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Halo Fest 2020 – The Fall of Reach

Released as a bonus for pack-in for the limited edition of Halo 5: Guardians and later on disc and streaming services, Halo: The Fall of Reach is a three act animated movie based on Eric Nylund’s novel of the same name. Personally, having not followed the release of Halo 5, I had no idea this was even a thing until I started my research for Halo Fest 2020, but it seemed significant enough for me to cover here, and, surprisingly, I’m actually glad I did.

“John and his friends having some teenage fun.”

Halo: The Fall of Reach is reasonably faithful to the book its based on while also taking elements from the 2012 Marvel Comics adaptation with a handful of other changes along the way. Oddly, this new adaptation only covers the first half or so of the book, leaving out the titular, you know, falling of Reach part. Actually, it seems pretty clear to me that a lot of these changes were intended to focus more on the members of Blue Team as featured in Halo 5 itself, allowing the movie to serve as their introduction and contextualizing their relationship with Master Chief for players who hadn’t read the novels. For me, it also helps explain why so many fans of the novel were disappointed with the otherwise excellent Halo: Reach.

Since we’re already on the subject, and this is backstory told out of chronological order anyway, let’s get into the plot synopsis. While this is fairly vague, it absolutely contains spoilers. Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid that sort of thing.

The Story: Dr. Catherine Halsey is searching colonies for child candidates for the SPARTAN-II program, a secret initiative to create super soldiers that could turn the tide against an ongoing insurrectionist movement. On Eridanus II she meets a child named John and quickly recognizes his potential. ONI agents abduct John and 74 other children, replacing them with barely functional “flash clones” to cover their kidnappings. At a UNSC academy on the colony planet Reach, the children are run through exhaustive training covering military theory, tactics, and history, along with physical and team building exercises. John, designated John-117, stands out from his peers and is soon promoted to squad leader. Years later, the SPARTAN-II cadets undergo a series of physical augmentations and chemical treatments to improve their senses, reflexes, musculature, and physical growth. A staggering 36% of the cadets do not survive the process. Later, John and four of his classmates are sent on a clandestine mission to kidnap an insurrectionist leader, with their success serving to help justify the existence of the program. Not long after, first contact is made with a hostile alien force known as the Covenant who seem intent on wiping out humanity. Dr. Halsey and the Spartans are transported to Chi Ceti IV aboard the UNSC Commonwealth when the ship is intercepted by a Covenant vessel. With the Commonwealth barely fending it off, the Spartans make it to the surface where the new Mjolnir power armor is tested on them for the first time. A success, the Spartans are assigned their armor and begin training with it. With the Covenant ship returning to face the Commonwealth a second time, John-117 concocts a plan to get behind the ship’s shields, board it, and detonate a nuclear warhead from within. The team fights its way inside and successfully plants the warhead, though one of its members, Sam-034, sustains heavy damage to his armor and volunteers to stay behind to buy his teammates time to exfiltrate. Flashing forward a number of years, the members of John’s original fireteam meet at the site of the academy on Reach, now in ruins after the planet was “glassed” by the Covenant, in memorial to their fallen teammate.

“Dr. Halsey reaping what she’s sown.”

Having never read the novel, I knew a lot of the generalities of what was covered here but not many of the details. Actually seeing the child abductions, training and augmentation deaths, and even the gruesome way that Mjolnir armor testing was depicted was much more effective than I would have expected. It was also interesting to see the (somewhat) original way Dr. Halsey was depicted versus how she was presented in Halo: Reach, Halo 4, and Halo 5: Guardians. You also have the remember that the original novel was very much written to be the backstory for Halo: Combat Evolved, so it’s chock-full of a lot of the context that is, well, frankly just missing entirely from the game: who Master Chief is and why he’s so exceptional, both as an individual, and as a Spartan, and where humanity is at this point in its war with the Covenant, for instance. As a long time Halo fan, it’s pretty cool to go back and geek out over this stuff all these years later.

