The Worst Film Ever

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

To be honest I never had high hopes for this mini series. It felt like a cheap marketing trick before I even saw it. Of course I thought to myself "They spent 10 million smackers making it, how bad could they screw it up?"Pretty badInstead of analyzing it to death, I'll list the disappointments:-There is little or no character depth-There is not enough character development of Locke, who I might add is the whole point of the mini series-The whole series has a bit of a cheap feel to it, from the environments to the guns-The plot is not emotionally engaging and goes nowhere-God help us, the clichés

*Minor Plot Spoilers* I'm not the biggest Halo fan, I'm not going to lie. I've played all of them, but I'm not going to complain about how many shots it takes a magnum to break an Elite's shields, but I know enough about movies to say how lazy this is. The plot of this series is boring. It takes place mostly on the broken Halo ring from Halo 1 where a group of ONI soldiers have to plant a bomb to destroy some anti-human element found there. Most of the plot is just this group of humans wandering around a wasteland and arguing about sides Survivor style. I was hoping maybe to see a return of the Flood on the ring, but instead we get... hunter worms? Thats right. Hunter worms not in their armor. They act as the generic sci-fi sound hearing monster and brought nothing interesting to the table. That was a curious choice to make, seeing as the flood could have done basically the same thing and make a bit more sense... speaking of curious choices, one of the first scenes of the movie they introduce a new alien species out of the blue that I've never heard of., so I looked them up and they were just made up specifically for that one scene. So under utilized that they don't even have a wikipedia page. Anyway, the marines go around the planet, draw lines, betray each other,and eventually get off the planet with their mission done. The characters themselves are as dull as they get and they all lack character. Locke? Well he's a marine commander... that's all. Master Chief had more emotion and he's equatable to a pet rock as far as emotions go. People complained about the CGI in this show, but I thought it was pretty decent for a TV show... then I saw its MASSIVE budget and realized how bad it was for the money. Yeah the CGI was good, but at times it just looked fake. I'm pretty sure the graphics of Halo 4 outmatched this by far, but still, the only star I'm giving this show is for the CGI. So, in the end this show is as boring and generic as it gets. Every plot point is predictable and can easily be seen a mile away.It was bad. It was boring. It was not worth your time. But my biggest question is simply, why is this a Halo series? Watch this... A group of Alliance marines fights an evil alien, the Slurgs, and finds out that there's an anti-human element on a planet orbiting around a super nova. There they find an evil alien worms called Hunter Worms. It's up to them to destroy the element and avoid the worms. Boom, I just made this movie entirely non- Halo. The only real reason this movie was Halo was to draw in the massive Halo fanbase, but it used so little of Halo's lore that it didn't seem worth it. The good news is that it didn't seem like it was a cheap cash-in, but it just didn't need to be a Halo series at all. I would feel a lot more comfortable reviewing some B-Movie generic sci-fi, but now I have to review a Halo generic B- movie Sci-fi. If Locke is the main character in Halo Guardians, I think I'll skip that one.

I have to say, I have been praying for years to everything I can think of to get a Halo film or Halo series started and now we have one - and it is a massive disappointment with minor bright spots.The Plot - The story to this series is pretty weak. I mean, it isn't terrible, but I find myself yawning and looking for other things to do when watching each episode (I haven't watched the latest one, I just can't be bothered). It is relatively predictable, and that isn't a bad thing necessarily, but here it makes it pretty boring to watch.The Presentation - (Mini-Spoiler) Okay, the show starts off with a bang; immediately throwing you in the midst of elites trying to sabotage a city. Sounds good, no? No. There is no easing into a pretty poor story, there is no character development of any sort, and because of these two points, you just can't seem to give a.. you get the point. The beauty of the Halo world is completely marginalized and presented shallow. Honestly, it is insulting. Acting - LOL. The acting or dialogue or directing given to the actors is on the cusp of bad and mediocre. It isn't engaging, but that could be because there is no background story, no character development, and you barely even feel you are watching Halo. If you tie all those points together, you could have Johnny Depp acting and it wouldn't make a difference. Overall, this series is insulting. Admittedly, they spent a good deal of time and money on the gear and the vehicles and all that jazz, which looks authentic and freakin' awesome, but apart from that bright spot which is always done correctly... this is not Halo. This is not the beauty of the Halo world as described in the books and games. Let me put it this way... if I had a friend who had never heard of Halo, I would steer clear of this series as it simply is not even in the same realm. Supremely disappointed. Whoever is in charge needs to take their time, spend money where money needs to be spent, consult correctly, get better actors (not A+++ actors, just better), and NEEDS to understand the beauty of the Halo world. Stop butchering this; it makes me, as a long time fan, irritated.

