- Title: Halo – Contact
- IMDb: link
I’ll be honest, my only real connection with the first-person shooter video game series the new TV-series is based on comes from the popular multi-player mode where I tried my best not to get shot in the back of the head by players who put in far more hours to the game than I ever would. The larger story about super-elite military soldiers versus invading aliens wasn’t really applicable to those scenarios. The series takes the basic mythology of the game and expands on it by adding a layer of class divide all too familiar to fans of dystopian science fiction. The opening episode is really only notable for recreating the look of the video game hero along with its high special effects and high body count of the various Covenant aliens Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and the others of Silver Team will put down.
“Contact” introduces us to various human miners who will be all wiped out the Covenant (think Doctor Who Sontarans with stranger faces) in the first episode as well as the alien race and the super soldiers who stop them led by Master Chief whose interaction with one of the sacred artifacts the aliens are after leads him to question his orders regarding the settlement’s sole survivor (Yerin Ha) who has no interest in making the oppressive military her family has fought against for decades look good on the evening news. We also see the bureaucratic infighting of the UNSC and the introduction of Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone) in charge of the Spartan soldiers who is quite curious about the artifact and its effect on her subjects.