> Hey, I said 'eclectic', not 'uniquely eclectic'.

*is complimented for his eclectic tastes... he thinks*

> OOOOOOPS. All this proofreading and something like this still slips
> through the cracks. Ah well.

Happens to the best (and worst) of us. It's also a tongue twister of a subtitle.

> There are 50,000 things wrong with it - or, rather, the only two things
> that I remember being good about it were Pablo Schreiber and Bokeem
> Woodbine. It feels like every 3rd or 4th scene is another meeting with
> various UNSC functionaries, and you think those chats are as boring as it
> will get, and then you get to Prophet-centric scenes and find out there's
> a new low you can sink to. Surprise familial relationships don't deepen
> any of the drama. There are a lot of child kidnapping flashbacks. It looks
> very cheap. There is not nearly enough Burn Gorman. I could go on.

> But perhaps most bizzare is that it's a show that's constantly at war with
> itself about how reverent it's supposed to be to its source material.

> For example, the opening sequence shows a colonized planet. People talk to
> each other for a while, and then some aliens attack. No one knows who or
> what they are, and you never hear things like Elite, Sangheili, the Great
> Journey, and other familiar terms. People are scared. Only an intervention
> from some armored soldiers saves them.

> Get past the incredibly janky visual effects and you can see a possibly
> interesting way of approaching the concept - doing mankind's first
> interaction with the Covenant enemy, and thus you're discovering the
> opponent as the characters do. It could avoid the problem of covering
> narrative ground from the games without pushing away fans of the
> franchise.

> And then in, like, the very next scene we cut away to somewhere else in
> space, specifically to where a giant space fortress is, and text on the
> screen reads something like HIGH CHARITY - COVENANT HOMEWORLD, thus
> basically defeating most of the narrative purpose of that opening.

> Never mind that even though we're in prequel-land we're also in a 'find
> the thing so I can find the other thing so I can find the third thing'
> territory. There is a lot of rock touching. SO. MUCH. ROCK. TOUCHING.

> Would Abel Korzeniowski doing the music have saved any of this? Probably
> not, but I doubt the version he was hired to do was anything like what we
> ended up getting.

My very meager exposure to the Halo franchise means that most of this is borderline gibberish to me, but reading the obvious annoyance and passion this show stirred up for you was highly amusing to read. Also lol'd at the "rock touching" bit. XDD