After the massive success that was both the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, I thought that the video game movie curse was finally lifted, and studios have learned to just give fans what they want, however, I was wrong. Paramount Plus’ Halo series has been a hot topic of debate ever since its debut. From Master Chief taking off his helmet, to him falling in love & having sex is but a drop in the bucket of the issues that plague this series, and fans are not happy in the slightest.
Honestly, the biggest issue that fans have with the TV series is the lack of respect for the source material. Basically, they just took the aesthetic of Halo and went completely off-grid with it, ignoring years of built-up lore and the characterizations in the mainline series. Yes, the series is not canon to the lore, however, it is almost unrecognizable from the video games counterpart! Many have said that it is just an adaptation and thus shouldn’t be criticized so harshly but even if you want to say that it’s just an adaptation, we still got to analyze what we have, and yeah, it just does not look good.
I mean, we’ve agreed that Dragon Ball Evolution was bad, and we agreed that the Last Airbender & Assassin’s Creed movie wasn’t good, so what made you think this one is an exception. Whether canon or not, it still takes attributes from well-established video game franchises, and thus fans had some expectation for it to at least stay respectful. And it couldn’t even do that right! Which fans have every right to express their distaste for this version of Halo, funny enough now might act as an introductory point for possible new fans of the series.
I hope that many future studios that plan on adapting video games will look toward the Sonic movies as the gold standard for video game adaptations and not Halo going forward. Creativity and trying to subvert expectations are great but that requires skills to pull off. Sonic did it extremely well, and is to be studied, why Halo seems to have missed the mark in the eyes of the fans. To be honest, people who aren’t a fan of Halo are more likely to enjoy the series than long-time fans, which isn’t right but that is the way it goes. If you look at it from that point of not being Halo, the series isn’t bad at all, just not what some fans wanted.
