Halo: Nightfall

This is the syfy special of Halo? There are 3 types of alien in thism ovie.? 2 only in the first episode? and a lot of bad choices. But the threats stay fairly limited and not ramping up.

luckily the human characters are 1 dimensional so you don't really care. And almost have 2 actors that do their job. i don't want to blame them. Scenery did a good job.

First, I have to say I am a huge fan of Halo series, I was not expecting a plot exactly as the original series but come on, this is simply horrible and I love sci-fi movies!

I've seen all 4 episodes wishing something well worth mentioning would occur but until today i have disappointments all the time.

I will be honest with you, the first episode was not that horrible, it make me curious for the second one even if did not impressed me at all.

The story is a mess, no interest and acting is really poor.

Please give back the viewers the 70 millions!?!?! spent in this movie,

From my point of view, the way things are, this series has no future!!!!

In the 28th 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 (Mike Colter) 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 (Steven Waddington) captures the middleman Axl (Jonathan Harden) 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 (Christina Chong) carrying a Havoc weapon to destroy the place. On the arrival, they find two terrorists but are trapped in Halo by weird worms that are attracted by technology. And in five hours the sun will rise.

"Halo: Nightfall" is a good and underrated sci-fi adventure. The story was released edited on a DVD as a feature and it works. I have glanced at the negative reviews and apparently they belong to fans of a video game that are not satisfied with the movie. However, for those like me that do not play the game, this movie is highly entertaining. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Halo: Nightfall"

Note: On 06 Mar 2022, I saw this film again.

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!

While Nightfall is a step above most other video game televisions or film adaptations, it is still unfortunately delivers less than what is expected from a modern drama and quite honestly less than what fans of the long running game series deserve. Halo obviously had an incredible series of video game entries but also was really the first game series to pioneer a literary universe alongside it with many award winning sci-fi novels that routinely place in the New York times best seller list. Television and film is an arena Halo has yet to conquer as successfully and Nightfall is, sadly, not going to change that.

My biggest complaint would be that at the end of the day the story really has very little to do with Halo. That's a benefit for those watching who have never played Halo, but a letdown for those fans looking for that kind of story, and honestly considering the scope and quality of what is available for sci-fi why would you watch this if you were not a Halo fan? Most elements here, if you had simply swapped the names to non-Halo terms, would not change the context or value of the plot at all. It is a sci-fi film with Halo paint essentially.

The CGI is absolutely laughable, but the costumes are quite exceptional and really the CGI turns out to be very limited as this turns into more of a character drama than anything else which I enjoyed. Most of the characters are fleshed out with unique motivations and it creates a lot of loaded, tense conflicts between then as they decide what they have to do and what choices need to be made. If I can say one thing is that this is the realest Halo had ever felt in terms of characters and motivations. Everyone has clear reasons for what they do and say and how they act towards each other and it pays off in a lot of tense interactions between them.

Maybe someday we will get the Halo show we have been asking for, and this certainly isn't it, but it still was enjoyable for me and honestly a lot better than what I expected from a low budget video game adaption.