Great Film overall

Best movie ever!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Watching the Western fantasies about the future and it clicks: the Western future society is far worse than any non Western threat, including the recent Islamist scare. Halo is about a platonic society of numbers where there is no personality, only the body, an ant hill ready to battle nobody knows what.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

I am one of many who has read the novel on which this movie is based off of and which I loved so you could say I went in with high expectations. I would be lying if I said i didn't have any. I will however say that I tried to lower those expectations and be open to a different view. Besides, book adaptations are rarely if not ever better than in it's original form simply because our own imagination plays a mayor role in it. It's hard to live up to those standards which are different for each and any individual.Unfortunately lowering my standards was not merely enough to be able to enjoy this movie. I would even say that if it weren't for me being a fan of the source material I would've given it an even lower score and it might have even scared me away from the franchise completely. The only thing that actually kept me going was me liking the universe the books created and my interest in how the team behind this production envisioned this prelude to the Halo games.And that's why it baffles me so much that it's this bad because this is coming from the people that have the property in their possession and who work on the current games in the franchise. Everything is there and checks out, from the original voice actors down to the lore, even small details like the HUD indicators from the games, and yet they have managed to produce a lackluster representation of an otherwise great story written by Mr. Nylund with stiff voice-acting and even stiffer animation work that resembled something closer to in-game graphics from last generations game consoles than anything. If I didn't know any better I could be fooled in to thinking I was watching a not so funny episode of Red vs. Blue. I know and agree that looks aren't everything but then at least get the emotion part right one way or another, especially because The Fall of Reach is one of emotional heavier tales in the franchise, if not the heaviest.The movie adaptation of the Fall of Reach ended up being quite a disappointment to me and I wasn't even expecting all that much of it to begin with, and to make matters worse, to top it all of, we didn't even get to see the full story. We have seen Reach, but the falling bit as mentioned in the title is a big part of it too. Either 343 didn't think so or this is a 2 parter.All in all I can't recommend this to anyone. And if you're a fan and you're as curious as I was though, take my advise and put the book on your nightstand before hand.

I just couldn't get past the animation and the egregious lack of diversity. I mean it's an animated film for crying out loud. Movie makers have to realize that adapting a story-line from a video-game is easy. Just don't add in more than it needs to be. It's funny because a die-hard gamer friend of mine warned me to stay away from pretty much most video game adaptations and he was right.This starts out just too entirely bloated in terms of meaningless dialog. The set-up is just too long winded and no way is this much set up needed for an action film. The dramatic moments are absent and there is no reason for such a set-up. We all know what the end result will be.I can't believe this is a Microsoft product. The animation is almost amateurish. The emotions have to register on their facial movements and I can't even get an even palate on the characters clothing. It's like watching stick figures talk to each other. The Final Fantasy films run circles around this film.If you haven't seen this yet don't bother.

This is a short movie/series so ill keep the review short as well, or maybe i wont.I was expecting a book adaptation like any other, with some scenes missing and so forth... but what i got was even worse. (i have read Fall of Reach multiple times) The reason why i think its worth solid 5 is because the story of Chief is followed to the letter... which is good, but some details are outright wrong and completely opposite of the book.Before I go into the story details, let me just say that the animation was fine... visuals were okay... it was unique style, might have been cheaper production wise like people say... I didn't find any significant complaints in the animation, could have been better of course but it was good enough. Reminds me of those other Halo Waypoint-series's which are done in similar fashion.However the main issue that this movie has (i own the blu-ray) is the story details. Multiple scenes were outright weird and did not belong... they had already been described in the book, so why not use that description and make it look like it? Instead it looks like that they didn't bother... just slapped something similar to get it over with.Some of those details can be overlooked because they are merely formalities like the way the kids dispatched the 2 soldiers during their training, in the book they beat up the last one of them instead of merely throwing a few rocks and stand around him... that was supposed to look like a pack of wolves taking down larger prey. However i can forgive that... maybe they threw the rocks so hard they didn't need to beat him anymore. Moving along... The details that i could not forgive were scenes like when the kids were first time introduced to their new place and told what they were gonna be... nobody tried to leave, it seemed like they didn't care... 6 year old kids would care and they would want to get back to their parents (like in the book...), but there was not a single bit of reluctance visible during that introduction.The next scene i found unacceptably wrong was the Mjolnir-armor suit up... that was the first armor suit the Spartans were going to use... they were supposed to look exactly the same, but somehow... someway.. they all had unique helmets. WHAT!. Correct me if I'm wrong but in general only Halsey was able to distinguish Spartans from each other while they were suited up... well, i guess every officer in the UNSC is too stupid to notice that they all had UNIQUE helmets to further make themselves distinguishable...duh.Okay the last scene i found disturbingly out of place was the first fight against a covenant ship... in the book the UNSC ship was like 3 times more massive than the covenant ship, and thus they thought it wasn't a threat... but its plasma weapons did far more damage to the unsc ship than they expected and it had energy shielding, on such a small ship! SURPRISE FACTOR!. But in this adaptation... what the heck, the covenant ship was like 10 times bigger than the UNSC ship. The superiority of covenant ship-technology was immediately made insignificant because their ship was so much bigger.The whole point of Halo story - Human-Covenant War - has been the humanity's struggle to survive against overwhelming technological superiority. This movie forgot that.If the major wrongness's were fixed... i would give this movie 7/10, if it was exactly as accurate as the book it would get 8.5/10. The Animation only takes 2 points in my book... it was good enough for me. The dozens of minor plot-changes and the few major ones took the rest... so i will end up with 5/10.In reality i should give 4/10 but i love halo so i want to give it 5/10... pity point i guess.