my only real gripe is that it's not long enough. it has great story telling. i just hated the fact that i was aware of it wrapping itself up. i would've appreciated another hour or so. it does say "series" so if there are more to come, then awesome.

as for as the visual quality, it's not AAA quality production. do you love Halo just for the graphics? or the lore.

i read the book years and years ago. i don't read books for AAA graphics. there are none. if it WAS done through AAA production, sure it'd be nice. there are two general paths to 3D, photoreal or stylized. this was chosen to be done in a stylized manner. and i actually like how they executed the style and atmosphere.

if you're in it for the visual effects, don't watch this. if you appreciate halo for the lore, if you appreciate some storytelling of a once great franchise, then i'd recommend watching this.

it helps shed some light as to why 117 is the way he is.

Children are recruited for a top secret military project. After brutal boot vamp and physical enhancements, they form the basis of a strike force against an alien invasion.

This feature-length CGI animation is a 3-part mini-series joined together, based on a novel and video game, neither of which I know much about.

The story is fine, albeit very reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, intertwined with assorted rites of passage stories, not to mention Wolverine's origin.

The backgrounds, props and sets are great - strongly effective visuals, well designed and executed.

The characters and animation are downright poor, especially for something created in 2015. The faces are inexpressive and far too similar, the facial animation is unconvincing, and the characters are extremely badly integrated into the scenery.

The voice acting isn't very good, either.

This could have been much, much better.

It all felt like someone strung up all the scenes from a game to make a story. I asked myself if it were fan made. The animation wasn't only weak, it was slow. The whole thing's an hour long, but at what I consider normal speed, it's probably more like 45 minutes. I watched at 2x and it was OK. Also there were some scenes that were perfect candidates for eye candy, like the explosions of ships and the fights. They had no budget for those.

Now, about the story, it's an origin story of this character in a game called Halo that I have never played or seen played, so I can only comment on it as an independent thing. Young children are abducted and turned into supersoldiers just in time to fight an aggressive alien species. I don't know why they called it The Fall or Reach, since nothing fell. Just as I was getting invested in the story the film ended.

Bottom line: nothing spectacular, not in terms of production or storyline, but it is an animation probably made using a game engine for a novel written for that game. What did you expect?