Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
I cannot overstate how culturally big the release of Halo 3 was in 2007. I consider myself a leading historian on this specific moment in video game history, in massive part due to the fact that I was thirteen years old when it happened. Halo 3 was overhyped in literally every possible way, then it over delivered.
In the years following Halo 3, the development company Bungie would make two more, non mainline, games in the Halo franchise, then fully separate from Microsoft, leaving the rights to Halo behind. Naturally, Microsoft would immediately look for ways to use those rights to make “products” and “money.” One of their first forays into stretching the IP was Halo Legends.
Following in the wake of something like The Animatrix, Halo Legends would be an anthology film made by a slew of Japanese anime directors given the freedom to make whatever they want within the Halo universe. These shorts were originally posted online, but now exist as the feature film that I remember renting from a Blockbuster and watching at my friend Jackson’s house.
Let’s talk through each segment.
Origins
The first segment kind of operates as a summary of the bulk of the games’ stories, I assume to create a bridge for the dads who ended up watching this with their sons. Cortana waxes poetic while Chief chills out in cryo-sleep.
it would be very easy to tell this story as a big bombastic epic or fixate on the asskickery that Master Chief usually brings to the function, but that’s not really ever been Halo’s move. Instead, the history lesson feels more like a thoughtful poem about existence, humanity, unity, and war. I personally found it a little tedious, especially since I know all the information already from playing the games, but I still respect how earnest it is.
It made me nostalgic. Does anyone else remember how sincere the Halo 3 marketing was? They had a lengthy, expensive ad campaign that features elderly actors portraying veterans of the covenant / human war and telling the camera about how they would have died in battle if it wasn’t for the chief. It was delivered completely straight faced. You could go online and view memorials and museum pieces from the war. This is a game that also had TWO Mountain Dew tie-ins.
I love how in love with it’s own scope Halo used to be. I think this segment is pretty boring and the visual elements don’t carry it, but it’s nice that it commits to being a 15 minute tone poem despite telling the story of a first person shooter video game.
The Duel
This one is about how the alien elites’ home planet is actually the exact same as 17th century Japan I guess. It’s a samurai story about the Arbiter avenging his family by killing 800 covenant with dual energy swords. It’s done in an animation style designed to look like water color that almost works, but since it’s movements aren’t fully fluid it kind of ends up looking like a weird Machinima, which I guess is actually pretty fitting.
This segment is fine. My biggest takeaway is that it’s egregious to make this segment knowing none of the games let you hold two energy swords at the same time. This short proposes that if we could we could take down masses of soldiers and even wraiths with ease, and I agree fully.
This one ends with both samurai elites falling to the ground, honorably slain by one another’s blade. It’s at this moment that I fully accept none of the characters in this movie are going to get a kill and then teabag.
Homecoming
This one is about how messed up it actually is to create spartan super soldiers. We crosscut between a battle where a spartan is the difference maker for a group of marines, and a flashback where a group of subjects have escaped the spartan program and are on the run.
The humans vs. Covenant action in this one is solid and it was exciting to finally see some classic UNSC weaponry getting fired at some grunts. The flashback storyline is much less “fun” as we learn that each of the subjects picked to become super soldiers was replaced by a clone back at their home, so there is actually no where for them to “escape” to.
The stories merge as the subject we follow closest is also the spartan in the middle of the present day firefight. The segment has a dire ending, as not only does the spartan die fending off the covenant so her squad can extract, but at the last second the evac plane is also blown up.
The thing that frustrated me about this segment was that the spartans are these tide-changing super units, but this one gets taken out very easily the second it fits her most ideal self-sacrifice moment. thank goodness this is the only segment that will be about that.
Odd One Out
Oh man this segment. This might be the weirdest one. It opens with Master Chief flying away from a planet and explaining that the other spartan soldier that was with him fell off the plane. We then move to that spartan, and learn he’s a bit of a goofball.
The goofball spartan immediately meets some precocious kids and is attacked by their pet T-Rex. Sure! The spartan meets the kids’ older siblings and it seems that they’re the only people on this planet.