As for this particular production, it’s… eh, decent. Visually, I think I could describe it best as looking a lot like a motion comic that has been upgraded to have an actual animation budget. This isn’t too surprising given that the studio who made it, Sequence, also helped make most of the motion comic-like cutscenes in other Halo games, like those from the terminals in Halo: CE Anniversary and Halo 4, as well as the cutscenes in the Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike games. This doesn’t sound like the strongest praise, and it definitely isn’t, but it’s better than it sounds and I think it works well enough for me. On the audio front, Steve Downs plays older Master Chief and Jen Taylor plays Dr. Halsey, giving the whole thing a much needed direct connection to the games. We also have Tom Salta returning from his work on Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike to compose the soundtrack. Not bad all around.

“SCPO. Mendez sits the kids down for story time.”

As a whole, I was surprised with just how much I enjoyed Halo: The Fall of Reach and turned around and bought a copy of the audiobook almost immediately after finishing it. While I’m sure I’ll end up enjoying the book much more, I’m going to have to rank this one up with Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn as an actual half-way decent attempt at a Halo movie. Interestingly, a lot of Halo fans seem to think this is the story to make a big budget adaption of, so even if the new Halo series seems to have veered off in an entirely different direction, it seems possible we may return to the Fall of Reach again at some point in the future.

Next up, as we finally near the end of this series, we return to the UNSC Spirit of Fire with Halo Wars 2. I’m looking forward to it!

Halo Fest 2020 – Nightfall

Halo: Nightfall is a live action digital series that was released as part of the Master Chief Collection in late 2014 as a promotional tie-in with Halo 5. I’d never seen Halo: Nightfall and knew only the scantest details about it before watching the feature length movie version for this post. While the parallels with the previously covered Halo: Forward Unto Dawn should be obvious, Nightfall feels a lot more like a legitimate movie that was chopped up to make a series than a series of separate shorts that were edited together to make a movie and, despite having similar budgets, Nightfall also features a lot more effects, more notable actors, and was produced by legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott’s production company. It’s certainly equally as ineffective as a tie-in to the game it is associated with, though!

“Alpha Halo, a little worse for wear after Master Chief’s visit.”

That is, Halo: Nightfall was supposed to be something of an origin story for Jameson Locke who we’d come to know as Spartan Locke, one of the main characters featured in Halo 5. The problem is that by the time we meet Locke in Nightfall he’s already pretty much the same character we get to know in-game, and while it’s not a bad introduction to him, we definitely learn a lot about who he is in the sense of his personality and values, there’s not much else there, nor is the overall story significant to the plot of the game either. That said, since it is a side story let’s just dive right into spoiler land! Skip next two paragraphs if you want to avoid a somewhat vague plot summary and some random but specific nitpicks.

The Story: Lieutenant Commander Jameson Locke and his four-man Office of Naval Intelligence team operating on the colony world Sedra track an Elite Zealot to the center of Sedra City where it detonates an unknown device. The device unleashes a never-before-seen element deadly to humans, resulting in a large number of casualties. Investigating, the ONI team discovers that the Elite acquired this element from smugglers who harvested it from a semi-intact fragment of Installation 04. Orbiting close to a sun, the ring fragment’s surface reaches extreme temperatures when directly facing it, making only short visits during its night cycle possible. Locke and his team devise a plan to head to the fragment, arrest any smugglers they locate, and, as it’s believed to be the sole source of the element, destroy it with a Havok nuclear warhead. The team is granted use of a slipspace capable Sedran Colonial Guard ship to make the journey, but only under the condition that they’re accompanied by members of the Sedran military. Arriving at the fragment, the joint team quickly locates the smugglers but are attacked by a swarm of Lekgolo, killing several of them and downing their ship before they can extract. With no way to call for help and only the smugglers’ small ship left intact, the team decides to complete their mission and journeys on foot to retrieve the warhead. With their numbers dwindling as they’re pursued by the Lekgolo, the group eventually has to shed most of their technology when they learn that the Lekgolo can track them by it. With time running out of time and desperation setting in, Locke’s remaining two agents take the rest of the team by surprise, taking a hostage and making their way back to the ship to save themselves. With few options left, the commander of the Sedran team, Colonel Aiken, a former SPARTAN-II who lost his only child to the terrorist attack, volunteers to manually detonate the warhead while Locke and Macer, the only other surviving Sedran soldier, attempt to intercept them. The pair reach the smugglers’ ship just in time to witness the Lekgolo finish off the last of them and swarm the now powered-up ship. Aiken begins to activate the warhead, drawing the Lekgolo away and giving Locke and Macer the window they need to board the ship and escape the fragment before it is obliterated.

