Yesterday, Paramount Plus debuted the first real trailer for the upcoming Halo show on the streaming service, which has drawn…mixed reactions from fans. There seem to be two main points of contention among Halo fans, namely that Master Chief does not have his original voice actor, and that this new version of Cortana, who is played by her original voice actor, has a very un-game-like look.
We’ll start with Cortana, who has already become a meme in the wake of this trailer debut. What’s going on here seems to be a bit complicated.
Originally, the Halo series announced that actress Natascha McElhone would be playing both Dr. Halsey, and the AI Cortana. That made some amount of sense give that Cortana is based on Halsey herself. But ultimately, the showrunners decided that may not be game-faithful enough, so instead they recast Cortana (and Cortana only) with Jen Taylor, who voices/performance captures Cortana in the actual Halo games.
But then now we have this unusual look for Cortana. While it certainly looks more like Jen Taylor than past iterations, there’s definitely some amount of modification being done here. To make her look younger? To make her look more like McElhone? That’s unclear.
The main issue appears to be how she’s rendered, however. She’s not fully blue, as in you can see a natural skin color in there, just with a somewhat blue tint. It feels like she should be more blue and looking more like a hologram. This has led to a lot of fan renderings doing just that, or comparisons to other places where we’ve gotten something that looks more like what you’d expect.
My money is that after this debut, there will probably be more post-production work done on Cortana so she doesn’t debut in full meme mode. Granted, we only had a two second clip of her in the trailer, but I think the show is determined to get everything “right” to satisfy gamers. Jen Taylor being cast as Cortana is great, but yes, the look probably needs to be modified further.
As for Master Chief’s voice? I think the explanation is probably more clear cut, and again, something that fans probably will not like. If you are going to have a guy in the suit with his helmet on 100% of the time, there would be no reason not to simply use Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes. So, the fact that actor Pablo Schreiber is both the physical body of chief and his voice implies that yes, we’re probably going to see him without his helmet at some point. That’s a big no-no for Halo fans, but it seems like the most likely explanation, especially given that the show is fine using a game voice actor in a different context with Cortana.
This was always going to be a hugely risky gamble, as all video game adaptations are. I thought the trailer, outside of Cortana, looked mostly okay, but we’ll have to see how it all works in late March when it actually debuts. I think I can get past the Chief voice, but I would not be surprised to see a more modified Cortana the next time something airs from the show in promotional materials.
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