I’ve never played Halo. I’ve seen the games played, obviously, and I’ve seen a little bit of the story, so I’m coming at the new Paramount Plus series brand spanking new. If you want a unique perspective on this one, that’s what I’ve got.

I’ve read online that the show isn’t super faithful to the storyline of the games. Since I’m coming at it completely fresh, just as a story itself, I don’t come at it with any bias. If you’re looking for someone who knows the games and knows the lore to sit here and complain about stuff, I’m not the guy. I’m going to take this the way I take every other sci-fi series and give it my review.

The setup: it’s the year 2552, and humans on the planet Madrigal have been fighting for independence from Earth, but a fatal encounter with the alien Covenant complicates things. Master Chief John-117 and his super soldier Spartans join the fight, and after the battle Master Chief heads to his home planet of Reach with a Madrigal survivor and a mysterious object he discovered on the planet.

Madrigal, and the Kid at the Bar

The episode is called “Contact,” and it starts with a really cool pan up of the planet Madrigal. This is considered a tier four heavy water extraction planet, and I don’t know what all those places are, but it’s in the UEG outer colonies, so there’s an area of space. Sorry, I’m stuck with Star Trek and Star Wars in the brain, so it’s all galaxies and universes with me.

It’s really cool looking, too. You get a bar setting with the propaganda news on, and these guys sitting around telling stories. One young kid is mouthing off and being real lippy, and they tell him, look, man, you wouldn’t stand a chance. He comes back with something about marines, and the answer is, yeah, Spartans aren’t marines. I’ve got to admit, he’s absolutely correct.

Then you go to the outer edges of town and meet a girl who’s the daughter of the general, who we met at the very beginning. These people are considered insurrectionists. They’re a colony that wants to separate from the rest of the UEG, so they’re very much on the lookout for UNSC forces. She’s out with her friends, partying, looking for these special plants that ultimately make them high. It’s a bunch of kids causing trouble.

The CGI, I’m sorry, the green screen isn’t the greatest in some of these scenes. Some of them do look practical, like when they’re in the forest. But there’s one where they’re walking up on top of a ledge and you can see the colony’s refinery area, and it’s not the best, especially considering how long it’s taken us to get this series.

The Show Defines Itself Fast

Then the general’s daughter sees a glint of something. This is the very first time we see something completely unknown, and the show defines what it’s going to be quickly. A blast from nowhere just obliterates this girl’s friend, and she’s got blood all over her. This thing we can’t see comes racing through, knocking out all her friends. She goes running, falls down a hill, and shoots a red flare. Everyone’s yelling red flare, red flare, and they think the UNSC is coming with the military.

So they’re all ready, the camera’s panning through, and then boom, in comes the Covenant. These aliens are pretty hardcore. They look good. I like the CGI on them, and they lay waste to these guys.

The kid from the bar runs up to where the general’s daughter had hidden the kids and some other young people in what they call a vault. Then this laser sword thing comes in and just melts through the metal. It’s the classic energy weapon I saw in advertisements for the game years ago, and it’s pretty cool. Again, I’ve seen the game played, so I understand that visually there’s a lot happening here that’s pretty faithful. And of course they’re trying to shoot the Covenant, and the Covenant have energy shields.

Master Chief Lands, and So Does My Problem With the VFX

Right as things are getting real rock and roll bad, you see a Pelican, which is what they call their ships, come flying in. A single figure comes falling straight down and lands in a classic superhero pose, and we’ve got our very first shot of Master Chief.

He’s a mixture of CGI and a guy in the suit, and the way you know which one you’re looking at is that the CGI one does the crazy jumps across buildings, and it looks jumpy. Good visual effects marry the character to the scene. This looks like a character that was pre-rendered and then overlaid. It’s almost like they didn’t animate him to physically move through the terrain. He’s a figure running and jumping in place, and then in post they’re moving that figure in the hopes it’ll match the movement of the camera. That’s what I mean by bad CGI and bad VFX. The renders look good, but they probably weren’t married to the scenes until much later in post. That’s my film industry experience coming out.