“Locke, James Locke. Our protagonist.”

While we’re told Sedra is surrounded by conflict and that the Sedrans have this archaic warrior culture (err, they still believe in Valhalla?!) we’re shown exactly none of this. Maybe this was a budget thing, but then why mention it at all? The almost constant tension between the ONI agents and the Sedran soldiers felt more than a little contrived and I found Colonel Aiken’s over-the-top combativeness to be especially unbelievable, even if it is explained by his backstory. Speaking of which, I really don’t buy him as an ex-Spartan. Furthermore, even knowing his backstory, Aiken wanting to sacrifice himself due to losing his daughter is a little lame for reasons I feel best described towards the bottom of this lengthy (and otherwise much more positive) article by Haruspis. Also, why in the hell was getting the Havok right then and there so damn critical? Why not just get out of dodge now and destroy the fragment later? The sad part is that I think the premise of the story actually works on paper, and while it might not have been an amazing Halo movie, it could have at least been much more entertaining if executed differently.

Thankfully most of my issues with the execution are wrapped up in those kinds of details. While some of the CGI is pretty bad, the majority of the practical effects, costumes, and props are quite excellent. The actors are all also mostly good despite being betrayed by the script a bit, with a pre-Luke Cage Mike Colter giving a typically solid performance as Locke. Another likely budget related letdown is the rather boring filming location in the latter part of the movie. While I get that the place they’re at is supposed to be destroyed, I can’t help but imagine how cool it would be if it resembled the games more closely. Speaking of the games, the soundtrack is another letdown. I’m sure it’s fine, but I literally remember nothing about it, and that really isn’t good enough for a game franchise whose soundtrack has always been a huge part of the formula.

“The combined team on the fragment. Love those ODST helmets!”

I feel like I’m being quite negative here, but Halo: Nightfall isn’t that bad. It’s entertaining enough to watch through once, sure, but it earns the “entirely skippable” I tagged Spartan Assault with and then some. In fact, unless you’re really curious about it and/or just have to consume everything Halo related, I’d suggest skipping it. At least I still liked Locke by the end of it so maybe that at least bodes well for my playthrough of Halo 5 when I eventually arrive there. Maybe? In any case, like Forward Unto Dawn before it, Nightfall still fails to deliver on a strong effort to make Halo a crossover success. At this point our only remaining hope is the 2022 series, and skepticism already abounds about that one.

A quick extra mention goes to the “Second Stories” bonus content that was released on the Halo Channel as something of an in-universe version of the after-episode shows that have been popularized with some of the bigger television series in recent years. While these shorts do contain interesting details that help fill in some gaps in the story, I can’t say they impressed me much. Still, they’re definitely a very notable but easily missed part of Nightfall.

