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Reviews
Those About to Die (2024)
I'm confused by the Cala character.
Is Cala a Girl Boss? She weasels her way into Xanas' life, takes over the desk of his betting operation, and impresses everyone by conversing with several punters in their native tongues.
All the while, Tenax, who was initially written as the top-dog, on top of every situation and devising cunning responses to desparate situations, suddenly turned into Cala's lapdog, hanging off her every "new" suggestion to improve "his" betting business, like in-game betting, that Tenax rejects because it could cost him his business, but she went ahead and did behind his back while he was incapacitated!!! What was her motivation to do this, why was she obsessed with in-game betting? Don't know.
Cala is written as the moral centre of the show. She's only doing "bad things" to save her children.
Tenax, though, is not. He's just in it for the money, isn't he, a dirty capitalist, and Cala gets to look down on him and take the moral high-ground at every opportunity, and this even after she has witnessed Tenax helping the children by giving them work and putting food in their bellies.
So when Skorpus engineers the death of another Gold Faction chariot rider, and Tenax reluctantly supports him to keep the Gold Faction together, Cala takes the position that he should have sacked Skorpus! And delivers these lines as though she was scolding a naughty boy, and Tenax just sits their taking it!
I've given this show 7/10, it would be an 8 or a 9, but the way Cala is written (more 2024 than 79) just takes me out of the show.
Mores the pity.
Halo: Halo (2024)
For Normies Eyes Only
The original Xbox game, Halo: Combat Evolved, was released on Thursday 15th November 2001.
It became a best seller, and sold a heck of a lot of Xboxes! I had been a Playstation gamer but bought an Xbox just to play Halo.
It's unique game mechanics of the rechargeable health and shield, forced players to switch from all out assault (when their health and shields were full) to stealth (waiting for their health and shields to regenerate).
But it was the world of Halo that kept gamers coming back for more. And why it's sequels where also best sellers under Bungie. The UNSC (through The Master Chief) vs the Covenant, then the UNSC fighting alongside one faction of the Covenant against another faction. And lurking in the background another antagonist that could wipe everyone out!
The reveal of this third antagonist in Combat Evolved was a fundamental step change. You thought you knew what the Combat Evolved story-line was: UNSC vs Covenant; good vs evil. Then something happened, and the complexion of the game changed. It turned from space combat to survival-horror. I still remember that scene and how I felt to this day.
And how did Halo the TV series treat this reveal in the season finale? In a completely different way with no build up. It just happened, through a series of blunders and neglect for basic safety protocols that had me rolling my eyes at the ineptitude of the characters I was watching, even the accompanying musical score as this section of the story unfolded, seemed a strange choice to me.
It does however crystalise what is wrong with the TV show. The story is just too generic - there is no imagination on show here.
If you have never played Halo: Combat Evolved, you may find this TV show interesting, and forgiving of the poor writing and how some of the character arcs are dispatched with in this episode.
But knowing how grander, space operatic, and grounded in realism (you know why characters know what they know) the games are, the TV show's plot is lazily moved forward with a character providing a supernatural "insight" into a situation that they really should not be in a position to know about (I'm looking at you Kwan Ha!); this show is a difficult watch. A series of missed opportunities.
I've given this episode 1 star for the FX, they are way better than season 1. And nothing for the character development or the world of Halo that the showrunners have reimagined.
It's just one generic sci-fi thing after another... A cherished IP burned to the ground by a writing room that has no appreciation or respect for the source-material. It's a product to be consumed, nothing more.
Halo: Onyx (2024)
Everyone's a Spartan now (SBI detected?)
Perez (actress is 5'6") is now in Spartan training, and following the "strong female character" trope so beloved of current day Hollywood, she's questioning and disobeying orders during a training combat mission.
After Kai raises serious issues of competence with all the trainee "Spartans" after the disastrous end to that training mission, Perez takes it upon herself to confront Kai and ask why she is being so hard on her in particular (she isn't, she's being hard on everyone), and then Perez asks Kai: "Is it 'cause I was on Reach and you weren't?".
Just WOW.
All this happens in the first 5 minutes of the episode, and it doesn't get any better.
Who is writing this? It has the same dismissive attitude to military discipline as Kurtzman Trek.
I do have to genuinely ask: is Sweet Baby Inc., a consultant on this show?
It's the only way to describe the decisions and directions the show has taken.
After walking around naked for much of season one and getting it on with Makee, "Master Cheeks" has now completely lost his armor!
How has it come to this? How can they keep putting up that title screen with "Halo" written across it when this series has so very little DNA to connect it to the games? Saying that this story is part of the "Silver Timeline" does not negate that.
In Star Wars, Disney bought a boy-brand that both boys and girls watched and enjoyed for $5bn, and turned it into a girl-brand that nobody watches, or cares about anymore.
Paramount is doing the same to Halo.
We can only hope that the rumours of Warner Brothers buying Star Trek from Paramount are true, so that Kurtzman Trek can be exorcised from the Star Trek canon.
Let's start a petition to get Warner Brothers to buy Halo!!! Who's with me?!!! (jogs away into the near-distanch shouting "Come On!". No-one follows...)
True Detective: Night Country: Part 1 (2024)
Echoes of Fortitude
Is it just me, or does "True Detective: Night Country", have a hint of "Fortitude" about it?
Fortitude, a series from 2015, is also set inside the Arctic Circle, and revolved around a working-class community whose chief law-enforcement officer (gloriously played by Richard Dormer, Game of Thrones), who has to work out why perfectly sane people in his community start to act very strangely indeed!
And what a cast: Dennis Quaid, Sienna Guillory, Ken Stott, Michael Gambon, Stanley Tucci, Sofie Gråbøl, Luke Treadaway and Robert Sheehan, to name but a few!
Damn! Now I want to re-watch it and have nightmares again!