But when you get to the dude in the outfit, he looks dope.

This Is How You Do the Helmet Shot

What’s awesome is you get the in-helmet HUD view, and you see the nose of the gun. This particular moment is how you do this right.

Years ago there was a movie called Doom, based on the old Doom video games, with The Rock in it, Dwayne Johnson. They tried very much to do this kind of thing, and it felt super contrived. This looks good. This looks like the cut scenes I’ve seen from the game, so I was really kind of like, okay, cool, that’s pretty dope.

The other Spartans show up, four of them total, and man, if they don’t each take out two. You’ve got another guy on overwatch with the big giant space sniper rifle, and they’re just wasting some fools. They’re wrecking Covenant guys all over the place, and it’s actually pretty cool.

You also get the general looking into the vault, and you see that when the Covenant guy put the sword through that door, he opened it and butchered all the children. They’re showing us just how ruthless the Covenant is.

The next moment is the same problem I was talking about. The Covenant dude looks good. He picks up the general and shoves the sword through him, and even that looks good. But then there’s a brief shot where he’s holding the general by the neck, and that looks bad. There’s a forced shadow under the hand. The elements look good, but they’re not being married together right.

The Thing Under the Ship

Sure enough, they’ve cleared the area, and Master Chief says they’ve got to go find the ship where the Covenant landed. You get this really awesome intro sequence, and it ends with a scene that’s about to become my wallpaper, because this thing looks pretty dope. I’m probably going to use it as the thumbnail for the video.

They find the ship, and underneath it they find what the Covenant has been searching for. Nobody knows what it is. It’s this cool looking rock thing. They call it stone, but it looks like technology of some kind. Master Chief touches it, and as soon as he does, it lights up, and it’s very reminiscent of cut scenes I’ve seen from the game. They do seem to be pretty faithful to the visual style of the games, and I love that. I love the way they’re handling action, too. A lot of good things are happening at the same time.

He goes through this experience where he sees what he thinks are visions. A kid, a dog, someone’s family. He tells one of the others about it, and then they make the decision to split up. He’s going one way with the thing, back to the UNSC, and they’re going another.

Halsey, the Admiral, and High Charity

We get our first shot of Dr. Halsey at FLEETCOM, which is on Reach. She’s reviewing all of Master Chief’s footage on a giant screen and catches the first sign of what happened. Then the admiral shows up, and the admiral is a pretty mean woman. She comes in questioning all kinds of things, catches something out of the corner of her eye, and says, I thought I told you not to work on this. Later on you see Halsey’s apparently working on clones and cloning.

Halsey wants to see the artifact, and the admiral tells her no, we’re giving it to somebody else. You find out who in a minute.

Then we cut to a place called High Charity, which is the Covenant command. It looks like a big giant brain, or a brain stem, out in space. It’s fairly interesting looking. You get an exchange between a Covenant guy who looks like all the other aliens and someone who looks human, all in the alien language. I can’t tell if she’s a clone or not. They’re telling her that one of the Spartans, the one they call Demon, touched the artifact and was able to activate it the same way this girl can. So we’re seeing the bigger world and the bigger plot potential.

Article 72

Back on the Pelican, the girl wakes up and sees Master Chief just sitting there in his own head. Later on you find out he gets all kinds of information in his HUD. Those of you who are familiar with the games already know this, so forgive me. I’m informing some other people.

A woman shows up, very young, which is why I keep wanting to say girl. She’s the person working on Covenant and alien artifact research for the military. She tries to talk to the general’s daughter, who you later find out is named Kwan. She tells her, listen, this is what we’re really facing, this is the real war, I need you to help us tell the others. And Kwan’s like, I’m not going to help you.

A little later the researcher’s father shows up, and he’s a higher up muckety-muck in the military too. He tells her he wanted to come tell her that Kwan’s succumbed to her injuries. She says, what are you talking about, I just talked to her. And he tells her there’s this thing called an Article 72.

