Halo? More like Ha-long...

"Twenty-three-skidoo!"

-me, playing video games

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that I've been playing Halo for like, twenty years. Twenty. Years. Goddamn. Anyway, I mention this because it's a fairly violent shooter full of guns and I hate guns. I think the Second Amendment was talking about hanging on to our muskets in case the British come back, and since we have like an actual military now, there's absolutely no justification for putting up with forty-thousand gun-related deaths every year because a bunch of goons collect assault rifles. I mean, get a new hobby. But still, Halo.

Actual people are going through this
kind of horror right now. It just seems a
little, you know, gross?

I think it's because the violence in the game is sci-fi nonsense. That is, you're shooting aliens and not, you know, people. It's not something like Call of Duty or those Tom Clancy games which just simulate conflicts that are actually happening in the world, but I admit it's a dubious distinction at best. Whatever, where I'm going with this is that I'm familiar with the Halo games and therefore have a reasonably informed opinion of the streaming series based on them. Which, yeah, there's Halo TV show now.

Video game adaptations are--as we talked about recently--historically pretty awful. Sometimes it was because the games being adapted didn't always have much in the way of stories to work with. Take the Super Mario Bros. movie for example. Or, it might be because those producing it didn't think much of the built-in audience that comes along with the fandom. See Mortal Kombat Annihilation. 

I mean refer to it was an example. To be clear, do not see Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. 

Although Cortana is a bit more Polar Express
when everyone else around her isn't CG.

But recently video game adaptations have been taken more seriously and some of them have been pretty decent. And Halo is just that, decent. The cast is good, the special effects and CG aren't as overwhelming as one might expect, and if it matters, the production design is spot on. Like, the world in which it is set feels very Halo-ish. I don't review things on this blog, but let's say it's a B. Like, second tier sci-fi television. But what I can't understand is the pacing. The slow, deliberate pacing.

I mean, it's not Shakespeare, but
at least something's happening.

I just watched episode five and there was a very-Halo-ish extended action scene the likes of which I don't think we've seen since maybe the pilot. And I'm not like, an action person. That is, I tend to lose interest when movies or TV turn into a gratuitously violent series of barely comprehensible jump cuts and explosions, but this was faithful to the game series. And coming as it did in the midst of so much slow burn world-building, it was kind of jarring.

"Oh so that's what Master Chief's
childhood home looked like..."

-no one, ever

So many of Halo's episodes up to this point have been spent following a revolution on some random planet, and the Halsey/Keys' family drama, and delving into Master Chief's childhood, you kind of forget what you're watching. And this would be fine if the games lacked any kind of story, but they don't. Sure, some fleshing out needed to be done. And yeah, I get why the writers needed to humanize Master Chief, but it seems like they could, I don't know, pick up the pace?

In a surprising twist, it wasn't aliens
who built Halo, but ancient Egyptians.

Bail now if you don't want anything from the games spoiled, but the first entry in the series has Master Chief being taken out of stasis to defend a spaceship against an invasion of aliens. The ship then crashes on--wait for it--Halo: a vast ring in space so large that it has an atmosphere and a habitat on the interior surface. The reveal of the ring comes maybe twenty minutes in, and the rest of the story is built on uncovering the mystery of who built it and why. Oh, and running around shooting stuff. It is, after all, a video game.

But five episodes in, we've not even been to the ring. At this point, I'm thinking it's the big reveal for the season finale. A reveal that's spoiled by the source material and in a sense, the title. And I guess that's fine for people unfamiliar with the game, but for the built-in fanbase it's kind of a frustrating game of wondering when are are going to see the titular Halo.

"Ah, now, eventually, you do plan on going to Halo
on your, on you Halo TV show, right? Hello?"

-Dr. Ian Malcom