SYNOPSICS
Halo: Nightfall (2014) is a English movie. N/A has directed this movie. Steven Waddington, Siennah Buck, Mike Colter, Christian Contreras are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2014. Halo: Nightfall (2014) is considered one of the best Science fiction movie in India and around the world.
In the 26th Century, the prolonged war between humanity and the fanatical alien alliance the Covenant has ended with a tenuous treaty. Despite the ceasefire, Earth's outer colonies remain vulnerable to the Covenant's covert intrusions. The ONI - Office of Naval Intelligence has been tasked with counterintelligence to beat the Covenant. In Planet Sedra, Commander Jameson Locke and his team witness a Covenant's spacecraft and a Zealot Elite warrior disembarks with a bomb. They unsuccessfully try to stop the alien that explodes the bomb in a mall. They realize that it is a biological attack with an element fatal to humans. Sedran Commander Aiken captures the middleman Axl that tells that the element is obtained from Alpha Halo, where the day longs 16 h and the temperature in the sunlight reaches 482o C. Aiken, Locke and his team head to Halo in the spacecraft Condor with pilot Macer carrying a Havoc weapon to destroy the place. On the arrival, they find two terrorists but are trapped in ...
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Halo: Nightfall (2014) Reviews
Review from someone who did not play the games
The worst thing about the pilot is that it is not that sci-fi. It starts promising, detailing the threat and "the mission", it shows the characters, then they all go to an isolated place where technology works against them. So basically, an entire setup for a medieval like quest, only on an alien world. Other than that, the plot is predictable, but not terrible, the acting is good and it kept me watching it, even if I knew how it would end from the first half of the movie. As I have not played the game, I have no quarrels with that aspect of the movie, however it did seem that it had nothing to do with how a specialized fighting force would behave in the 26th century. Also, it didn't really say anything about the Halo universe. As a complete noob, I had no idea who MasterChef (he he!) was and what a Halo was. Bottom line: forgettable, but not that terrible. It did seem really low budget, though, and I have to ask myself what is the purpose of a low budget sci-fi series pilot which brings nothing in terms of story or characters? It only prepares an even less worked on series, right? Update: didn't realize that "the pilot" was the whole first season. Heh!
No effort, B-list acting, Syfy CGI.
|SPOILERS IN THIRD PARAGRAPH| So I'm a big Halo fan, but not fanatically so, I've enjoyed 343i's offerings to the universe and the Karen Traviss trilogy of books. I've enjoyed both Forward Unto Dawn and the animated anthology, and they took some liberties, but this is just lazy, I don't feel like anyone involved, the actors, the writers or the directors actually gave a damn about what they were doing. They had $70,000,000 to make this series, Ridley Scott is directing, I was expecting something well above what you'd usually get from a scifi TV show, maybe something with the production values of Battlestar or Star Trek, after all Forward Unto Dawn had a much lower budget and was a triumph, but no, what we get is at best a Syfy Channel original series with B-list acting and laughable CGI. For comparison, both Defiance and Falling Skies had better special effects, better acting and felt more genuine than this, and those shows were pretty terrible. The issue is, this is not an original series, this takes place in an established universe loved by millions around the world, with rules and lore that need to be respected. Nor is this a new adaptation of the universe meant for TV, this show is broadcast on Halo Waypoint and aimed at Halo fans who own Xboxs and are already invested in the series. |SPOILERS START NOW| So, the first episode starts, and we're introduced to an alien...that no Halo fan has ever seen or heard of before. It looks like a Star Trek TNG alien, an actor in crude makeup, completely trampling all over Halo's reputation for exotic and creative aliens. Halo fans have fought tooth and nail against all the races of the Covenant, ranging from 3 foot tall methane-breathing crustaceans to one ton colonies of sentient worms driving battle suits, and we've never seen anything as lazy as this. So we get over that, and in comes a Covenant dropship, it looks good enough, it raises our hopes, and then we see the Sangheili it drops off. Or rather we see a blurry, jerky representation of a Sangheili Elite that looks like it was made in Blender. If you've played Halo you're accustomed to beautiful CGI directed by Blur studios that gives Avatar a run for it's money, and Blur studios this is not. So this blurry figure stumbles through the forest, and the half dozen ODSTs tracking him lose him, as the 8 foot tall, half-ton dinosaur in full battle armor disappears down a human-sized manhole cover. Our protagonist, the wooden and disinterested Locke, follows him into the sewer, and attempts to fight him. The Elite has a plasma sword, and repeatedly misses at close range, while Locke's M6 Magnum, a gun that can punch through an