Is the ‘Halo’ series so disappointing that it has hardly been talked about?

For several years, the television adaptation of the video game ‘Halo’ was always on the lists of the most anticipated series. His journey to reach the screen, with Spielberg involved, has been long and complicated and the result, let’s say, not very satisfactory.. Of course, it is not up to ‘The Last of Us’, although that is not easy either. But it is still curious that, after so many years of expectation, the premiere of the ‘Halo’ series made so little noise, neither in the United States when it premiered in March last year on Paramount+, nor here, which has arrived with months late as part of the SkyShowtime catalog without much festivities. And that the series is renewed for a second season.

Where does all this ‘Halo’ stuff come from?

First of all, let’s do a background review. In case you’re absolutely into video games, ‘Halo’ is a franchise that has sold more than 81 million copies and comprises six main games (the first, ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’, was released in 2001 and the last one, ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’, Infinite’, in 2021), in addition to a good handful of secondary works. to understand each other, andIt’s a game of shooting and killing enemies, although it has its history: the protagonist is the Master Chief, a Spartan (superhumans trained to combat, created under questionable ethical decisions) and must fight against the Covenant, a group of theocratic and genocidal aliens that threaten the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), which also does not is that they are completely clean wheat. In essence, gunslingers in space.

And being such a popular IP, Hollywood began to think about its adaptation, being almost a cursed project. Already in 2005 it was considered to take the franchise to the cinema with a Columbia Pictures project and a script by Alex Garland (’28 days later’) that did not materialize; That same script would be rewritten, mind you, by DB Weiss from ‘Game of Thrones’ when the project passed into the hands of 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, who even had negotiations with Guillermo del Toro. There was no movie. What did come out were two minor projects: ‘Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn’ and ‘Halo: Nightfall’, both conceived as series of short episodes and later remade as movies, which did not have any kind of impact.

But the project that would truly arouse the interest of the industry would begin to take shape in 2013 when Xbox Entertainment Studios and 343 announced that they were preparing a television series with Steven Spielberg, as producer, and his company Amblin Television. With that name on board, doubts were dispelled as to whether this was another low-key adaptation. Later, it was learned that it would go to Showtime and it would be a high-budget series, the great bet of the channel. However, the ‘Halo’ series got stuck for years in the development process, with various ideas and arrivals from directors and screenwriters, and it would not be until February 2021 when shooting began, with Pablo Schreiber as the protagonist and already with views to premiere it on Paramount+ instead of Showtime.

And how is the ‘Halo’ series?

As we said at the beginning, despite being a highly anticipated series, the ‘Halo’ series did not get, far from it, that everyone talked about it. And less for good. Although if we get benevolent we could affirm that It is not an absolutely failed fiction (it stays close), the truth is that it has few elements that make it stand out. To begin with, the mythology of the original ‘Halo’ drinks from many referents of science fiction and the space operas and the series, by making it its own, does not offer any point of novelty. This could be a hodgepodge of ideas from ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Galactica,’ ‘Star Trek,’ and other works in the genre.

The story does not contribute anything either and, in summary, it is quite similar to that of ‘The Mandalorian’: following an act of insurrection, the Master Chief decides not to kill a girl and instead escorts her to safety (yes, another dry gentleman who travels with an infant out there); this seasoned with galactic machinations of little consistency. At the script level, ‘Halo’ is quite flimsy and seems like an accumulation of things seen a thousand times. And it doesn’t help that its protagonist has, by definition, to lack charisma; being a super-soldier they have stripped him of his humanity and he has to go through the episodes with an impassive face.

And finally, and very important, there is the visual and technical level of the series that is not something to write home about either. Does the file cover? Okay, yes. Is it a spectacular work of science fiction that looks very expensive and state-of-the-art? Well no. It is closer to a ‘Stargate’ than to ‘Andor’, so to speak.to the antipodes of ‘Foundation’ or ‘Dune’, where we witnessed the portrait of distant worlds that were visually overwhelming and evocative. Here the monsters and the digital effects do not go beyond what is acceptable.

This being the case, it is understandable that ‘Halo’ was not the series that drove the entire globe (and nearby countries) crazy. It’s more of a fiction see if you got SkyShowtime, without much hope, on a silly Sunday afternoon in which you are not afraid to fall into the arms of Morpheus on the sofa with the drool falling. For that, it’s not bad. Or if.