|SPOILERS IN THIRD PARAGRAPH|So I'm a big Halo fan, but not fanatically so, I've enjoyed 343i's offerings to the universe and the Karen Traviss trilogy of books. I've enjoyed both Forward Unto Dawn and the animated anthology, and they took some liberties, but this is just lazy, I don't feel like anyone involved, the actors, the writers or the directors actually gave a damn about what they were doing. They had $70,000,000 to make this series, Ridley Scott is directing, I was expecting something well above what you'd usually get from a scifi TV show, maybe something with the production values of Battlestar or Star Trek, after all Forward Unto Dawn had a much lower budget and was a triumph, but no, what we get is at best a Syfy Channel original series with B-list acting and laughable CGI. For comparison, both Defiance and Falling Skies had better special effects, better acting and felt more genuine than this, and those shows were pretty terrible.The issue is, this is not an original series, this takes place in an established universe loved by millions around the world, with rules and lore that need to be respected. Nor is this a new adaptation of the universe meant for TV, this show is broadcast on Halo Waypoint and aimed at Halo fans who own Xboxs and are already invested in the series.|SPOILERS START NOW| So, the first episode starts, and we're introduced to an alien...that no Halo fan has ever seen or heard of before. It looks like a Star Trek TNG alien, an actor in crude makeup, completely trampling all over Halo's reputation for exotic and creative aliens. Halo fans have fought tooth and nail against all the races of the Covenant, ranging from 3 foot tall methane-breathing crustaceans to one ton colonies of sentient worms driving battle suits, and we've never seen anything as lazy as this. So we get over that, and in comes a Covenant dropship, it looks good enough, it raises our hopes, and then we see the Sangheili it drops off. Or rather we see a blurry, jerky representation of a Sangheili Elite that looks like it was made in Blender. If you've played Halo you're accustomed to beautiful CGI directed by Blur studios that gives Avatar a run for it's money, and Blur studios this is not. So this blurry figure stumbles through the forest, and the half dozen ODSTs tracking him lose him, as the 8 foot tall, half-ton dinosaur in full battle armor disappears down a human-sized manhole cover. Our protagonist, the wooden and disinterested Locke, follows him into the sewer, and attempts to fight him. The Elite has a plasma sword, and repeatedly misses at close range, while Locke's M6 Magnum, a gun that can punch through an Elite's shields and armor in a few shots in the games, is about as effective as a paintball gun, and the Elite escapes. When Locke catches up to him in a shopping mall (where nobody seems to care that an Elite in battle armor is walking around, do they do their grocery shopping in Zealot pattern armor?) Locke climbs onto his back and unloads his M6 into the top of the Elite's head, the magnum breaks his shields but fails to penetrate his helmet. Again this is the iconic, fan-favorite hand cannon of the Halo series renowned for penetrating armor and shields like they're wet toilet paper at ranges that would make a rifle blush, this Elite's brains should have been soup by now. So this 8 foot tall Elite that's able to flip a military jeep like it's a Power Wheels toy is unable to shake a 180lb human, and is apparently driven to exhaustion by a 5-second struggle, dropping to his knees, the plasma sword he was carrying 20 seconds ago conspicuously missing. Locke, a high ranking ODST, then allows the alien to monologue, despite knowing what a Zealot is, and thus knowing that he can't be taken alive, allowing the Elite to set of his dirty bomb when he could have just executed him. At this point I had lost interest, and the episode continued to butcher the lore, with outstanding examples such as the navigator telling the computer to "search the galaxies" for trace elements when Halo takes place in one galaxy, and there being a Pelican dropship that looked about three times larger than it should be, which is inexplicably capable of slipstream travel. The cast of ODSTs prattled on about honor for the duration of the episode, despite an ODST being a ruthless shock trooper with about as much regard for honor as a drunk in a bar fight, known for bad attitudes and getting the job done at any cost.In summary, the actors did not care about their acting, the writers did not care about the source material, and the director obviously thought this mess was passable, or just didn't care, after all it's just a video game for nerds, right? I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed, Forward Unto Dawn showed us that Halo can translate well into shows and movies, it was a great jumping off point for expanding the Halo universe into a multimedia empire, and instead the opportunity was squandered.