Elite's shields and armor in a few shots in the games, is about as effective as a paintball gun, and the Elite escapes. When Locke catches up to him in a shopping mall (where nobody seems to care that an Elite in battle armor is walking around, do they do their grocery shopping in Zealot pattern armor?) Locke climbs onto his back and unloads his M6 into the top of the Elite's head, the magnum breaks his shields but fails to penetrate his helmet. Again this is the iconic, fan-favorite hand cannon of the Halo series renowned for penetrating armor and shields like they're wet toilet paper at ranges that would make a rifle blush, this Elite's brains should have been soup by now. So this 8 foot tall Elite that's able to flip a military jeep like it's a Power Wheels toy is unable to shake a 180lb human, and is apparently driven to exhaustion by a 5-second struggle, dropping to his knees, the plasma sword he was carrying 20 seconds ago conspicuously missing. Locke, a high ranking ODST, then allows the alien to monologue, despite knowing what a Zealot is, and thus knowing that he can't be taken alive, allowing the Elite to set of his dirty bomb when he could have just executed him. At this point I had lost interest, and the episode continued to butcher the lore, with outstanding examples such as the navigator telling the computer to "search the galaxies" for trace elements when Halo takes place in one galaxy, and there being a Pelican dropship that looked about three times larger than it should be, which is inexplicably capable of slipstream travel. The cast of ODSTs prattled on about honor for the duration of the episode, despite an ODST being a ruthless shock trooper with about as much regard for honor as a drunk in a bar fight, known for bad attitudes and getting the job done at any cost. In summary, the actors did not care about their acting, the writers did not care about the source material, and the director obviously thought this mess was passable, or just didn't care, after all it's just a video game for nerds, right? I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed, Forward Unto Dawn showed us that Halo can translate well into shows and movies, it was a great jumping off point for expanding the Halo universe into a multimedia empire, and instead the opportunity was squandered.
Reasonable start but going downhill
I generally like any kind of military scifi, but I have to say, this show is starting to tax my patience. When I recall that the episodes are only twenty minutes long, that is actually far worse than it sounds. The initial setup and "mission" are quite promising, but after that first episode, what was an interesting scifi concept turns into "Quarry Walking Simulator 2014". This begins in episode 2 and continues all through to the end of episode 4, which is about an hour of viewing. There is a rather weak attempt to turn the show into a psychological study of people put in a difficult situation, but it doesn't really work. The short format of the series, plus the sub-par writing and acting, only makes the characters annoying rather than interesting. Instead of tense drama, you end up with trite stereotypes and predictable scenes. The CGI isn't brilliant, but it does the job, but, as I have already mentioned, mostly it is a tale of people slowly losing control whilst walking around a large quarry. Quite where the purported $70 million dollars it cost to make the show went is a bit of a mystery. SUMMARY: A poor man's Pitch Black, hampered by bad writing, acting and with precious little of the extensive HALO universe to show for the budget. Monsters that are clearly designed by someone who thought Matrix Revolutions was good. Considering what was done with the Battlestar Galactica webisodes, there is really no excuse for this. VERDICT: The wait for a decent HALO series continues...
$70,000,000 Garbage by producers with no respect for the franchise.
I've played since Halo 1 on Xbox Original. I have all the halo games that have come out, I have the xbox original, xbox 360, xbox one. Forward Unto Dawn did an excellent job with only 12,500,000. I think Ridley stole the money from halo to fund his exodus movie. The acting is poor, the script is garbage, CGI looks flat-out FAKE (The Elite in the mall???). Ridley Scott, the assault rifle doesn't shoot like that nor does it have that type of precision from that distance. It might not matter to you, but it matters to us because we buy the game and made the xbox successful by being loyal to the halo franchise since the beginning. Halo is the flagship game of xbox.
Disappointed
I'll start out by saying that I love the Halo story even though it's kind of a ripoff of Stargate but Nightfall is basically copying the script of the Riddick movies. Forward Unto Dawn was good, but this is so boring, nothing really happens in the second and third episodes. There are so many shows 343 Industries could have made but they decided to be lazy. It's cool seeing other Spartans but they're not even in armor and their size doesn't add up, Spartans were genetically altered but they don't really look like anything special. Since 343 has taken over the stories outside of the Halo 4 have been boring and kind of annoying. It comes free with the Master Chief Collection, but otherwise don't buy it.