Halo TV premiere review: Uneven start saved by a stellar Chief

[Karlston]

Spoiler-free review will spare you from likely social media reveals ahead of March 24.

Actor Pablo Schreiber dons Master Chief's iconic armor in the new Halo TV series, and in its first two episodes, he is the show's saving grace.

Paramount / Amblin

Halo had to reach its fifth full-length video game before toying with the idea of Master Chief being a bad guy.

 

The Halo TV show, debuting March 24 exclusively on Paramount+, gets there within its first 55 minutes. And this moment is representative of the dark, series-pivoting stakes that the new "silver timeline" is gunning for—eager to pry back the shiny, military-good-guy veneer of the video games and explore the darkest corners that have hidden within Halo games all along.

 

That alone may be reason enough for series fans and newcomers alike to tune in—but goodness, does Halo's TV series need all the help it can get. I've seen the first two episodes so far, and the casting, acting, script, and often stagnant pacing struggle to keep this Warthog on the road between some memorable highlights.

“Spartans aren’t human”

The Halo TV series revolves around a "silver timeline" that introduces three new Spartans. But these non-Chief combatants don't figure largely into the first two episodes that we've seen thus far.

Paramount / Amblin

As I previously wrote at Ars, Halo's TV version exists in an alternate "silver" timeline. The basics remain the same as the primary games-and-books canon (Master Chief in iconic green armor, Cortana as an omnipresent AI, the Covenant are alien beings, etc.), but other major events and characters can emerge or change. And the first TV episode is a good example of this creative decision turning out well... for the most part.

 

The pilot episode toys with surface-level Halo expectations by landing in an unexpected scene: a rebel outpost. Everyone here hates the series' iconic human military force, known as the UNSC, and they really hate those power-armored soldiers. "Spartans aren't human," one rebel says during a rowdy scene in a bar. "They keep killing."

 

New series character Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), who comes from a rebel settlement, quickly becomes Master Chief's most unlikely ally in this TV series.

Paramount / Amblin

This opening sequence is a brisk-yet-thorough world-building that is neither confusing nor overwrought. Most sci-fi TV series would kill to launch with it. And that's before all hell and lasers break loose. This rebel compound on the planet Madrigal is soon overrun by a conflict that demands intervention by the Spartans—and while the resulting battle confirms that Master Chief is a Covenant-slaying badass, it also shows him falling short of the archetype that fans and novices alike might assume him to be.

 

In one midcombat moment, Chief silently nods to a UNSC-hating rebel leader in a way that feels pitch-perfect—we may disagree, but now is not the time, the nod seems to say. Yet the combat winds down with the surviving rebels not necessarily being a priority. A dramatic camera zoom on one survivor emphasizes this point, as if to shout to viewers: don't trust the UNSC. And that's not the last time Halo suggests this to viewers, even as we enter the series assuming Master Chief is supposed to be the Good Guy.

Over-the-top violence—yet not much of it

By the way, parents: If you've enjoyed Halo games with kids ages 10-17 and have excused its colorful violence as a milder alternative to the military-combat likes of Call of Duty, rethink your assumptions. Halo's TV series began life as a Showtime project, and its violence is in "premium-cable" territory. Covenant monsters sometimes die with visceral gore and unflinching footage of point-blank gunshot wounds, and a second-episode sequence includes a military execution in which a despot bags prisoners' heads before popping each with a pistol.

 

Despite this warning, the first two episodes of Halo don't have very much combat. They add up to 110 minutes, yet they only include one game-caliber showdown, along with a fine-if-toothless space flight interlude (in which Chief masterfully flies through an "impossible" asteroid field, because, duh, of course he's not going to crash and die this early into the show).

 

Familiar character Dr. Halsey figures prominently in the Halo TV series' noncombat portions.

Paramount / Amblin

Halo's handlers clearly want viewers to invest in the politics and in-fighting of the UNSC's inner circle, one where military leaders butt heads with the researchers who lead the Spartan project. That shouldn't surprise fans of the series' many books, which have dug into the UNSC's machinations, and there's meat on the bone of premise like, "with great Spartan armor comes great responsibility."

 

With the right casting and script, perhaps the show could have gotten somewhere near a Halo spin on The West Wing. But these overlong UNSC sequences drag with overexplained plot and dead-faced actors, and their apparent heart, Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone, Californication), never manages to connect with her SyFy-grade castmates in a way that flexes her acting muscles. The character of Halsey has always juggled responsibilities and ambition due to her intense connection to the Spartan supersoldier project, and when we see her finally sit down with Master Chief (portrayed here by Pablo Schreiber, Orange is the New Black), her eyes light up.

 

But that's more the exception than the rule for Halo's UNSC-focused moments, and the soap opera-like results are better described as Dawson's Reach.

Schreiber mostly makes up for the blatant Dune rip-offs

There's surprising life behind Master Chief's mask, aided largely by Pablo Schreiber's performance.

