dalxray Review of Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn (2012)

I guess Halo fans like it - but fans of good movies won't

[3/10 · 20 November 2012]

I don't know why the Halo fans are giving this movie such great reviews - as a standalone movie it is (as another reviewer put it) a poor man's Starship Troopers - not that ST was a great movie itself. Mostly this movie is just plain boring. Nothing happens for the first 55 minutes - we are introduced to a group of cadets at a military academy. All the standard character clichés are here with typical tragic back-stories - the protagonist Lasky, who has a problem with authority (what's he doing at a military academy? - oh, his brother was the best cadet ever at same academy and was then killed in combat), the squad rival, the love interest, the computer hacker, the tough chick - you've seen it all before. They go through training, the protagonist nearly quits, the instructors see great potential in him if only he would realize it, etc, etc. Boring. At about the 55 min mark, the aliens attack, kill nearly everyone in a matter of minutes (apparently on the entire planet) except for said group of cadets, who mostly survive despite the fact they often stop and pause in the middle of firefights and explosions to look around dumbfounded at their fallen friends and instructors. Finally a super-soldier "MasterChief 117" - rescues the few remaining survivors. All this is presented as a flashback of the older Lasky, now a captain, after receiving a distress call from a ship named Forward Unto Dawn. There is an opening sequence featuring this vessel drifting thru space which is totally incomprehensible - I guess you'd have to know some of the Halo back-story to make sense of this bit. On the positive : effects are pretty good, performances not bad despite a lot of banal dialogue. Overall, I guess the not-too-fussy fans of the game enjoy this movie, but everyone else - don't waste your time.