Lol. My expectations were pretty much rock bottom but man oh man its even worse then I expected. My sister and I are huge halo nerds and we're going to hate-watch and riff the shit out of this monstrosity. Edit: Sidenote I wonder if this trailer will finally kill the slowed down popsong cliche once and for all?
I am unhappy with this.
This will be the last shot at live action Halo gets, and you can tell the showrunners don't care. They left (either before production or before release), they ignored the Halo music library and instead used Phil Collins, they had the Chevy Tahoe (I don't care as much about the AK), and they had the bad human lady, which makes no sense. Forward Unto Dawn wasn't good if you weren't already a fan of Halo, and Landfall was just one combat scene. I am sad :deeper-sadness:
Yeah, had a similar thought watching this. I don't know the production story of this thing but up until this point Microsoft/343/bungie(at the time) were actually super protective and hands on with the IP that they basically had to go independent with smaller budgets to get the kind of creative control they wanted and make sure this exact kind of thing didn't happen. Not sure if they just loosened up or this was done internally but man...it does make me sad.
Halo is Microsoft's signature FPS franchise, worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. I guarantee you that they will be making Halo media content for the next twenty years, easy.
The showrunners are being told to churn out content as fast as their overworked team of content lemmings can crank. This ain't Francis Ford Coppola spending three years, doing two major reshoots, and going 10x over budget to make Apocolypse Now. This is five different guys getting hired and fired in rapid succession to deliver the modern day equivalent of Xena Warrior Princess to a streaming platform that's still finding its legs in the middle of the pandemic.
The showrunners aren't being paid to care. They're being paid to deliver the slop.
When they do two more seasons at half cost, they'll be even worse. And when they reboot the franchise in 2026 just in time for the next game release, it'll be as a shitty CGI cartoon produced by the lowest bidder available in some Sri Lanken refugee resettlement camp.