New Halo trailer takes us into the Master Chief’s world

Master Chief is reporting for duty. After some failed movie attempts, showrunner departures and a network-to-streaming-platform jump, Halo is finally here in the form of an eponymous Paramount+ TV series. The show stars Pablo Schreiber as John-117 (a.k.a. the Master Chief), who’s part of a group known as “Spartans,” enhanced soldiers that protect humanity against the Covenant — an evil race of extraterrestrials — and a whole other host of other-worldly threats.

Halo is coming to our television screens soon, and Paramount has released a full trailer for it, giving us a better look at its the eye-popping action and showing off some of the perils that Master Chief and his A.I. companion Cortana (Jen Taylor) will be facing.

Watch the full-length Halo trailer

Having initially been envisioned as a big-screen franchise,  putting Halo on television had worried some fans, who feared a small-screen budget would prevent the series from reaching the games’ larger-than-life aesthetic. Going by what’s shown in this trailer, however, Halo: The Series seems to be a faithful visual adaptation of its source material.

Admittedly, we need a full look at the show to properly assess its aesthetic and feel, but so far, it appears Paramount+’s Halo‘s spectacle will be worthy of Master Chief’s video-game escapades.

Bringing the Halo universe to casual audiences

The ‘Halo’ franchise has an expansive mythology that spans multiple main video games, spinoffs, books and comic books. Its lore is so complex that even using Combat Evolved (the first game in the series) as your first foray into the franchise can feel like a foreign experience. This meant a big challenge for Paramount+’s Halo, which had to deliver a story that was digestible for new viewers, but still felt like a satisfying adaptation for longtime fans of the franchise.

The people behind Halo: The Series approached that challenge by setting the show in the “Silver Timeline,” a newly created continuity that uses the games’ lore to tell its own story. Discussing the show during an interview for HaloWaypoint.com (Halo’s official website), ‘Halo’-Franchise Creative Director Frank O’Connor explained the reasoning behind this move, and what it meant for both the video games and the series:

"“We’ve been working on the idea of a ‘Halo’ TV series for a long time, but one of the first things we realized when we started working with writers and directors was that there were some real dangers of mapping a totally different medium – games – to a linear narrative format, TV or movie for that matter. Not just because of the differences in approach and perspective that make sense for each medium, but also because we want to make sure that we’re not forcing either the game or the show to go in completely unnatural directions.[We] wanted to think of the simplest and most productive way to make sure we didn’t ‘break’ either medium by trying to force square pegs into round holes. […] Basically, we want to use the existing ‘Halo’ lore, history, canon, and characters wherever they make sense for a linear narrative, but also separate the two distinctly so that we don’t invalidate the core canon or do unnatural things to force a first-person video game into an ensemble TV show.”"

By being separated from the games’ storyline, Halo: The Series is able to create a new side of its world without being bound by 20+ years of history, and without having to interfere with the video games’ aforementioned ever-expanding plot.

Halo: The Series will be released exclusively on Paramount+ on March 24, 2022.

What did you think about the Halo trailer? Are you happy with the show adapting its source material instead of being part of the ‘Halo’ video-game canon? Let us know in the comments!