By now you’ve undoubtedly seen the trailer for the new Halo show, and based on the title
of this video you might think that I’m either A. someone who hates video games and gaming
culture or B. someone who is salty about one of the creators of the new Halo TV show that’s
coming to paramount plus sometime in 2022.
Honestly I’m a huge fan of the halo universe.
It’s lore is rich and has some really cool ideas.
I’ve played all the games and read many of the books, and seriously I do hope that
everything I say in this video will end up being completely wrong.
I want this show to be good, I really do, but I can’t shake this nagging feeling that
it’s going to be just plain bad.
I really don’t have much faith that it’s going to be anything that Halo fans will hold
in high regard.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that this show is going to end up flopping even harder than
the previous attempts at adapting halo into a live action story.
I say these things not because I think the creators don’t have the skillset or are
not capable of making a good halo series.
I say these things because as someone who loves the games and has spent well over a
decade of my life studying and making films, I just don’t see a path forward for the
series that will result in a good product.
A lot of these problems lie with the Halo source material itself, but there are also
economic and film business issues that I think will really exacerbate the issues that lie
within the source material.
Now before you hit the dislike and click away let me explain what I mean when I say issues
with the source material.
As a game franchise halo is awe-inspiring.
It has rich details and an interesting world.
I think you could make a really great series or film in that world.
There have been many books written in that world and a lot of them have some really great
stories, and, we will come back to that, but I think the biggest, glaring issue with Halo
that will cause the TV show to have issues is that they are using Master Chief as the
show’s protagonist.
The Halo TV show wiki lists Master Chief, Dr. Halsey, Captain Keyes, Miranda Keyes,
and others characters that existed around the events of Halo 1, Halo 2, and Halo Reach.
So it’s safe to assume we have a decent understanding of which version of Master Chief
will be represented on screen.
This version of Master Chief is not the John 117 we meet in the book, the Fall of Reach.
The video game version of Master Chief is pretty one-dimensional.
At that point in the game he pretty much does whatever he is told, and he doesn’t have
any real philosophical ideas that drive his character.
His dialogue is pretty stripped back.
I mean that kinda makes sense.
It would be really weird if the main character in your first person shooter had to overcome
debilitating character flaws in order to save the day.
I think 343 realized this and tried to have some sort of interesting antagonism with the
master chief in the later games.
Them making him sort of go rogue was at least somewhat interesting but playing half the
games as another character and then all the characters on your team hating your favorite
character made the game significantly less fun.
As a video game having a badass quiet super soldier that kicks ass is super fun.
But when you are trying to tell a story that resonates, especially over 10 episodes and
not just 2 hours, it can be really challenging if your protagonist doesn’t have anything
to overcome emotionally or at the very least some belief that the rest of the characters
need to learn themselves.
Imagine if, in the video games, master chief was haunted by the fact that he was stolen
away as a child.
If he had some sort of PTSD or inner wish to find his real parents.
The only person he cares about personally is Cortona, and that takes like 3 games before
we start to see that relationship really develop.
A vengeful master chief haunted by his past is much more interesting than a super soldier
who does exactly what he’s trained to do without batting an eye.
I think some of the other adaptations realized this about chief and tried to shy away from
having him as the protagonist of their stories.
A big issue with these, to be completely honest, is that I don’t think they had the budgets
to write stories that would really work.
Nightfall and Forward unto dawn both had budgets of 10 million dollars.
For comparison, 10 episodes of this halo show has a budget of $200 million.
So that’s $20Million per 1 hour screen time versus the $20 million they spent to make
two 90 minute movies.
When I look back at those, I do think that the filmmakers had the right idea, but they
just couldn’t quite make it work.
If you look at Halo CE, at its core, that game is kind of a horror game.
The best parts of that story are when you are dealing with the flood.
There’s literal found footage of soldiers getting murdered by the flood.
They tried to sort of replicate that in Nightfall by having the Lekgolo, the hunter worms, be
sort of a monster antagonist.
But when you are adapting a video game and it also has to set up another video game you
are kind of filmmaking with your hands behind your back.
I mean really, these are just expensive commercials for the video games.
There’s so many other boxes they have to check because they are trying to sell copies
of Halo.
There’s so many things they CAN'T do because the marketing team won’t let them.
We’ll dig deeper into that in the section about the economics of all this and the film
industry itself, but I do want to mention something else before we get into that.
Halo, as a game, has incredibly high stakes.
