Nightfall |
USA • 2000 • 82m •
   • Directed by: Gwyneth Gibby. • Starring: Jennifer Burns, Winsome Brown, Joseph Hodge, David Carradine, Ashish Vidyarthi, Pradeep Singh Rawat, Tony Mirrcandani, Sushant Kumar, Smita Hai, Varun Vardhan, Malini S. Paul, Lalith Sharma, Manosh Sen Gupta. • Music by: Brad Segal, Nic. tenBroek.      The panic stricken inhabitants of planet Aeon are preparing for their very first nightfall. Fear and superstition mound as they anticipate horrors straight from their wildest dreams, but the reality of what's to come is even more terrifying.
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Review:
Everything, even down to the smallest details, was awful. In the beginning, the two girls want to look in the mysterious hole, and the big beefy guard sounds just like a little kid as he pathetically pleads them not to. You almost expect him to start to say that they're mean for not listening to him. That dumbass guard even held their lantern for them while they began to dig deeper in the hole. Illyra finds ç�¿ï¿½ï¿½¿ï¿½rtifacts' in the hole that bear ridiculous resemblance to mirrored balls shaped like tin cans (`・t appears to be some kind of alloy�¿ï¿½¿ï¿½¿ï¿½'). She pokes around in the cave for quite some time before noticing that it is packed with snakes. And did anyone stop to think about what exactly those snakes might find to eat down there in this lifeless hole? Sheerin suggested that Beta (I guess that would be the biggest of the six suns) was going to be eclipsed by an INVISIBLE planet. Some of the characters are fighting with ridiculous tin foil swords, yet Illyra has a freakin' laser gun. What is this, The Gods Must Be Crazy meets Star Wars? Besides that, the editor must have slept through the scene where one of the evil watchers was on fire and wandered on camera with his great big space helmet in plain view. What a joke.
What was the deal with the planet Aeon? Was this just Earth in disguise? Illyra referred to her race as `mankind,' there is talk about `God's will' as well as the Book of Revelations (not Earth, but they have the same Bible?), and these bonehead girls even buy a CAMERA from a street vendor (`Wow! A camera! I've never seen one so advanced! It's got some kind of filter on it!'). You can tell that these girls were real geniuses. At least they TRIED to portray the females as intelligent people (even though they failed miserably).
Metron was pretty ridiculous as the poor guy who finds himself among the bad guys as he modestly makes use of his laughable powers (firestarting, mind control, HEALING for crying out loud). All of the acting in the entire film was pathetic, and so was the script. However, I loved the efforts of Sheerin to keep her promise to Illyra. That was probably the funniest part of the whole movie. `Where is she?' `I promised I wouldn't tell! She went into the desert with a watcher named Metron! They left yesterday!' Oops. What an idiot.
Once the point of the movie eventually rolled around, it got interesting for a few seconds in a row, surprisingly enough. Aeon has never experienced nighttime, and every 1000 years, a gigantic planet eclipses her largest sun and plunges the planet into darkness. Maybe it wasn't so much that they were all afraid of the dark as much as they were just mystified about what happened to their other five suns. Besides that, did these people not have darkness in their houses? Had they never escaped the sunlight even for a minute in all of their lives? It seems that without darkness, they wouldn't even know to be afraid of the dark. Oh well, I guess it's a mass response to set fire to their own houses and then giggle hysterically as they watch them burn. Also, never mind the fact that a planet that size (the one that caused the eclipse), with a 1000 year orbit, would probably have eclipsed Aeon for WEEKS, not minutes, as you saw in the movie.
It is truly a shame that Isaac Asimov's name was associated with this horrendous insult to the cinematic medium. There is not a single good thing to be said about this movie. `The Greatest Science Fiction Story of All Time' should qualify as false advertising. Even hard-core science fiction fans would be hard pressed to find something interesting about this garbage. Avoid at all costs.
Review by Michael DeZubiria from the Internet Movie Database.
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