To promote the upcoming release of the video game Halo 4, somebody made a series of five 15-minute web videos, using live action, set in the Halo universe. They were set up like a little miniseries with a vague story to accompany the novelty of seeing what it would look like if Halo came to life. It was a much, much higher quality than you would expect for a bunch of web videos. In fact, I'd say the production values and special effects were of higher quality than several movies I've seen recently. If the goal was to create a compelling marketing product that people would want to watch in order to get them excited about the game, they really did a phenomenal job.
Unfortunately somebody decided that because they had something that visually looked like a movie and had a story that vaguely resembled something you might see in a movie, that meant they had made an actual movie that they could release as a commercial product. Because Hanlon's Razor states, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," I'm forced to assume that this decision was an attempt to cash in on the Halo buzz and not an act of spite against all the people they knew would be furious when they realized they paid actual money for something that is not actually a movie. There are no real stories, there are no real characters, there's really not any explanation of why anything is happening or what any of it means. It's just long stretches of children being upset interspersed with shots that will make the viewer feel like they're playing the video game. It's about as much a movie as a pile of bricks and lumber is a house.
Warning to parents - towards the end of this movie my son (who's a little young to be playing Halo yet himself) looked at me with a very concerned face and asked, "why are so many kids getting killed?" If you think you might want to put this on for your child because they don't care if something doesn't have a story as long as it's something they like, you really don't. Nothing at all interesting happens for the first half of the movie, and then the rest of the movie is children getting crushed, shot, blown up, and slowly bleeding to death from gory leg wounds as their friends helplessly look on in tears. You'd have to be a real piece of excrement to deliberately charge people money for this.
Unfortunately somebody decided that because they had something that visually looked like a movie and had a story that vaguely resembled something you might see in a movie, that meant they had made an actual movie that they could release as a commercial product. Because Hanlon's Razor states, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," I'm forced to assume that this decision was an attempt to cash in on the Halo buzz and not an act of spite against all the people they knew would be furious when they realized they paid actual money for something that is not actually a movie. There are no real stories, there are no real characters, there's really not any explanation of why anything is happening or what any of it means. It's just long stretches of children being upset interspersed with shots that will make the viewer feel like they're playing the video game. It's about as much a movie as a pile of bricks and lumber is a house.
Warning to parents - towards the end of this movie my son (who's a little young to be playing Halo yet himself) looked at me with a very concerned face and asked, "why are so many kids getting killed?" If you think you might want to put this on for your child because they don't care if something doesn't have a story as long as it's something they like, you really don't. Nothing at all interesting happens for the first half of the movie, and then the rest of the movie is children getting crushed, shot, blown up, and slowly bleeding to death from gory leg wounds as their friends helplessly look on in tears. You'd have to be a real piece of excrement to deliberately charge people money for this.