Master Chief and an eerie live-action Cortana meet (and kill) aliens in the latest Halo trailer

Paramount+ has just released its first real trailer for the Halo TV series, and the darn thing is really starting to look more and more like the Halo video games. At least one of the many enemy aliens is here! There are Assault Rifles and Battle Rifles! Someone talks about the existence of a supremely powerful weapon called a Halo! Even Master Chief’s best AI buddy Cortana shows up, played—in a weird meld of live-action and video game CG—by regular series voice actor Jen Taylor. Plus: Master Chief does not remove his helmet, giving him a leg up on a certain other famous helmet guy who got called out for doing that the other day.

This trailer even gives us some indication of what the show will be about, and it doesn’t appear to be a straight retelling of the first video game (which is a good idea, since people can only stand so many episodes about Master Chief silently walking through endless identical corridors, shout out to “The Library.”) Instead, it seems to be about the lead-up to what happens in that first game, with the super-soldier Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and his bosses at the United Nations Space Command first killing regular humans before turning their sights toward a vaguely religious alien cult known as the Covenant.

We won’t spoil what the Halo does, since it’s probably going to be a plot point in the show if the people in this trailer don’t know, but suffice to say they are Big and A Problem. Oh, also, there’s more than one. The video game series has now been going for 20 years, after all.

The Halo series is coming to Paramount+ on March 24 and also stars Natascha McElhone, Bokeem Woodbine, Shabana Azmi, Natasha Culzac, Olive Gray, Yerin Ha, Bentley Kalu, Kate Kennedy, Charlie Murphy, ad Danny Sapani.