Game trailers tend to be forgettable things. Explosive diversions paving the way for a marketing campaign that hits you, tries to sell you something then fades into nothingness as the next hype train takes its place. ODSTâs live-action clip, though, lingers long after the game has disappeared off the charts.
I watched this the other day when YouTube did its thing and recommended it to me, based on a mysterious algorithm that Iâm going to assume was âthis guy really needs to watch this againâ.
Iâm glad I did, because it struck me that despite being almost seven years oldâan eternity in the fast-paced world of modern video gamesâit is still easily the best example of a live-action, AAA video game trailer.
It does so many things that most trailers only try (and fail miserably) to achieve. Thereâs a sense of tone and place that burrows deep under your skin, leaving you with the weird sensation that this trailer is more ODST than the game itself managed.
It also looks incredible. OK, so some of the CG stuff has aged a little, but the cold, dirty and real live-action footage not only looks fresh, but looks professional. We were long teased a Halo movie from directors who have big Hollywood experience, but if a Halo movie is ever actually made, it can learn a lot more from this clipâs colour and lighting than it can from watching gameplay footage of a giant space soldier smash a fat purple alien in the face with a pistol.
My favourite part, though, is the little twist of switching languages. Weâre so conditioned to seeing future soldiers speaking with American and British accents in our sci-fi media that itâs initially shocking to see them speaking somethingâŠelse. Something we (well, most Kotaku readers, hi Europe!) donât understand, and arenât even afforded the decency of being given subtitles for (though you can read a translation here if you want to lose some of the magic).
Every actor in the clip is speaking (and screaming) in Hungarian. Itâs a genius touch, because with Uralic roots Hungarian is one of the few languages in the Western world to not have derived, like everything from English to German to Spanish, from Indo-European dialects.
What this means is that we have no idea what those men are shouting about, because not a single word of it sounds even remotely familiar to us. Even the accent, given the lack of other Hungarian media in the wider global consciousness, is unfamiliar.
The songâwhich is not Hungarian, but in Welsh, another tough language to casually decipherâis also suitably âforeignâ to most ears (and while weâre on it, what a hell of a song it is).
This all results in a clip that despite focusing entirely on events surrounding âusâ in a war starring space monsters still feels alien. Like it really does come from the future.
For all thatâs great about the clip, though, thereâs a touch of hurt watching this in 2016. Back in 2009, if you looked past the craziness of Maser Chiefâs personal story, the Halo series itself knew what it was about. It was the tale of a future human race with our backs to the wall, with even our best and bravest seemingly not enough to stop an alien alliance from wiping us out of existence.
That was the whole point of Master Chief. He was the superman here to save us where mere mortals were trying, failing and dying. There was a sense of inevitable bleakness to Haloâs tale, from Reachâs unfolding tragedy to the classic opening sequence of Combat Evolved, where despite your own best efforts most of your comrades around you spend the opening hours of the game dying.
This trailer, with its illustration of an ODSTs grim circle of life, nailed that feeling. And sadly, I think its a narrative anchor that Microsoftâs recent Halo games have lost sight of, which might explain why despite some solid play sequences I havenât enjoyed the last two games in the series anywhere near as much as Bungieâs efforts.
Ah well. Times change, as do video games, and even if I can never again dig a Halo game like I did ODST or Reach, weâll always have this trailer.
