In the year 2552, the USNC is the prevailing human authority in the galaxy, and its Spartan super soldiers are its deadliest asset. When Silver Team, led by Master Chief John-117 go to foil an assault by the alien Covenant on a rebellious planet, they find more than they bargained for.

I have a reasonable knowledge of the Halo videogame franchise, having completed the original trilogy and dabbled with some of the other entries in the series, but that knowledge doesn’t extend to the vast canon which has evolved from the games in terms of novels, comics and so on. Fortunate then, that this TV show is based in its own interpretation of the Halo universe, inspired by the setting of the games but designed to form its own separate canon, to better suit the medium.

That said, anyone who’s picked up a controller and taken Master Chief for a spin will find plenty here which is familiar – the sound effect of Spartan armour losing its shielding and then powering back up, the weapons, the armour and the Covenant Elite enemies – all present and correct. It even manages to slip in a couple of first person shots in the middle of battle scenes, just in case you might have forgotten for a moment exactly where the show draws its inspiration.

But it also stands very much on its own, albeit borrowing heavily from what other franchises have done. The USNC here is a darker, less immediately ‘heroic’ presence in the galaxy, with many planets rebelling against it and striving for their own independence. The development of the Spartan super soldiers here is even darker and more shadowy than I recall from the videogames, and there’s a definite feeling of this being an organisation which does terrible things while justifying them as necessary for the greater good. It’s not a carbon copy of Firefly/Serenity’s Alliance, but there’s definitely an echo in there.

It’s also a lot more graphic than the games ever were, not shying away from the visceral effects of the Covenant’s deadly weaponry on human bodies. Minutes into the thing, there’s a set of quite brutal deaths, and the body count in the episode as a whole is high indeed.

As far as plot, it’s not blazing many new trails – Master Chief and his squad turn up on a planet called Madriga which continues to assert its independence from the USNC looking for Covenant invaders. Said invaders have got there first and make a mess of a settlement commanded by General Jin Ha. Having dealt with the covenant, Silver Team head to find out where they landed and uncover a mysterious doohickey, followed by Jin’s daughter Kwan. Master Chief’s encounter with this doohickey has an unexpected impact on him, and events progress in fairly predictable fashion.

A lot of time is spent on establishment of the universe – we get to see the scientist who created the Spartans, Dr Halsey, as well as her estranged husband and daughter, and between the three of them it becomes clear that, while the USNC may be fighting ‘on behalf of humanity’ against the Covenant, it isn’t too picky about collateral damage along the way.

We also get a glimpse of the Covenant home base, and a mysterious, out of place individual there who I suspect has some important link to make with our central character at some point. There isn’t much here to suggest who the Covenant are, other than baddies, but it is an opening episode and one suspects much more exposition would have doubled the length of the thing.

As to the series protagonist, perhaps the biggest departure from the games here is that it’s difficult to sustain an entire television series on someone with no real personality, no identity and little to say. What works to immerse an active player in a videogame actively alienates a passive television audience. Therefore, it becomes clear early doors that this version of Master Chief will be something very different, and in a decision which I suspect may upset some long term franchise fans, gets a Stallone Judge Dredd-style unhelming before the episode is done, as well as hints at other narrative similarities to that divisive 1995 vehicle.

So it’s not the games and it isn’t especially new or original in much of what it does. What it does do is commit. The budget is clear to see from the first appearance of the Spartans themselves, and the visual FX and aural fidelity to its parent franchise are second to none. The cast is pleasingly diverse, with actual Asian characters speaking in their native language instead of just fragments of that language being splashed into Caucasian English speakers like in some other shows I may already have mentioned. Most of all, the cast is well chosen and acting its collective socks off. Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief has perhaps the hardest job – emoting in a helmet is hard but when he gets to take it off, you really do believe in his inner conflict. Yerin Ha’s Kwan is a hell of a lot more compelling than a basic ‘rebellious daughter of an authority figure’ really has any right to be, and Natasha McElhone is pleasingly difficult to get an exact handle on as Dr Halsey, who may or may not have the best interests of her Spartans at heart.

All in all, it adds up to an entertaining hour of television, and it does things you don’t quite expect, even as it treads a fairly familiar meta narrative. One is always sceptical about videogame franchises making the leap to film and TV, but on the evidence of this opener, this may well turn out to be one of the best examples yet.

Verdict: Familiar narrative beats and genre tropes elevated by an excellent cast and some obvious passionate investment from the creative team. I’m impressed. 8/10

Greg D. Smith