Halo: Look past smoke and mirrors and TVNZ-hosted adaptation for game fans only
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
REVIEW: Twenty minutes in to the pilot episode of the much-awaited Halo TV series (now streaming on TVNZ OnDemand), everyone – bar one person – you've been introduced to in the premiere's opening moments is dead.
Including a cavern full of kids hiding from alien invaders.
It should be a brave signalling of intentions for the long-heralded adaptation of the Xbox video game series, but instead, thanks to ropey CGI, some fairly awful dialogue and some cheap looking outfits, it feels awfully flat and depressingly rote.
For those unfamiliar with the game series, Halo is set around the premise of the Spartans, an elite group of fighters who battle an alien threat known as the Covenant.Head of their group is the enigmatic (ie monosyllabic) Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber), a hulking brute of a Robocop-like soldier whose real name is John, and who much like Judge Dredd and the Mandalorian, mostly doesn't remove his helmet.
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The game series has an avid bunch of followers – the latest, Halo Infinite has hooked in some 20 million players globally. So to say there's a weight of expectation of the TVNZ-hosted new series is perhaps an understatement.
In the first episode, we're transported to Madrigal, a far-flung planet on the edge of the Earth-run colonies. The planets are ruled with an iron fist by the UNSC, a seemingly benign organisation, but one which deploys Spartans to regiment their wishes.
When Madrigal is suddenly invaded,
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