This past weekend saw Paramount unveil the first full trailer for its Halo television series, a project which has now been literally decades in the making. I still remember when the likes of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were attached to helm the adaptation as a film, a far-flung reality which has now settled into an episodic venture that, all things considered, actually looks pretty darn good. It has big fan film energy at points, but manages to express enough of the franchise hallmarks while simultaneously teasing lore that has only ever been explored in the books and comics. Prepare yourselves, we’re going in deep.
Judging from the trailer, the television series will be a relatively faithful depiction of humanity’s conflict with the Covenant, a battle that will usher in the discovery of an ancient ring capable of destroying the entire galaxy. We see established characters like Master Chief, Cortana, Captain Jacob Keyes, and even Catherine Halsey. We see smaller battles between the UNSC and Covenant forces erupt before ushering in the start of a larger war, one that will inevitably involve the holy ring and the religious zealots desperate to make its dawn of galactic destruction a reality. So far, so Halo.
There’s also the Index – essentially a fancy key – and conversations with certain characters that echo key moments from Combat Evolved and other earlier games. This show is clearly trying to pull a Hannah Montana and be the best of both worlds without dragging itself down with a predictable approach to faithfulness. Yet all of these familiar moments are juxtaposed with new faces and mysterious concepts that threw me through a loop. I’m sure those who have read all the novels and comics will know exactly who the sexy tentacle lady is and why she is ensnaring humanity under the will of the Covenant, but I’m completely in the dark and that’s so exciting as someone who has been a fangirl of this series her entire life.
The same can be said for Yerin Ha’s Kwan Ha Boo, who will likely act as a young heroine to help highlight Master Chief’s evident humanity despite the Spartan programme’s determination to strip young soldiers of their faculties. Halsey describes Chief as a super soldier to be controlled and improved throughout the trailer, an identity he will likely cast aside in order to do the right thing and save humanity in the full show. The games never really bother to talk about the moral implications of this messed up experiment, with the exception of Infinite which brushes across it in audio logs and cutscenes before never mentioning it again. Chief isn’t an unstoppable hero, he’s a scared little boy in a suit of power armour injected with enough chemicals and military indoctrination to keep him fighting.
The show needs to go further, and make Halsey a villain on equal footing with the Covenant, showing how far she is willing to go in order to bring Chief under her control and demand every single Spartan in the UNSC abide by her unreasonable wishes. She’s a mother whose birds are flying the nest after realising how twisted her upbringing has become, and the show would be missing such an opportunity if it failed to capitalise on that potential drama. Thankfully the trailer is clearly teasing such a plotline, featuring a few flashbacks and dialogue snippets that aim to flesh out how fucked up it really is to be someone like Master Chief. Yet he still has Cortana.
Despite all the show’s potential gleaned from the trailer alone, one sticking point amidst fans right now is the portrayal of Cortana. She isn’t the naked blue lady we’ve grown so accustomed to over the years, even if Jen Taylor returns to offer her iconic voice to the role with all the passion and sarcasm we’ve come to expect from the AI companion. I think she looks great, both in terms of performance and appearance, but the internet seems unhappy about the uncanny valley effect she exudes. She is neither live action nor CG, aiming to occupy a middle ground that makes it clear she is an artificial programme that exists outside the very real humans that otherwise make up the show’s cast. I suppose you need to make that distinction in order to avoid confusing the viewer, and given we’ve only seen Cortana for a handful of frames, it is far, far too early to be making snap judgments.
As gamers love to do, they have drawn conclusions long before there is enough evidence to make such lofty claims. Cortana looks weird, shut the entire show down and set it on fire. Come on now, Halo Infinite only launched a few weeks ago and reinvented Cortana’s character with a new look, personality and drive that finally killed off her original incarnation for good. She also has clothes now, which is much nicer than a naked blue lady in a world which has shown time and time again that other constructs are perfectly capable of being dressed and resembling their human creators.
She is just naked because Bungie wanted to get its rocks off I suppose, which was pretty typical of gaming back in 2000. Let’s give the show a benefit of a doubt and not bury Cortana over a trailer. I mean, it appears her and Master Chief will meet for the first time in the show itself, showing that we will be taking an alternate look at the Combat Evolved timeline instead of dropping into an instance where the two have been intimate partners for years. This will be a very hard relationship to develop and live up to the games and books that inspired it, since for me, it is what Halo is all about.
If the show launches and Cortana looks disgustingly out of place I will happily eat my hat, and perhaps it will also fail to develop her as a character with the same depth and personality as her gaming counterpart. But with the same actress behind her, it seems that Paramount is aware of the legacy associated with these characters and what viewers familiar with the games will expect to see, and that’s a very wise balance to strike when so many adaptations launch only to falter under the weight of their own mediocrity.
I’m not a fan of ‘breaking the curse’ of bad video game adaptations because it feels like a reductive moniker to place on productions with a lot of passion behind them, but the Halo television series feels like a project that understands the gravity of its source material without being afraid to expand upon it in bold and unexpected ways. I hope it does the same with Cortana, even if it means reinventing the character’s appearance and pushing her to pastures anew. Halo fans are some of the most toxic around, so we should have expected a reaction such as this directed towards a female character, but let’s not let it ruin a potentially good thing.
Source: Read Full Article