A few weeks back, Paramount+ released the first teaser for its upcoming sci-fi video game adaptation Halo, revealing that series protagonist Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) is rocking some serious back scars, confirming that friendly AI Cortana (Jen Taylor) is up and running, and…Well, we don’t really have a third thing to fill out that Oxford comma. It was a pretty short teaser, is the thing.
Now, though, the studio has released a fuller look at Halo as part of tonight’s annual The Game Awards. (The Game Awards: The awards show where you sit through the commercials to get to the other, more expensive commercials!)The new trailer sees Schreiber teaming up with Natascha McElhone (playing his science mom), fellow Spartan Bokeem Woodbine, and several others to fight the dogmatic alien Covenant. (Absent here, but at least we get some of those iconic Halo piano hits on the soundtrack.)
Halo: The Multimedia Something Or Other has been in development in a few different forms since at least 2013, when Steven Spielberg’s Amblin got attached to try to turn the massively popular Microsoft games franchise into a workable sci-fi property. (And here’s where we’re legally obligated to note that Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 grew out of an even earlier, failed effort to adapt the franchise to film under the watch of Peter Jackson.)
The Halo series tells a sprawling, surprisingly detailed story of a long war between humanity (represented by the superhuman Spartans and the military UNSC) versus the Covenant, which gets even more apocalyptic once both sides stumble onto a massive alien installation capable of wiping out a decent chunk of all life in the universe.
The series was originally developed at Showtime, but was eventually shifted over to Paramount+, in an effort to give the streamer another big-budget sci-fi show that isn’t another dang Star Trek show.