you gave it to the generic "Gotta find my girlfriend in the zombie apocalypse" story?! I mean I adore Sam Witwer as much as the next guy...) But that's beside the point, World War Z isn't here either. Not even once. I've popped around smaller, independent, outlets and I'm getting the same results. 0 matches, try again next time.

Needless to say, I've sunken way too many hours into this budding conspiracy and now I'm pulling at my hair. Is this what we've come to, people? Are we faking Game of the Year awards now? Is nothing sacred anymore... Now I find that as I take a look at all the different folk talking about World War Z, only the bare few are wondering the things I am, and it makes me agitated. Why aren't more people talking about the fact that a video game company, backed by gosh-darn Paramount studios, is fabricating it's own merits for phantom acclaim? It's like padding out your resume with fluff you pulled out of your ass, only perhaps even more of a waste of time. (No one's gonna give a call back anyway.) Am I literally the only person upset by this affront to the holy system of video game award ceremonies? Yes, quite honestly, yes I am.

But maybe my investigative journalism sucks, (actually, I think we can erase 'maybe' from that statement) perhaps someone from Saber interactive managed to corner some drunken lout in an alleyway and trade his inebriated signature for the price of a lager, I just wish this transaction had a virtual footprint so I can stop tearing my hair out! Even as a sad, pathetic man writing in the dark at '04:00 am' with no talent, friends or redeeming characteristics whatsoever, I still feel belittled by this company in a deeply personal manner. As such, I offer this own deadly ultimatum to whichever member of Saber Interactive is man-enough to stand up for the honour of their company and game; beat me in a Deprived speedrun of Dark Souls and I'll make a full apology, tail between my legs. Your next line is "That doesn't sound too hard", but let me assure you; I may have literally never tried to speedrun a Dark Souls game before (or any game for that matter) but I'm bored and willing to give it a shot. The ball's in your court, Saber...