Halo Fest 2020 – Forward Unto Dawn

The Story So Far: As the Forerunner dreadnought, the Anodyne Spirit, enters Earth’s atmosphere, Master Chief makes a hasty escape, relying only on his armor and a piece of the ship’s heat shielding for protection. Rescued by UNSC and separatist Sangheili Elites troops, the Master Chief is then sent to help clear Covenant air defenses deployed to protect the Prophet of Truth as he attempts to activate a Forerunner artifact excavated near New Mombasa. While successful, the UNSC isn’t able to prevent Truth from activating the artifact, which creates a massive slipspace portal. As Truth and the remaining Covenant fleet jump through the portal, a Flood infested UNSC ship crash-lands nearby, though Elite forces move quickly to contain the Flood threat. Following a message left by Cortana hinting that a way to stop the Flood exists on the other side of the portal, the Elite fleet, accompanied by a small UNSC force and 343 Guilty Spark, travels through it, leading them to a massive Forerunner Halo control and construction installation called the Ark. Master Chief, along with the Arbiter and a squad of UNSC marines, head to the surface to stop Truth from remotely activating the remaining Halo rings. High Charity, now fully controlled by the Flood, jumps in and the Flood begin their own assault on the Ark. The Covenant succeed in activating the rings prompting the Gravemind to offer Master Chief and the Arbiter a truce. With the Flood’s assistance, the pair fight their way through the Prophet of Truth’s remaining forces, killing him and halting the activation. With the threat of the Halos being activated out of the way, the Flood immediately turn on their new allies. Devising a plan to wipe out the remaining Flood by activating the still under construction Halo Installation 04 replacement ring, Master Chief heads to the Flood infested High Charity to recover Cortana. Despite 343 Guilty Spark attempting to stop them, Cortana is able to activate the incomplete ring and the Master Chief, Cortana, and the Arbiter make a last minute escape aboard the now abandoned UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. The activation of the incomplete ring causes it to self-destruct, destroying the Ark and the Flood along with it as planned. An unintended side effect of the destruction, the slipspace portal ruptures just as the Forward Unto Dawn is traveling through it, ripping the ship in half, and stranding the Master Chief and Cortana in unknown space. While the Arbiter makes it through the portal, the Master Chief is presumed dead.

Now, before we jump into Halo 4, it’s worth a brief mention that the Halo: CE Anniversary was released in 2011. These days it’s usually thought of as a foundational piece of the Master Chief Collection, but it was a standalone Xbox 360 release first. I’ve already talked a bit about the Anniversary edition when talking about Halo: CE, which has continued to be improved in the MCC even since that post, but there was, no surprise, another live action trailer around its release. No real story here, it simply depicts a UNSC Commander giving a speech at some sort of a remembrance ceremony. Not bad, but entirely skippable.

“Our protagonist, a very young Thomas Lasky.”

Moving on to 2012, no, this isn’t about Halo 4, but Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. I didn’t necessarily plan on giving Forward Unto Dawn its own post, but between its plot setup and its release date, I suppose it makes the most sense to talk about it separately first. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is really the culmination of these sorts of live action promotional shorts, at least up to this point. Another marketing effort itself, Forward Unto Dawn was released as five 15 minute web shorts and then compiled into a single movie for a DVD release, which makes it the closest thing we had to a Halo movie by 2012. I watched it around the time I played through Halo 4 and was pleasantly surprised that it actually surpassed my (admittedly, rather low) expectations. In fact, in my brief original post about Halo 4 I joked that I probably enjoyed Forward Unto Dawn more than Halo 4’s campaign. I’m curious about how that statement holds up.

So it’s not Halo 4 proper, but what is Forward Unto Dawn about? Well, for the first time in this series I think I’m going to go ahead and recap its plot in the same post as I just recapped the previous game’s. The reason for that is, despite being set immediately following the events of Halo 3 described above (and also depicted in the Origins sections of Halo: Legends) the movie is essentially one big flashback. That means it mostly takes place out of chronological order from the main series and the parts that don’t are more setup for Halo 4 rather than plot spoilers. As usual, while I’m fairly vague in these plot summaries they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the next two paragraphs if you want to avoid them.

“The freshmen of Hastati squad bonding over some light illegal espionage.”

