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Pablo Schrieber cast as Master Chief for Halo TV series
- Thread starter I Am Captain America
- Start date
It's a TV show, not a movie.
Making a movie would have been smarter in the right hands.
Ohhh, thanks. Haven't been keeping up with this. Thanks.
Hell yeah! Way more fitting.
Smart thing to do would be to just never show the face. Chief is the Helmet.
In reality, it's a TV show on a medium level paid for cable channel. Expectations should be very middling for both the quality of the show and the quality of the cast. Had this been on something like HBO then they might have been able to secure talent of that caliber.
I wish they would just have his dialog voiced over by the game's voice actor. Nothing against the actor, I just think it would be cool.
Liked him in Orange is the New Black.
Was in 13 hours, so he is comfortable around weapons.
He's a good actor and he's also really, really tall for an actor.(6'5") Which is good for noted giant, Master Chief.
I only know him from Orange and American Gods but I really like him, his voice is amazing for when he uses the helmet, and he is really tall so I can dig this casting
I agree, but they always show the face more than necessary in everything.
He would do an incredible job of being distant yet showing how much he cares about cortana and saving everyone.
Sure, just pointing out he would be perfect for this, but never expected it would happen.
The games already do that. This is an opportunity to add depth to this story by showcasing master chief.
I recently watched Nightfall, Forward Unto Dawn, The Fall of Reach, and Halo Legends and was surprised at how much I enjoyed each one, especially Nightfall. They're pretty stupidly written, but then so are the games. They're not the highest production value, either, but we're talking animation and web series.
For what they were, they were cool. It is mind-blowing to me, though, that a big studio and a big budget haven't tackled the franchise yet, given both its insane popularity, and Microsoft's seeming-insistence on doing right by the fans, which will hopefully prevent it from being yet another disastrous video game movie. Of course, I also think focusing it on Master Chief is silly. Make it about a group of survivors in Covenant attack, or about a group of marines, or maybe a horror story featuring a small settlement dealing with a Flood infestation.
There are interesting stories to tell in the Halo-verse and the ones featuring Master Chief have been told a million times. Imagine 85% of Star Wars movies, novels, comics, and shows all focused on Luke Skywalker. Fucking christ already.
For what they were, they were cool. It is mind-blowing to me, though, that a big studio and a big budget haven't tackled the franchise yet, given both its insane popularity, and Microsoft's seeming-insistence on doing right by the fans, which will hopefully prevent it from being yet another disastrous video game movie. Of course, I also think focusing it on Master Chief is silly. Make it about a group of survivors in Covenant attack, or about a group of marines, or maybe a horror story featuring a small settlement dealing with a Flood infestation.
There are interesting stories to tell in the Halo-verse and the ones featuring Master Chief have been told a million times. Imagine 85% of Star Wars movies, novels, comics, and shows all focused on Luke Skywalker. Fucking christ already.
Really hoping news starts flowing out about this soon. I wanna hear more casting choices, and possibly see some pre-production assets.
Side note: Steve Downes better voice him in the armor still, with the actor only providing dialog out of the armor.
Side note: Steve Downes better voice him in the armor still, with the actor only providing dialog out of the armor.
Why not just use the games voice actor because we "should" never see his face so the person in the actual suit doesnt matter.
Get a stunt man in the suit, get the voice actor to do the....err voice?
Get a stunt man in the suit, get the voice actor to do the....err voice?
The bad games do that. When it was moved away from Bungie, they used the same excuse for it. To add depth to Chief. All it did was undermine what made him charismatic.
His no-nonsense minimalism is his charm. Depth is added from the outside in his case. Bungie always understood that Chief was basically the T800 in the world of Aliens.
Did V in V for Vendetta lack depth because they refused to show his face?
Felt like the first Halo wanted to be somewhat Hard Scifi, but after that it became low hanging executed mehly trope city
I can agree with that. There is potential in the Halo universe for sure. Never read the books, but the games have that feeling where the lore was designed after the gameplay, and you can just tell the developers are trying to add depth/meaning to shit that was just designed to be fun to shoot at.
Dude owned in Den of Thieves.
Halo's story has been trash since day one so hopefully they do something interesting with it and the action is good.
Halo's story has been trash since day one so hopefully they do something interesting with it and the action is good.
General answers that are really just repeats of how I've always talked about the Halo games and fiction -- as opposed to show specifics, which we'll discuss later in the year and I am not touching at all here, by hint, by exception or by inference but as for game and story Chief so far...