Article 72 is a kill order. When the UNSC or the UEG, and there are so many acronyms, so many acronyms, deems you a threat, they eliminate that threat. Later on you find out Kwan has been through this before. Her mother was a rebel, an insurrectionist if you will, who was terminated by Master Chief and another Spartan because she was an Article 72.

You also find out this young lady is Dr. Miranda Keyes, and Dr. Miranda Keyes is the daughter of her father, obviously, Captain Jacob Keyes, and Dr. Catherine Halsey.

For those of you who’ve played the games, I don’t know how close any of this is to the story you know, so please take my amazement and fascination with a grain of salt. I know Halo is steeped in history and lore, and we’ve been waiting on this for a long time. It was supposed to be a movie, it was supposed to be a series, whatever. I loved The Fall of Reach, which I think was a short film. It had the original voice of the guy, and I do kind of miss that voice. I may do a review of it, because it was actually pretty good and I had no clue what I was getting into. When Master Chief shows up in that, it’s amazing.

You Think That’s How You Take Out Master Chief?

Kwan is talking to Master Chief, who isn’t eating, and she tells him the story of her mom. All of a sudden, in his heads-up display: Article 72 issued. The order is to terminate her.

Master Chief proceeds to go and turn off the cameras in the ship. That flags everything back at HQ, and the admiral’s asking what’s going on, why is your Spartan not doing his job. Halsey says she doesn’t know, and that’s not a good thing.

So they take it upon themselves. They cut the oxygen. He passes out, she passes out. But you think that’s how you take out Master Chief? Shut up. On very low oxygen, when he should be knocked unconscious, he rolls over, goes to a panel, does a thing, and the atmosphere comes back. Oh, they’re upset, by the way. They’re getting ready to send everything.

Meanwhile the girl wakes up and grabs his gun while he’s trying to fix some stuff. She tells him he’s got to stop, and that she’s going to kill him. He tells her about the armor. It’s called Mjolnir armor, love that by the way, Mark VI Mjolnir armor, and he says you won’t make a dent in this.

Then he takes his helmet off and tells her, you’re going to kill me, you’re going to have to do it right here.

The Helmet

It’s our first time seeing his face, and I don’t know how happy I am about that.

I’m sorry. I just got finished watching two seasons, three if you count The Book of Boba Fett, of shows where guys wear helmets predominantly and only reveal their faces when needed. I didn’t even know who the actor was. He’s a guy named Pablo Schreiber, and he’s six five. Big boy. I’m taller, I’m six seven, and I’m totally considering investing about a thousand bucks in getting a Master Chief outfit made. Probably costs more than that. But I think I’d be a dope Spartan, bro.

You spend the rest of the episode with his helmet off, and I’m not happy with that decision. You guys couldn’t have given us even three episodes before we saw his face? I don’t know. I’m just not happy with it.

The Escape

Taking the helmet off is what convinces Kwan it’s okay to trust him. They arrive, and he’s trying to take control of the ship back from the AI. He dismantles the AI, but they manage to shoot him down with a railgun or something. They bring the whole army. The whole army.

The three other Spartans are mobilized at the same time. Halsey meets with them and says, I don’t care what happens, you protect John by all means. They ask her, against friendlies? And the dude says anybody trying to take out Master Chief isn’t a friendly. Right on, bro. Dope.

They’re ready to do just that until Master Chief manages to grab the device. When he grabs it, it unleashes a weird kind of EMP that powers up the Pelican but briefly takes out everything on Reach. They manage to escape, and it’s on.

The Verdict

Halo Episode 1, “Contact,” is a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

I’m excited. It’s not a bad show. It was a good opening, a really good opening, CGI issues aside. Yeah, give it a seven. Not a bad start. I’m in, and we’ll see what it does. It’s going to make for some pretty long mornings doing this on the same day as Picard for now, but either way, man, I’m down.

I’d love to hear what you have to say about the show, especially if you know the games and I don’t. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.