The broad strokes of the franchise are here, and there’s definitely a whole bunch of stuff that I recognize from the videos games, but most of what I recognize are the long plotlines from the books, which has to be absolutely maddening for anyone that didn’t read nearly every single one of them. There’s also a ton here that’s just unique to the televison series and it’s unfortunate to find the new stuff is the worst part of the show, with gratuititous nudity from the Chef, the Chef having sexual encounters to prisoners of war, to all the Spartans running around without Helmets on for 90% of their screen time. Look, I get it, this is a TV show and it’s difficult to convince an actor to hide their face for most of the show, but look how well it went for The Mandalorian, and if you hire from the perspective that this is mostly going to be a limited Voice Over role, who wouldn’t jump at the chance?
It’s telling that they only brought the voice of Cortana Jen Taylor onto the project when their first choice was unavailable. She’s the vocal heart of the franchise and the original intent was to not include her? Mistakes were made well before filming ever started. They certainly didn’t stop once everyone was on the painfully digital sets. As I said at the top, most of the adapted content was from the books, as the games didn’t have much in the way of the angst that is the revelation that the Spartans had extremely unfortunate origins.
It’s a shame for me personally that this franchise has gone in a direction that I don’t care for, I had bought in on it pretty damn hard. Even the last game was a lackluster release that was released way past when it was intended to be, but is STILL waiting to have co-op added to it.
Will we see a season 2? I hope not. Let the stumbling corpse of HALO die for a while, maybe it can be saved down the road, but right now it’s a franchise in search of meaning.
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