The series premiere — directed by filmmaker Otto Bathurst and simply titled “Contact” — needs only a few minutes to set the tone for what’s to come.

Where “Combat Evolved” began in the depths of space, following the crew of a battle-damaged warship on the cusp of the discovery (and existential threat) of a lifetime, “Halo” opens on a sweeping, overhead vista of a dusty, Mars-like world called Madrigal in the year 2552. The first characters we meet aren’t futuristic Spartans or other members of the ubiquitous UNSC (United Nations Space Command) but, tellingly, a batch of diverse rebels scraping together a meager existence of “heavy water extraction” on a far-flung Outer Colony world. And based on the initial conversation we drop into that takes a decidedly anti-Spartan and anti-UNSC tone, the downright heroic portrayal of rebel general Jin Ha (Jeong-hwan Kong), and our subsequent introduction to his stubborn and inquisitive teenage daughter Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), it quickly becomes clear that the Insurrectionists may just be the one and only faction of unambiguous “good guys” that we’ll see in the early going.

So naturally, they’re all about to get completely wiped out. The same sense of distance that provides security to this forlorn outpost (in an early hint of the show’s frustratingly vague and murky world-building, it’s never made clear just how far removed they are from the main goings-on of the galaxy or even whether they’re the only inhabitants of this planet) also makes them a prime target of an invading vanguard of Covenant forces, searching for some sort of mystical object underneath the planet’s surface. As encountered in utterly brutal fashion by Kwan and her friends only moments before (whose only crime was the urge to get high), the extraterrestrial Elites sweep through the human defenders with little resistance, splattering shocking amounts of gore as they mercilessly attack civilians and soldiers alike.

Right on cue, the dramatic entrance of the Master Chief John-117 (Pablo Schreiber, stoic and blandly generic, making him an ironically faithful depiction of the game’s main “character”) and his Silver Team of Spartan squadmates finally makes “Halo” feel like, well, “Halo.” The unconvincing and somewhat amateurish attempts to render the super-soldiers’ fight choreography into live action, however, will likely only make viewers wish they’d fired up their Xbox instead. A bewildering mix of handheld shots, jarring shaky-cam, and POV camera angles from inside the Chief’s helmet all collide in a frenzied firefight that left me wanting more. The fact that this is the episode’s only real set piece almost feels like a blessing in disguise.

At the very least, this allows the rest of the sequence to concentrate on the mysterious object, the debilitating effect it has on John, and most importantly, the task of bringing the Spartan and Kwan into close contact, establishing the pairing and moral dilemma that’ll form the emotional backbone of the episode.