Like “save all of humanity every time” level stakes.
From a gameplay perspective, that’s totally cool, I’m all about it, let's go kill some
aliens.
But when you have a TV show, it can’t rely on action scenes to carry it.
It has to have a character driven plot, and it needs to make sense.
A big part of that is understanding why the antagonistic forces are doing what they do.
The covenant, as a species, are kind of awful antagonists.
They do everything they do because of their religious beliefs.
Kill all humans, activate halo rings, glass planets because Great Journey blah blah.
That’s super abstract and it doesn’t always feel personal enough.
Antagonists need to have some sort of opposing philosophy that actually makes sense.
For example, one of everyone’s favorite villains, Thanos, wanted to wipe out half
the universe.
That’s a tall order, but he did that because everyone on his planet died due to overpopulation
and lack of resources.
In his mind he was doing what he thought was right.
As a viewer you are like oh shit, he’s definitely not right, but I could see why he would feel
that way.
Compare that with a show like the walking dead, where the zombies want to kill you because
they are just... zombies.
They are really only the main antagonists for the first couple of episodes.
They are mindless so they can’t really have philosophical differences with the protagonists.
Because of this the characters begin to have conflict with the other humans, the non zombies.
Eventually the walkers are like not even a threat really.
You go full episodes without seeing zombies at all.
I just don’t think that Lore is enough to go on when it comes to telling a good story.
The Warcraft Movie was pretty faithful to the source material, and that universe is
lore rich too, it even has some interesting philosophical arguments that can create some
riveting conflict.
The problem is that lore is like all plot and no character.
It’s just impossible to tell an interesting story without characters that are fully fleshed
out.
It’s going to be extremely tough to make a compelling show that fits with Halo canon,
is a different story from the games, but also meets fan expectations.
You might think, well they could just tell a different story in that universe.
Maybe don’t have Master chief as the main character, maybe make it about a smaller story.
I think that the previous adapters thought about all of this, but I think that is where
the problems with economics come in.
For the studios making this show to spend $200M on the first season, it has to have
master chief, Full stop.
200 mil is a lot to blow on a show and they aren’t gonna spend it on something risky.
They aren’t gonna make something that is too unfamiliar to fans.
To be fair, As halo fans, most of us want master chief to be in it.
I know that I wanna see him on screen too, but I just don’t think that’s what’s
best for the story, at least not the Halos 1 through Reach version of Chief.
For the filmmakers, they have this impossible task of taking what is in the video game,
making a new story that fits with what we have already seen, check the boxes of characters
we know and love, and not piss everyone off.
I don’t think it’s just that the filmmakers they chose aren’t good enough, and I don’t
think it’s a casting thing.
For this to be good, it has to have a large budget, but for it to have a large budget,
executives will require a cast of characters we know and love.
But those characters, for them to be canon, will not make a compelling, character driven,
story.
To the executives greenlighting this stuff, it’s a numbers game.
Halo 3 has sold over 14.5 million copies.
Over 10 weeks for 10 episodes you’d have to subscribe to Paramount+ for three months.
If you only converted half of those 14.5 Million sales into Paramount+ subscriptions for 3
months that only comes out to a little over 108 Million.
Luckily their other subscribers can help the pad the budget for this thing, but it really
has to drive subscriptions during the first few weeks in order to get a season 2.
Because of this, I think there’s no way they’d try to do anything different or go
another route than having the show be about the characters we know.
They have to make their money back so of course they are going to have Master Chief front
and center on this.
Unfortunately, as I said before, I think that’s going to be the death of it.
There’s already warning signs on this too.
It’s been in development since 2013, it’s taken a really long time for it to get off
the ground.
Sure Spielberg is attached as Executive Producer, but he’s not the showrunner, and it’s
looking like the showrunners have already said they won’t be back if it gets greenlit
for a second season.
Clearly they weren’t happy with some part of the project, or the filmmakers were just
not that into it, either way that’s a red flag to me.
I hope I’m wrong on this.
I really do.
I want this to be good, but it's a tall order for sure.
But what do you guys think?
Do you want to see master chief of the small screen?
Do you have any ideas for what the filmmakers could do to actually make this a good show?
Let me know in the comments down below.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you got this far then hopefully you enjoyed the video.
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I’ll be posting lots more video essay slash film analysis content in the coming months
that you won’t want to miss!
Thanks again for watching guys, I’ll see you in the next one!