Halo: The Fall of Reach (2015)

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

First off, let me start off by saying that I've read the book, off of which this movie is supposedly based, cover to cover, multiple times over. If you're a fan of the book, you're going to be very disappointed.This movie is deplorably bad. The voice acting is absolutely terrible. Dr. Halsey is voiced by the same voice actress who voiced Cortana, which is appropriate based on the books. In addition, the voice actor who voiced the chief - Steve Downes - has a few lines. This is where the good stuff ends. The rest of the voice acting is absolutely terrible. Sometimes their tone is off, sometimes the children sound like they're shouting - for literally no reason at all. You truly never realize the importance of talented voices in an animated film until you don't have them.Moving on, the writing is terrible, too. Heath Corson, a screenwriter with nothing to his name besides a web series, a couple shorts, and a handful of superhero cartoons, bears the blame for this monstrosity. Anything of value from the book has been stripped away from the script, including its namesake - the fall of Reach. That's right, the climactic end of the book is nowhere to be found. The dialog from the book - which was powerful in its own right - is practically nonexistent. The parts of the story which do exist are only partially correct, seemingly re-imagined for brevity instead of drama. Kellogg's should sue this guy, because the dialog in this movie makes them all sound like Fruit Loops.But maybe bad writing and poor voice acting could be saved by good cinematography. That is, if there were any. The space combat, all three minutes of it that exist, is the diamond in this proverbial pile of dung. The 3D animation in this movie could've been great if they'd used any of the technology created in the last two decades. Instead, we get stiff, poorly animated characters who rival marionettes controlled by a triple amputee. Their mouth movements have zero effect on their face, their body movements are glitchy and copy-pasted to the little chief and all his companions. The camera angles are atrocious. The action is sloppy and mundane. There's zero tension in any scene throughout the entire movie. Nothing looks natural. It's visual heresy.The worst part of this movie is that they had the audacity to say "based on a book by Eric Nylund", because that's an outright lie. If you paid a cent to watch this, you should be furious. I had the opportunity to watch it free of charge, and I still feel ripped off. Your move, 343.

I enjoy The Fall of Reach for what it is. However I like Forward Unto Dawn more, the Animation I like the style of it. But I have only one problem with this Animated feature. The title is a darn lie! If your series doesn't even deal with The Fall of Reach or part of what was covered in Halo Reach, don't even call it The Fall of freaking Reach! Just call it either Halo Origins or Halo Blue Team and it'd be done. Look I know that this is based on the Novel, but still it doesn't make since when you think about it. Halo Origins would have been a better title. And even still, so with all odds Halo The Fall of Reach is best of what it can do. I give it a 8 out of 10.

SPOILER ALERT i saw the movie from games point of view as most of others would who played halo day night it is great piece of work..!! movie was not displeasing at all...!! i was just expecting more AI stuff and more gadgets.. the movie had some drawbacks on backgrounds but the story telling was impressive.. the hard choices characters made were emotional but overall it was just a start and so i would like a sequel..!! actually the movie made me curious and so many that were missing were present in the novel.. so i am gonna read it now..!! i would suggest each and every fan of HALO games fandom you should see it..will change your perspective..!!

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.