Chief's appearance was described in detail in fiction quite some time before anyone even had an Xbox - in the origin setup story, the Fall of Reach we meet him as a child and an adult and he's not in that regard particularly unusual or striking. For the show, he's cast for his acting chops before anything else. But this response is about the game and the character background as it's been presented to date.
Most people experience Halo through the game - and in that regard you make plenty of fair points - and think of him as the guy in the green armor with the gold visor, or they think about their own actions in those games and stories. We also have a very big fiction following - and those people think of Chief sometimes in the ways described here - but also as a person with a distinct face, hair color, scars, freckles, the whole nine yards. In that sense, there's no wrong way to think about what he looks like, because while he's physically well-described, the value in the game can come from different angles because it's a vastly different medium.
Chief's in-game appearance is a hybrid of his purpose in the game, the usefulness or immersion of player agency being uninterrupted by that dissonance - which is why people sometimes shift (in both directions) between "I jumped over the thing" and "When Nathan Drake jumps over that thing..." as well as years and generations of design, content and story changes - not to mention technology, style and content evolutions. At the end of the first Halo game, that's cemented by Chief taking his helmet off as the camera pans away - both as a jokey nod to his anonymity, but also as an acknowledgment of what you the player had achieved.
His persona is a function of a similar thing - playing a story as "yourself" versus "experiencing a story about people and events" and obviously that's not limited to Halo by any stretch of the imagination and the faceless protagonist pre-dates the antagonist with a recognizable face. and that's not something that changed between how I have personally described it dozens of times when I was at Bungie, or since. IN all the novels where Chief is a featured character, his persona is obviously vastly expanded versus the games. And contextualized in a hugely different way by the nature of the medium.
Personally I have always thought of him both ways comfortably - including before I ever started at Bungie in 2003 - but obviously I read the book before I played the game - and further, I'm not a typical Halo fan. But I am also a Halo fan and my opinions aren't outliers by any stretch of the imagination - I've had hundreds of conversations about this with fans over the years and I'm somewhere in the middle.
As for your perfectly valid V for Vendetta example, I think personally that's a really different thing - for me, V is shown as literally a smiling Guy Fawkes throughout the entire movie (and comic) and his real appearance
is hidden because of the plot - he's hideously burned and is in a quasi romantic relationship with the female lead and his appearance is also used as the most direct visual inspiration for the revolution his actions incite - and further, is a physical requirement for the unfolding plot - they all wear the exact same masks to both maintain their anonymity and show homage to their "leader." SO for me his appearance is almost the opposite of obscured - it's the most profound and important visual element in the entire film - including the expression of wit and menace and in some shots even wistfulness - all with the same mask
Obviously I've given this a lot of consideration over the years, but I've tended towards the Judge Dredd example as a useful tonal or device comparison - where the mystery of his appearance evolves over time - first as a kind of artistic choice in a short form story - but over the years a fundamental component not of his mystery - but of his persona. He is literally a faceless avatar of justice and it becomes a kind of Rorschach test for whether you think he's a noble anonymous hero who eschews ego in the pursuit of justice or a "fascist thug" who lacks empathy - and the writers over the decades have done amazing things with that (including IMO the best comic book panel of all time) but Chief in all the games (and obviously you have strong feelings about them) utters action-movie one-liners, thoughtful questions and laconic jokes. He's at times respectful, somber, pensive and at times light hearted and glib.
Our audience has extremely subjective feelings about Chief where they talk about him as a fully fleshed out character in the fiction (as opposed to an avatar for their adventure) and they have wildly different interpretations of his relationship with Halsey, Cortana, the Covenant's nobility or the UNSC's decisions in defense of the Earth and her colonies. He's also, over the years become more of the focus of some stories since he's by necessity been at the center of the biggest events in the galaxy. Ironically one of our loudest complaints about Halo 5's story were variants of "not enough chief."
I'm actually fine with people having really different subjective feelings about Chief - what he represents to them, whether it be a tragic figure, a mythic hero whose fate and backstory are essential to how you want him to be portrayed, or if he's a faceless Virgil guiding them through a sci-fi world, and even if they just want him to be a camera they drive through the games to make stuff explode, as long as they get something meaningful out of those experiences in that medium.
I mean they got a red head so they are at least trying to stay close to the canon. Works for me!