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Monday, January 31, 2022

The trailer for the HALO series has me convinced that the March debut will knock it out of the park.

The new trailer for HALO dropped this last week. I was never a player of the games, but I watched some friends play. As a first-person shooter, I was intrigued. And I also liked the sci-fi armor suit, which has been a staple of science fiction for twenty-five years, and before that a staple of comic book type stories.

I expect that people will draw comparisons with Arcane from League of Legends, which really knocked it out of the park as far as a video game adaptation goes. However, the track record on video game adaptations to this point has been bad. I'm sure that going into this thing, which premieres in March of 2022, there will be plenty of people posting the equivalent of, "I hope the writing is not garbage." This is a peculiar comment to me, mostly because I know what goes into writing. And I've never been impressed with most video game writing. What I saw of HALO didn't qualify as good either. So it's weird that people used to consuming such low-hanging fruit would suddenly feel compelled to raise the bar on the writing now that it's getting a live-action adaptation. It's as if the old spoon-fed garbage they consumed for hours is suddenly not worth their time if there is no game attached. (Shrug) I just notice these things; I can't say that I've ever understood them.

That being said, the trailer (which is embedded below) does look good. I like that there is a "Cortana" as the friendly artificial intelligence. It reminds me that this whole thing is a Microsoft property, and why they named their Windows assistant "Cortana." There is also a rumor that they spent $200 million on the first season of this thing, so it may be a pretty spectacular first season. Paramount + (thus far) has been worth every penny I've spent on it since first signing up to watch Star Trek: Discovery, and I'm looking forward to a second sci-fi franchise with now baited breath. Anyone else have any opinions on Halo?

2 comments:

  1. I only played the game once or twice so I'm not really familiar with it. If they're still going with that you never see the Master Chief's face that would give it kind of a Mandalorian feel.

    I think this could do better than a lot of video game adaptations because there is a more robust story with the original game and its many sequels and whatnot. In the end it boils down to a war between humans and aliens, doesn't it? That's a pretty basic concept so it really shouldn't be too hard to build a decent story around it.

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  2. I just watched that trailer last night. (I had nothing to watch.) I liked it. It did feel rather paint-by-numbers in how trailers are generally constructed. But I might just be nit-picking because video game adaptation, so I'm not expecting it to be good. But it did look interesting. I might be tempted.

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