Paramount / Amblin

Thankfully, Schreiber handles the seemingly impossible job of taking the Master Chief character—defined by the plot as a necessarily emotionless husk of a human—and imbuing life and empathy into him without betraying his origins. I'd go so far as to say that Chief is the Dark Souls of real-life acting challenges. While Schreiber's voice and cadence diverge from the stoicism of the games' long-time voice actor, Halo's TV version rarely leaves viewers startled or annoyed by the fact that this timeline's Chief has more to talk about.

 

The best part about Halo thus far is how eagerly it leans into real-world military parallels. Most military-gaming stories tend to gloss over this stuff. How many humans are caught up as collateral damage in the military-industrial complex's march toward its goals? What happens when an armed force stops calling certain populations "survivors" and begins calling them "insurgents"? For soldiers caught up in a conflict, at what point does "duty" deteriorate into "control"? These questions all trouble Master Chief in ways that his Mjolnir superarmor can't deflect. That conflict, along with how Schreiber visibly struggles with it, has me optimistic about what's to come in future episodes.

 

All that being said, however, Halo echoes what Frank Herbert did in Dune decades ago. When Halo isn't aping that series' "the spice must flow" rhetoric, it's showing Master Chief plagued by increasingly revealing dreams or following rebel teens into a secret cavern, where they discover that their planet's native plants double as an LSD-like drug. At this point, Paramount+ may as well hire Zendaya for a brief walk-on role and seal the deal.

What’s Silver Team up to?

This tense UNSC response hints to an unexpected scene in the Halo TV series.

Paramount / Amblin

One hundred ten minutes is long enough to confirm that I'll watch the show, but that's more out of Halo curiosity than genuine hope that the show will pay off compared to other modern sci-fi TV options (including plenty of solid Trek content on the same Paramount+ platform). I'll use one spoiler-free anecdote to clarify why I'll go into the rest of Halo reluctantly.

 

Later in the second episode, Master Chief decides he needs the help of his Silver Team squadmates (the reason is a spoiler), so he lights up a beacon. At this point in the TV show, we've barely seen him interact with these three new-to-Halo Spartan soldiers. The stakes of his decision are potentially massive, in terms of his squadmates having questions about what's been going on. It seems like a juicy opportunity to see them interact in a tense showdown and become more grounded as characters.

 

Yet seconds later, the camera cuts to Chief walking away from his squadmates to take care of another task. The show offers us no conversation, no briefing, and no stare-downs. Maybe this opacity was intentional? The kind of fake-out where we later learn that the Silver Team hatched a plan during that secret meeting, which would bear fruit a little while later?

 

Sadly, the second episode ends with no such suggestion. Instead, Chief seems to ignore every obvious red flag he walks past as the episode concludes. And based on how other conversations play out in the first two episodes, I worry that Halo's TV version is more likely to go the straighter, narrower path, one where low production budgets dictate shortcuts like fewer battles and "that take was good enough, I guess" performances.

Verdict so far: reluctant optimism (and a social media warning)

This remote outpost looks pretty snazzy when the camera zooms out and leans on CGI. But Paramount didn't provide official images of some of the cheaper-looking, non-CGI sets. Some viewers will dig Halo's early Star Trek vibes, but be warned not all of the show looks this polished.

Paramount / Amblin

To its credit, the first two episodes plant intriguing seeds in the form of two characters who are new to the franchise. The first, Kwan (Yerin Ha), is a teenage survivor from Madrigal who sometimes accompanies Chief and forces him to face his humanity in surprising ways. The second, Makee (Charlie Murphy, Peaky Blinders), is a human who's entered the Covenant's inner circle due to her mysterious powers, and while the first two episodes limit her to monologues, her unclear allegiances imply that she may turn out to be a more complicated villain than Halo games typically feature.

 

Between these characters and some solid CGI highlights—including game-caliber gunplay and fantastic digital actors for both Covenant soldiers and their overseers—I could see things picking up in future episodes. (Seriously, the Covenant elders look really cool on both an aesthetic and technical level, and they have me hopeful that the CGI character of Cortana might look better than her original trailer reveal indicated.) The sole combat sequence does nifty stuff with popular Halo weapons for both UNSC and Covenant forces without in any way betraying how they work in the games. I want more, more, more of that. (The same does not go for the brief moments when Halo's camera dips into Chief's first-person perspective, however. This always looks dorky. We get it: The series' inspiration is first-person action. Let us play the game for that stuff.)

 

I'm also leaving out a few massive spoilers for things that pleasantly surprised me. Let me be clear: social media is going to light up with at least one massive spoiler, because the rest of the series hinges on its ramifications. So if you want to go into the show completely blind, stop with this review, mute your social media, and tune in to Paramount+ on March 24 when the first episode debuts. (Halo will have a once-a-week rollout, by the way, as opposed to a Netflix-style binge-launch.)

 

As far as the generally low bar of live-action game translations goes, Halo clears it handily. But the script and production values are too inconsistent so far, and that means I do not urge anyone with less Halo faith than me or other long-time fans to feel anywhere near as optimistic about the remaining seven episodes.

 

Halo TV series' premiere trailer.

 

Halo TV premiere review: Uneven start saved by a stellar Chief