We cut to a covenant ship where we see a prophet ordering a huge brute(?) to go to the planet and kill the Master Chief. At least, I think it is a brute. This alien does not look like any enemy that has ever appeared in a Halo game, which is kind of annoying. Oh boy is this big ape(?) in for a shock when he instead finds a silly little guy and his new friends.
There is a massive fight where the spartan runs out of ammo immediately. The fight then turns into a big flashy fist fight between the alien, the spartan, and the humans, who somehow also seem to have super strength and speed.
This segment feels like someone made an episode of Dragon Ball then put one of the characters in spartan armor. It has practically no Halo elements in it at all. This is the one where I finally asked the question, “is Halo popular in Japan?” According to a random Reddit post from 2017, not particularly! Halo 3 was a mild hit there, but it is safe to assume these shorts were made with an American audience in mind.
Prototype
This one is about a platoon of soldiers who are pinned down. We crosscut from their battle to their squad leader’s really sad tragic flashback. It seems truly insane to me that Halo is one of the most creatively expansive universes maybe ever and it seems that the only two ideas they came up with for these were this one and “what if a spartan fist fought a dinosaur.”
At least this time it isn’t a spartan…
Annnnnd the squad leader puts on an experimental mech suit that is basically heavy spartan armor. Once in it, he activates the default mode, which is heroic self sacrifice. He mows down covenant and covers his squad as they escape, knowing he’s going down with the suit.
It feels like if they make a segment where a spartan lives they’ll get sued or something. Just going off of this movie, it’s my understanding that a spartan is designed from the ground up to take enemy fire until four regular guys escape. It seems like a bad investment.
If this mech suit was in any of the games you would for sure switch into third person when you get in it.
The Babysitter
We follow a squad of ODST’s, which means our main characters do take fall damage. They’re joined by one spartan (I’m sure they’ll be fine) as they drop in deep behind enemy lines to assassinate a Covenant prophet. This one is pretty dope both in premise and execution. It might be solely because we finally see a squad not pinned down from the jump.
Our main ODST has a through line of being outdone and saved by the spartan. During one small scuffle, the ODST falls off a waterfall. The spartan catches him, but his sniper rifle falls. That’s infuriating right? He kills one single grunt with it before fully dropping it. Kind of makes you think it actually would have been okay to team kill him for it? Like if he grabs it off the top of Blood Gulch really fast but sucks with it it’s actually okay to betray him and grab it? We all agree on that?
The squad reach their target and are about to line up a shot when a brute jumps out and swings a gravity hammer right at the ODST. The spartan jumps in the way, taking the full hit. Then, with her dying breathe, she tells the ODST to take the shot.
WHY! Even if he can and will hit it, you are SO much more valuable than him, and YOU can hit the shot. They sent the spartan on this mission specifically so that she could be the one to shoot this shot. There is just absolutely no math that makes this decision makes sense. The only explanation is that spartan armor is literally programmed to self sacrifice by any means necessary. If that brute hadn’t jumped out when it did, I can only assume the spartan would have found a really rickety bridge and shoved their teammate onto it so that they could then pull them back to land and heroically fall to their death.
The ODST hits the shot, which is cool. Would have been cooler if the spartan had been alive, because they could have ran down and mounted the prophet and punched them to death.
The Package
This one is fully 3D and my first thought was “this looks like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which is a movie we all equally remember.” Would you believe I then learned it is by the same studio! I’m so smart! I learned so much in my youth when I wasn’t playing Halo.
This one is simple and (maybe just because it’s such a breathe of fresh air) totally rules. It’s Master Chief and two other Spartans (there are like 10 but a ton die really fast) going on a dangerous rescue mission aboard a Covenant ship. Immediately I use my context clues to piece together that there is a 99.99% chance that both of these Spartans that I have forgotten the names of will die in a self sacrificing way.
Highlights of this segment include a couple quick shots that are in first person and even have the shields and HUD, the fight scenes really look like later Red Vs. Blue, and they PLAY THE MUSIC. When I looked back at my notes I took while watching this one, I wrote “THIS ONE RULES” as my second bullet point and then my last bullet point note says “this one might not actually be good it might just have the Halo music.” What the hell is that note taking? How am I supposed to parse that!
The two other Spartans both sacrifice themselves.