Welcome, one and all, to the "Video Game Movie Marathon" here on Reaction & Review. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna be covering an animated anthology film from 2010. That movie is "Halo Legends".
Now, I've played quite a bit of Halo in my lifetime. I played the original "Halo: Combat Evolved" with a friend of mine years and years ago. Although, at the time, I didn't really care that much about it. I thought the campaign was a little too long for my tastes, and while the multiplayer was fun, and the story was pretty good, it wasn't really my kind of game. However, I did get the Anniversary Edition on the Xbox 360 about a decade ago. And while I still think the campaign is a little long, my appreciation for it has grown just a little bit. I then played "Halo 2", and I loved it. I loved the campaign, the story was really good, and I still play it to this day. In fact, "Halo 2" stands, at least to me, as one of my favorite games of all time. That's how much I loved "Halo 2". I wasn't too big on "Halo 3", mainly because of the campaign. It was just far too short. I played a little bit of "Halo: Reach", but I never completed the campaign, mainly due to me being lazy. That, and my backlog of unfinished games have piled up since then. And I haven't played "Halo 4", so I can't really comment on that.
So overall, my experiences with Halo are pretty good. And, of course, Halo doesn't just exist through video games. It inspired online series such as "Red vs. Blue", and that show was great. Well...the first 5 seasons were great. Everything after season 5 was complete shit. I also know this series has novels. However, I have never read any of the books, and to be completely honest, I don't care to read any of them. And, of course, it has also spawned through television and movies. Speaking of which, that leads us into tonight's movie. The one thing I do know about this movie is that it's an anthology film. Which I find to be a bit funny, considering that I covered another anthology film for this series not too long ago. That film, of course, being "Terror Eyes". So, to already cover another anthology film shortly after that one is kinda funny to me.
I'm certainly hoping for this thing to be better than "Terror Eyes" though. Because "Terror Eyes" really sucked. And considering that the subject for tonight's movie is centered around Halo, it's probably gonna be decent. But I really won't know if it's going to be decent unless I quit stalling, and I start watching this thing. So, the only for me to do at this point, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Halo Legends".
6 minutes later
Well, guys, I'm not able to say very much about the movie so far. But I will say that I am really liking the art style in this first story. It looks really cool. Plus also, the animation is really good, too. So yeah, we're off to a pretty good start.
8 minutes later
OK, guys, this story here is pretty good and everything, but I do have a bit of a problem with it. It just seems like we're missing a ton of details as to when we got caught up with our desire of wanting destruction on our planet, so that we could discover other worlds to prosper and thrive. I understand it sounds like a minor detail, but it kinda bothers me a little bit. Because we're being summarized on a lot of things here and not getting a lot of context to them. And I feel like we're just rushing through everything with this story, you know?
13 minutes later
All right, I was sorta hoping that I wouldn't have to bring this up already, but the CG, and the entire look of this third story, looks absolutely hideous! It also doesn't help that the blurriness is really distracting the art style, too. I'm kinda hoping that this story will still be good, regardless of the art style, but holy shit, is that gonna be a challenge.
12 minutes later
Thank God, that story is finally done. Seriously, if I had to keep looking at that blurry CG any longer, then I probably would've hated that story more than I should've. That shit was distracting as hell.
10 minutes later
Wait, so that scientist is actually a female? I genuinely thought it was a male, considering the structure of the character's design. But no, it's actually a female. I'm kinda surprised, really.
14 minutes later
You know, guys, I am really surprised by the level of comedy that is in this story. It actually is rather funny. And the fact that they combine it with some music from "Halo 2" actually makes it better. I'm actually kinda loving it.
16 minutes later
All right, well, you know what? Even though this story is rather weak, I will say that the aftereffects from that explosion that suit gave off looked really fucking impressive. I gotta say that much.
11 minutes later
Well, holy shit! Seeing Master Chief finally in action against a brute, without a weapon mind you, is pretty badass. Now I'm kinda curious as to why we haven't seen a Halo game where the Chief can just beat down an alien of sorts with his bare hands. Still though, that was really cool.
4 minutes later
O...K. I guess I was wrong into thinking that this was Master Chief. Apparently, it's a different spartan that happens to look like Master Chief. Not totally sure what to think about that, honestly. Still though, at least it kinda caught me by surprise.
