Last time - Halo Infinite - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=143045
This time - “As a courtesy to John, I’m not gonna crush your skull.”
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There are development hells, and then there was the development hell that was trying to get a live-action Halo property off the ground. Once planned for Peter Jackson as a feature film, then for Guillermo del Toro, then for Neill Blomkamp (who reused some of his designs for his own District 9), and then almost resurrected by Steven Spielberg, the concept lumbered into two webseries (including the 2014 Ridley Scott-produced Halo: Nightfall with an unreleased score credited to Klaus Badelt) before finally taking shape as an episodic TV show. Things somehow got worse from there. It didn’t hit its 2015 target. A 2018 10-episode series order from Showtime had Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt attached as director and producer alongside showrunner Kyle Killen (who’d created the acclaimed but sadly short-lived series Lone Star), but Wyatt left the project within six months and a co-creator of TNT’s The Last Ship was added as a co-showrunner in early 2019. Filming started in fall 2019 but slammed to a halt due to COVID and didn’t resume until early 2021 in a different country, at which point the distribution of the series had moved from Showtime to Paramount’s nascent Paramount+ streaming service. News broke in summer 2021 that both showrunners would be leaving after season 1, but the concept was apparently too big to fail since the series was renewed in February 2022 (a month before the series premiere aired) with a new showrunner who’d worked on Fear the Walking Dead.
Certainly shows have withstood creative turmoil and come out alright; the first season of Game of Thrones with its largely re-shot pilot episode comes to mind. But the first season of Halo was very much the opposite of that. There are way too many shots involving characters convulsing because they’re touching a rock to find a thing to find a thing, seemingly more shots of flashbacks to scenes of child abduction, and seemingly even more shots of dull meetings of various branches of Earth’s space military bureaucracy. The show’s version of Master Chief takes off his helmet, seen as sacrosanct by some of the faithful even if actor Pablo Schrieber was one of the few good things about the show, but his facial visibility was the least of his problems as he also goes rogue, and then doesn’t, and then does, and then doesn’t, and at some point in the midst of that he also gets laid for maybe the first time. Creative indecision ripples throughout the show as if its makers couldn’t decide if they wanted it to be a Halo series for the uninitiated or for those familiar with the lore; one early sequence has human characters encounter the Covenant enemy from the games for the first time, but then the very next scene jumps to the Covenant homeworld and acts like you’re supposed to already be familiar with all the dynamics over there. And it is backed by some of the jankiest visual effects in recent memory; they spent $200M on this thing only to have the cutscenes in the 2014 anniversary remaster of Halo 2 look better than this. It is without a doubt the worst season of television I’ve ever watched start to finish.
Its music held some promise at the start as Abel Korzeniowski, who’d done a bang-up job on Showtime’s earlier horror series Penny Dreadful, was announced as the composer in August 2019 before shooting had commenced. But showrunner turmoil and the stop-start nature of the production somehow resulted in his departure from the project, and a month before the show aired it was revealed Sean Callery was on board as composer. Callery had done capable work on a limited budget for 24 and backed the Netflix Jessica Jones series with some nice noir tones, so there was still reason for optimism. But even with Callery creating multiple new themes, the end result was a shockingly nondescript regurgitation of modern action tropes, leaving little sense that this had anything to do with the Halo franchise. It’s not as much of a bad score as it is a confounding entry in the context of a franchise with an established musical legacy. Blame shouldn’t be thrown at the composer but rather the producers and the network; the uncertainty about what kind of show they were making would have necessitated substantial compromises for any composer, and poor Callery seemed to be in a no-win situation.
A second season dropped in March 2024, and while it was seen by some as an improvement (how could it not be?) the show was canceled that summer. Callery wasn’t retained for season 2, but someone still on the show made the kind of composer choice that made me gasp and tell my wife it was almost enough of a reason to watch the new season: Bear McCreary and his Sparks & Shadows crew (or more specifically Etienne Monsaingeon, Alexandre Cote, and Brendan Mercer). McCreary provided a new arrangement of O’Donnell’s series theme for the main title sequence while all other composing seemed to have been done by his team. None of their work has been officially released, though in a bizarre turn of events an album of Callery’s score for the first season was finally released months after the show was canceled.
Season 1 score: ** - https://open.spotify.com/album/00PgOyChjOHvMIq2lLMnWI
Season 2 score: N/A, but here’s McCreary’s title arrangement - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poYVmR6BsSg
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Next time: Wrap-up thoughts and series rankings
