The Halo show is nothing like the games, and that’s why it’s good
After seeing the first episode of Halo, I’m totally on board. I’m a Halo lore hobbyist, meaning that while I’ve enthusiastically experienced the campaigns of Halo’s Combat Evolved through Guardians, go on regular Halopedia wiki dives, and own a well-loved copy of Eric Nylund’s The Fall Of Reach, I haven’t consumed everything the Halo universe has to offer. (Ghosts of Onyx, I swear I’ll get to you one day.) But based on the Halo stories I do know, I think Paramount Plus’ series offers a far more compelling look at the Master Chief than anything the games have done so far.
Spoilers for the first episode of Halo below:
It’s hard translating video games to film and TV. It’s only recently been done right with Arcane, Castlevania, and the Sonic movie. And the common thread for all these successful titles seems to be “chuck out every established story the audience knows and tell a new one.” Halo’s showrunner Steven Kane said in an interview with Variety that “We didn’t look at the game. We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.” His comments drew criticisms from Halo fans on social media worried that this show was going to look nothing like the games. It doesn’t, and that’s what makes it really good.
I love that the central premise of the first episode has barely anything to do with the fight against the Covenant. It would have been very easy to make a show about the Master Chief with his Blue Team pals running up on the Gravemind or 343 Guilty Spark. Instead, the entire first episode is all about the friction between the Chief and his UNSC masters — a topic that wasn’t even broached until Halo 5: Guardians and, even then, only in the context of “I
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