The Story: Commander Lasky, executive officer of the UNSC Infinity, reviews a distress signal sent by the AI Cortana aboard the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. This triggers a flashback to his time as a cadet at the Corbulo Academy of Military Science on Circinius IV some 30 years earlier. The son of a high ranking officer and brother of another graduate of CAMS who became an elite ODST trooper, Lasky was under a lot of pressure to perform. With ailing health due to cryosleep sickness and grief over the loss of his brother, Lasky began developing a reckless disregard for orders, causing his squad to underperform in combat exercises and leading to him to clashing with his classmates. With the help of one of his professors, Lasky has a breakthrough just before the last combat exercise of the term and leads his squad to a major victory. His sickness worsening, Lasky is given the option of being medically discharged from the academy. As he contemplates his future, a campus-wide alarm sounds and he and his classmates gather at the academy’s space elevator to evacuate. As ODST drop pods land all around them, Covenant corvettes appear overhead and destroy the elevator. Fleeing in terror from this unknown threat, Lasky and his classmates seek refuge as Covenant attackers viciously cut down anyone they see. Unsuccessfully attempting to breach an armory, the cadets are forced to hide from an Elite Zealot stalking them. Just as the Elite is about to find them it’s struck down by an SPARTAN-II. As unknown to them as the Covenant aliens, the cadets cautiously follow the Spartan, who introduces himself as Master Chief before helping to arm them and leading them to an evacuation site. Clashing with more Covenant forces along the way, the few shell-shocked surviving cadets, including Lasky, eventually board a Pelican with Master Chief and the other Spartans of his squad. Back on the Infinity, the ship and its escorts prepare to jump to the origin of Cortana’s signal. Meanwhile, Cortana considers waking Master Chief from cryosleep as the wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn is pulled off course.

My favorite aspect of the story is that Lasky’s flashback takes place before the existence of the Covenant and even the Spartan program were declassified, and Forward Unto Dawn does an excellent job at conveying that. Seeing the cadets’ wonder at Sullivan’s footage depicting these huge, armor clad soldiers, the panic as they realize the ODST dropping at the school is a really bad sign, their confusion and shock as Covenant ships appear overhead, how terrifying the Covenant Elites hunting them down are, and their awe over Master Chief’s size, strength, and professionalism: it’s all great and helps ground some of the more fantastical elements of Halo that have been somewhat taken for granted in the games. Not only that, but the sheer badassery of Master Chief in contrast to what we’d seen from these young cadets up to this point (further contrasted with how slow the first 2/3s of the movie is) is a great moment of fan service that I loved almost as much during this viewing as I did the first time around.

“Master Chief firing his AR one-handed for extra cool points.”

For a web series, Forward Unto Dawn is surprisingly solid on the production front. The actors are all at least adequate, the direction is, I suppose, fine, and the score, peppered with the excellent tracks from Halo 4 as well as callbacks to earlier games, is good. Besides the fact that most of the action takes place in some very dark environments being a bit of a cheat, CGI is used fairly subtly, and the costumes, props, and practical effects look pretty good (with that old Weta Workshop Warthog making yet another appearance!) It absolutely is not, however, the big budget Halo movie that no doubt both Microsoft and Hollywood executives have been hoping will have major crossover appeal at the box office for years on end now. I believe that by this time any serious efforts tied to the Peter Jackson produced effort had died off, although it seems that the idea was never completely abandoned. After what seems like an eternity, its current incarnation, a gritty Showtime series (now bound for Paramount+) just got a teaser trailer this week.

In conclusion, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn might not do an awful lot to fill any story gaps as we go into Halo 4, but it did at least help build the excitement for its launch. More importantly, it still stands up as a solid entry in the expanded media of the franchise, even if it is a bit of a side story. I’d easily recommend it to Halo fans, but this sadly isn’t the one that is going to win over masses of non-gamers.

“Capt. Del Rio: ‘Red means bad, right?'”

While we’re here, the CG Halo 4 teaser trailer “Awakening” from 2011 shows Cortana waking Chief up and him scrambling to survey the situation, only to find his chunk of the Forward Unto Dawn being pulled towards a massive constructed object that resembles the Forerunner Shield World we encountered in Halo Wars. More notably, the live-action Halo 4 trailer “The Commissioning” released later in 2012 shows the commencement ceremony for the UNSC Infinity’s new mission as Captain Del Rio gives a speech. As the trailer continues, we see the Infinity sometime later being scanned by a mysterious orange light, then erupting in chaos as systems malfunction and crewmembers strain from the pressure as the ship is pulled to the very same object. Pretty cool trailer, and I think I’d chalk this one up as essential as well. More about what is actually going on here when we get to Halo 4 itself, of course!