Episode 1
Halo is here. As you can see by all the dirty and ethnically diverse Hunger Games extras.
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https://i.ibb.co/N1WVdCS/image.png]
Halo CE opened with a big and practical looking spaceship and a discussion of immediate dangers. Our introduction was mystery, tension, a bit of awe, and the impression that serious people were doing serious things.
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https://youtu.be/yTxmVZFWdw4]
I don't mean to write a screenwriter's guide here, but this contrast in tone is captured perfect in this first minute. Halo CE gave us space and serious men dealing with danger. Halo TV gives us a jolly game of cards at the Mystery Meat Saloon in the middle of nowhere. Yes, most of these people are about to die, but this isn't a bold subversion of our expectations. It's actually exactly what you would expect to happen if you correctly figure in the opening moments what genre you're observing.
Halo TV is not a science fiction series. Men make science fiction. Halo is run by women and eunuchs now. And they like Young Adult Fiction. I'm not sketching out theories for the sake of jerking myself off here, it's just self-evidently what they've reduced Halo to. This opening is the same one you've seen in Eragon, Wheel of Time, Name of the Wind, and countless other unreadable stacks of light genre toilet paper. We get our wholesome setting where our plucky protagonist has their life in order, then some ominous force rolls through and tears it all apart, forcing our protagonist on a path towards heroism.
I'm ahead of myself here, back to the events of the show so we can see this playing out.
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https://i.ibb.co/M7GNnFj/image.png]
Here's our hero, on the right. Back at the saloon after some talk about how the big oppressive government is bad and their spartan soldiers are unstoppable, then we get #Resistance leader asking where his daughter is. She's out with her friends looking for hallucinogenic mushrooms, and they're all talking about yearnings for freedom and to TRAVEL. I think 6 year old me would be crying by this point.
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https://i.ibb.co/T45X9vC/image.png]
Then she spots aliens, and before she can adequately warn her friends of the threat the aliens start blasting them. All of her friends die here. Blood flies and people have bits blown off by alien weaponry, but contrasted with the overwhelmingly lame and castrated tone of everything we've seen so far and what we'll see ahead it feels more like a self-aware concession than a coherent part of any kind of vision. "Okay we made halo gay and aren't going to express any kind of masculine feeling for this entire show, but look, heads blown off. Aren't we hardcore?" I feel like this happens in a fair bit of media now, 'GORE' being used to try to hide the fact everything has been castrated and sanitised. Which game is more hardcore? Nu-doom or Farcry2?
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https://i.ibb.co/DGwXk5W/image.png]
She runs home to warn the Mystery Meat Militia, who get their extremely cheap low effort props ready to defend their extremely cheap and low effort set home from invaders.
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https://i.ibb.co/MBPrxzs/image.png]
And here it is, Halo TV's action and effects in all of their glory. Here's a shot for you but I'll link the whole scene.
[Video:
https://youtu.be/AaTnX6Y79Mk]
[Video:
https://youtu.be/yIOt_tawdjc]
If you can't be bothered watching, the aliens are unstoppable super-orcs until the master chief and his friends arrive and kill them all with their superhero and power ranger moves. This being kind of retarded I don't see as a problem. Bungie were science fiction nerds, but also dealing with the constraints of what the game did, and what looked cool. It was never about making perfect hard sense. Then this doesn't have the constraint of having to harmonise with the game holding it back, but it comes out gay. "action" scenes in isolation often aren't that much fun to watch. I really believe that they can live or die on the spirit of the whole work they're contained within. Maybe this would feel at the very least acceptable if the whole feel of the show wasn't estrogen-infused vomit.
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https://i.ibb.co/3Rh9SCC/image.png]
Everyone is dead, Rose Tico's backstory is complete. Motivation: established. Or maybe not really, her story gets very stupid.
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https://i.ibb.co/pXLgjBJ/image.png]
Master Chief runs off to find what the aliens were after and finds some ancient technology macguffin. Touching it gives him a flashback to an idyllic childhood.
I'll skip ahead a bit here and cover something I consider important. A running theme in this show is how horrible it is that Master Chief was taken as a child to be made into a soldier. Taken advantage of him, life was so great, he needs magic space technology to suppress his memories and feelings, war is hell, power is unjust, it's a bunch of Hunger Games stuff about how power is bad and there are no great people, only bent out of shape inauthentic spirits. This is a master chief who needs to go to therapy, and from this point on we're going to be seeing very little in the way of aliens, and a lot of scenes that are pretty much therapy sessions to reform this poor boy-victim turned instrument of power.
Contrast that to Bungie's vision of The Master Chief. A boy who was chosen to be a soldier for his already manifesting violent and competitive tendencies, who more or less went along with the military willingly, is aware of his entire life history, and loves his forceful adopters for providing him with opportunities to push himself and test every limit he has in the open arena that only war can provide. He is aware that he's been instrumentalised, but this is also a kind of liberation. They took what he was, and turned him into a demigod wielding the greatest powers and shouldering the greatest responsibilities in the world. The Master Chief kills people, aliens, whatever. He's a finely tuned master of violence and he loves to do his thing. Their Master Chief is not a tragic figure, he's a heroic one. War has not robbed his life of colour and meaning, it's provided more than he could ever have dreamed of without it.
And people called Moviebob a kook when he said he detected a trace of Nazism in Bungie's work.
This has gotten long now so I might call it here for the minute and run through some more tomorrow. We'll be able to pick up the pace as things get a bit uneventful from here and I don't have too many particular points to make. Hoping it's starting to make some sense what I mean about Halo TV being spiritually different.
