Axios! Is the Forward Unto Dawn Blu-ray worthy of your money?

December 17, 2012

For the time being, the prospect of a theatrical Halo movie remains an elusive one. Luckily, even as they were putting the finishing touches on the massively hyped Halo 4, 343 Industries saw fit to embark on a new experiment to bring the war between the UNSC and the Covenant into live-action. Ultimately, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a very expensive piece of advertising for the game. But it managed to tell a compelling story that adds something to the Halo mythology and, in particular, the relationship between Master Chief and Commander Thomas Lasky in Halo 4 proper.

I previously reviewed the individual web series episodes and wrote a full season recap, so I won't spend too much time rehashing Forward Unto Dawn's strengths and flaws. Suffice it to say that while some of the secondary actors were stuff and underwhelming in their performances, the two leads (Tom Green as a young Lasky and Anna Popplewell as his fellow trainee Chyler Silva) carried the adventure. Despite working with a modest budget by the standards of Hollywood movie-making, the filmmakers delivered a sci-fi adventure that looked and felt like Halo.

The real question is whether fans can justify spending money on a movie that is freely available online. And to their credit, 343 packed the Blu-ray a quality transfer and enough supplemental material to justify the price of admission. For one thing, what originally premiered as five-part online series has been recut into a "special edition" - basically a single movie with roughly 15 minutes of extra footage sprinkled in. The edits are most noticeable at the very beginning of the film. Forward Unto Dawn now opens with a faux-documentary sequence as the various students speak to the camera about their motivations for enrolling in Corbulo Academy. This sequence is a useful addition, as it helps introduce viewers to the more minor characters and provides them with a bit more screen time. Additionally, the Cortana scenes that book-ended each episode are now edited together into one sequence that plays during the credits. The rest of the added scenes are fairly minor and easy to miss, but the special edition cut is definitely the superior version. My only quibble is that the original episode breaks are still fairly noticeable. Not because of the narrative structure, mind you, but because the film still stubbornly cuts to black at each break despite that serving no real dramatic purpose.

Despite the modest production budget, 343 clearly put forth a lot of effort in bringing Forward Unto Dawn to Blu-ray. The picture is razor sharp, with even the finer details like skin pores and hairs, costume markings, and computer text standing out as clear as day. My big fear with the transfer was that, because Forward Unto Dawn relies heavily on CG for various background and environmental elements, as well as depicting the Covenant aliens, those elements would stand out and appear more fake at such a high resolution. Luckily, that didn't prove to be the case. The Corbulo architecture and Covenant soldiers look even more impressive now than they did in a browser tab. That said, the transfer does suffer from some fairly obvious banding problems in certain scenes. In scenes that take place in darker environments illuminated by a specific, limited light source, the banding can be pretty noticeable at times. And unfortunately, that describes a large chunk of the final act, as Master Chief leads Lasky and friends down dark corridors and through a Covenant-infested forest.

The audio quality is even stronger than the video, with no areas of complaint to be found. Dialogue is regularly crisp and clear, even when the score swells up or the bullets and plasma blasts start flying. The sound effects are distinctly Halo, and fans of the games may want to turn up the speakers or headphones and absorb the vibrant surround sound experience this disc has to offer. The disc also includes a separate audio track with an isolated score, though at a much lower bit rate than the main DTS track.

The improved special edition cut and high-quality transfer might have been enough to justify a purchase, but 343 rounded out this release with a healthy slate of bonus features. First and foremost, the disc includes no less than three commentary tracks. The first features director Stewart Hendler, the second features 343 bigwigs Frank O'Connor and Kevin Grace, and the final track features producer Josh Feldman and writers Aaron and Todd Helbing. With each group approaching the material from a slightly different creative perspective, fans will find plenty of interesting tidbits about filming and the general behind-the-scenes process.

If the commentaries aren't enough, the disc includes a series of documentary featurettes that cover topics ranging from visual effects to performing the stunts to bringing Master Chief to life in live-action to operating the fully-functional Warthog vehicles. None of the featurettes are terribly long on their own, but taken together they form an enjoyable documentary that clocks in at a little under an hour.

Rather than offering any deleted scenes, per se, Forward Unto Dawn includes 22 vignette sequences that shed more light on the various characters prior to the events of the film. Some of these vignettes are basically extended versions of the interview sequence from the opening of the film. But others are entirely new material that explore life at Corbulo Academy and the rigors of training for interstellar warfare. Finally, the disc is rounded out by a handful of other brief videos, including a new Red vs. Blue short, a Corbulo recruitment video, and various trailers. About the only thing that's missing is the option to watch Forward Unto Dawn in its original, episodic format. But given that the special edition is the superior version, this isn't a huge omission.

Given its origins as a glorified commercial and the generally lousy state of video game movies, Forward Unto Dawn had every reason to suck. Instead, 343 Industries delivered a memorable action-adventure that offers a strong template for how to adapt the Halo mythology for Hollywood. The Blu-ray version only improves on the original web series, combining a slightly superior extended cut with impressive video and audio quality and a robust slate of extra features. In this case, yes, it's definitely worth paying money for something you can watch for free.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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9.1
  • +The extended cut improves over the original version.
  • +Strong picture and sound quality.
  • +Surprisingly robust slate of extras.
  • The transfer is sometimes marred by banding.
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