11 minutes later
You know, guys, I kinda appreciate that they're going in first person with a few of these shots here. It actually feels like I'm playing a game of Halo. I'm kinda impressed by that.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "Halo Legends". I'm gonna shut the movie off...OK. As much as I'd like to listen to more Halo music, I can do that later. Right now, I'm gonna go ahead and review this movie.
I'm gonna approach this review a bit differently. Because, as I've done with all the anthology films that I covered for this series so far, I would usually give a brief summary of every story for their respective films. I'm not gonna do that for this movie. Because most of these stories range from being OK, to not being very good. And when I say that they're not very good, I mean that there's just not much of a story there. And there's two examples I want to bring up. One of them is the story known as "Prototype". The story for that is that there's this marine sergeant known as Ghost, and he's holding a wounded female soldier who tells him to try and become human instead of just being a nameless ghost with no personality or feeling. Because he had lost his squad during that battle. And so to make up for it, he tries to take down a bunch of members of the Covenant inside this giant mech, so that he can fulfill his mission and not let anymore of his soldiers die. And it doesn't really work, because his character is so fucking shallow and lifeless. And I don't want to hear that it was 'intentional' to make him shallow, because that's just a cop-out excuse. I feel like that the story only existed so that the movie can pad itself out to it's, nearly, 2 hour runtime. It really just felt like a shoehorned story that might've been taken from one of the Halo novels, and they tried to adapt it within such a short time. Now, I have no idea if any of these stories were taken from the books. However, as I've stated earlier, I have never read any of the Halo books, so I can't really say if that's accurate or not. But if it was, then it was done in a really lazy fashion, because there really isn't much of a story here for "Prototype". And I can easily say that this story was the weakest of the bunch, because it just feels so fucking shallow, that you could've replaced it with anything else, and it might've been done better. Or you could've expanded this story much longer into a mini-series. However, I'm gonna get more into that in a bit.
Another example I want to bring up is the second part of the origins story, which would be "Origins II". First of all, I should mention that both Origin stories are narrated by Cortana, as they are the first two stories of this anthology film. In the first part, she explains about how the Flood came to be and how the Forerunners tried to preserve the lifeforms of everyone that lived and moved them to different planets before they 'destroyed' the Flood, and then sacrificing themselves. Now, I will say that "Origins I" was really good. It was told really well, and we got some really nice animation out of it. However, in "Origins II", a lot of it feels really rushed. Because we're told that humans have had this desire and power to destroy each other, and that we always go to war with each other. However, and this is where the story felt so rushed, is that we somehow came to realize that we could look beyond our planet and to seek other worlds, so that we can preserve our life there and put an end to our senseless fighting. Basically, we had to boldly go where we hadn't gone before. (And yes, I am totally proud of that reference) Now, a couple of problems arises. First of all, I really like how Cortana says that ALL of humankind decided that we should look beyond our lonely planet and to look towards others because there are too many people living on Earth. So...what exactly is wrong with Earth, anyways? So fucking what if there's billions of people that live on that planet? I get that she wanted to say that we should look to preserve our race for other planets, but she never really explains what makes Earth so bad, other than "Oh no, humans fight each other through war" and all this horseshit. That's not really a viable excuse of wanting to ditch Earth for other planets. Speaking of war, even though humans did move to other planets and made our own civilizations there, guess what? Another war broke out and we fought each other again. But it wasn't until the Covenant invaded, and we decided to finally ban together against a common enemy. And from there, she basically summarizes what happened in the first 3 Halo games. But I feel like, again, this story just feels so rushed. But then again, I could also say the same thing about a couple of the other stories such as "Prototype" and "Homecoming". Both of those stories felt really rushed, too. And going back to my comment about "Prototype" being a mini-series, I really feel like what they should've done with most of these stories is turn it into a mini-series and run it on, say, HBO. Give it about a season and let these stories flesh out. Because putting them into this anthology film actually brings the quality of these stories down a bit. I'm gonna tell you guys, I only liked about, maybe, half of this anthology film. The stories I liked were "Origins I", "The Babysitter", "Odd One Out", and "The Package". The other half was mostly shallow and kinda shit. And that's disappointing, to say the least.
