Halo Legends (2010)

Halo Legends (2010)

Directed by: Shinji Aramaki, Hideki Futamura, Toshiyuki Kanno

Starring: Shelley Calene-Black, David Wald, Deke Anderson

Get ready for a whole week of movies made in 2010, thanks to a double dog dare from one of my friends who was apparently tired of seeing me review nothing but 60’s Italian horror movies and 90’s action movies about computers. YOU ASKED FOR IT, FUCKO!

Halo Legends is actually a compilation of seven short animated films about the Halo series, a la The Animatrix. It even starts out with the exact same sort of thing, with the first short (which is a two-parter, for some reason) being about the backstory of the human/covenant war and where the Flood came from and things like that. Also in the collection is an ugly piece of shit about two covenant guys who are apparently samurai and several stories about other Spartans who aren’t Master Chief doing things ranging from remembering their training experiences to fighting with huge guys. Okay, it’s mostly fighting with huge guys.

I didn’t really expect much out of Halo Legends, if only because I didn’t think The Animatrix was all that great, and the story behind the Halo games is really bare-bones and generic. I mean, that’s fine for a video game and all, but come on guys, it just doesn’t have the ability to support a Star Wars-esque expanded universe of books and movies and what have you.

The most surprising thing about Halo Legends to me was that two of the seven stories are the ugliest goddamn things I’ve ever seen. The rest are pretty decent, movie-grade anime, but those two… damn. The first was this one that looked like it had been made in Flash, then had a Photoshop watercolor filter slapped over the whole thing, making it look like a smudgy mess. The other, and even more surprising one, was where it was all done in CGI. Like, the kind of CGI you’d expect from 1999 in a direct-to-video failed kid’s show or something. I mean, it would’ve looked better had it been machinima from ANY of the existing Halo games. It was inexcusably terrible for 2010.

But, all around, it’s entertaining enough if you like watching anime about space marines blowing up aliens, which is a pretty huge demographic, so I’ll bet plenty of people liked it.