So, the writing for this anthology film is a mixed bag at best. As for the acting, well, the acting is actually pretty good, for the most part. There were, maybe, like a couple of actors that sounded like they phoned it in. One of them was whoever was voicing one of the kids in "Odd One Out". I don't know if they got an actual child actor to do the voice for it or not. But regardless, they sounded pretty terrible. And the other bit of acting comes from whoever voiced Daisy, our lead character in "Homecoming". The actress voicing her sounded rather robotic at times. Now, mind you, I am judging this movie by the English dub's standards, because that's the version I watched going into this movie. But aside from, like, two actors, everybody else did a pretty good job. So, I can say that this dub is rather good for what it is.
Now, let's get to the animation. Oh boy, I gotta lot to talk about here. First off, I should mention that just about every story in this movie was made by a variety of different Japanese animation studios. And most of them have a rather unique look to them. In fact, "Odd One Out", which was my favorite story from this anthology film, was made by Toei. Which actually made sense, because the art style in that short was very reminiscent to stuff like Dragon Ball. In fact, that entire short felt like a Saturday morning cartoon, which kinda made me like it all the more better. Now, even though I say that most of these short films have a unique look to them, that doesn't mean that they all look good. The best example goes to "The Duel". Oh. My. God. Where the fuck do I even start with this short film? How about the fact that the CG looks fucking awful? And that it probably would've not looked awful if there wasn't so much pixelated blurriness around every single Elite? I have no idea what the hell they were going for, in terms of the art style for this short film, but the pixelated blurry bullshit actually brought that entire story down! So much so that I couldn't really focus much on the story. It probably would've looked better if they got rid of that pixelated bullshit around the Elites. I'm not saying that it would've looked great, but it would've looked a hell of a lot better than this. While I'm on the subject of the Elites, every single Elite character has these awful-looking mouth movements. Now, when I say that, I am not referring to any syncing issues with an actor's dialogue that is trying to match the mouth flaps. I'm referring to the actual mouth movements on these Elites. The mouth movements look so fucking janky that it looks like they might've been modeled out of some fourth-rate animatronic from Chuck E. Cheese, and they decided to green light that shit in hopes that it would look good. Well, guess what? It looks horrendous. And that entire story could've benefited from better-looking CG and less on the pixel blurry bullshit, and the god-awful mouth movements. Christ, that short film looked so fucking bad. Speaking of CG, the CG in the last story, which was "The Package", looks decent. But I will admit that the CG looked rather dated, too. And I mean it looks REALLY dated, even by the standards of 2010. But at least the story was pretty good, and I was able to look past the dated CG. Overall, guys, the animation is pretty good, as long as you're willing to look past the horrendous CG in "The Duel".
Sound-mix is mixed perfectly. The music is also fantastic. But then again, a lot of it is music that you would hear from the Halo games. In fact, I mentioned it earlier, I heard a couple pieces of music in "Odd One Out" that were from "Halo 2". In fact, I believe they used a lot of music from the Halo games and inserted it into this movie. And I, personally, loved it. No matter the game it came from, Halo's music is the one thing I absolutely love from this series. It always sounds great. In fact, when the DVD menu popped up, one of the tracks came from "Halo 2". Which kinda made me want to go back and play "Halo 2" again, honestly. I'm not totally sure if I will do that after I put this review together, but it is certainly possible. Overall, guys, the music in this movie is absolutely amazing.
So, when all is said and done, am I able to recommend "Halo Legends"? Only if you're a fan of Halo. I, personally, can't recommend this to non-fans, obviously. And I think newcomers who want to get into Halo would probably be turned off by this movie, because there is so much history and lore to this franchise that you would be totally lost on a lot of this. And because of that, I don't think this movie would be a good start for any newcomers to Halo. If you really want to get into Halo, my advice would be to play any of the games. Whether you play them on the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, or even the Xbox One. If you have any of these systems, go play Halo on those. And if you really like what you played, then check out this movie. Otherwise, your best bet is to avoid this thing. It really is only for fans of Halo. And as someone who likes Halo, such as myself, I honestly don't even know if I would want to watch this thing a second time. Because, as I stated earlier, I only liked half of this anthology film, and the other half of it kinda sucks. Mind you, I liked watching it once. However, it's not something I'm gonna jump the gun on and watch it multiple times over. Now...I was debating on whether or not I should play "Halo 2" again. Well, as tempting as that sounds, I kinda want to play "Halo: Combat Evolved" again. Because I haven't played that in quite a long time, and I feel like it needs another playthrough. So, I'm gonna go do that, because I'm kinda in the mood to play some Halo.
Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.
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