Halo: Nightfall focuses on Locke, a naval intelligence agent who discovers that the hostile aliens known as the Covenant have weaponized an element that can wipe out human beings. After learning that the element is being harvested on a piece of a destroyed Halo installation, Locke and his team pair with Aiken, a former Spartan, to find the source of this element and destroy it.
I adore Halo. While I didn’t own an original X-Box, I did play the first game on a friend’s PC, and I fell in love with it. I beat it several times, in fact I did a science paper on how quickly I could complete the game in relation to how much sleep I had gotten. While this experiment may have been a thinly veiled attempt to spend more time playing a video game, I did end up getting a B on my paper, and more importantly, I was able to spend extra hours inside of a world that I enjoy. My love of Halo has even propelled me to other forms of media, including books, where I basted myself in the expansive lore of the first four Halo novels. I’ve purchased Halo toys, soundtracks, comics and movies. The games don’t just deliver fun action, but an interesting universe that centers on an epic war between humanity and a technologically advanced, fanatical alliance of alien species hell bent on ending all life in the galaxy. The Master Chief may be something of a blank character, but his stoic nature and romance with his companion A.I. Cortana is far more compelling material then one gets in most first person shooters. The games also feature sweeping, melancholic musical scores and first class sci-fi designs. When one combines all of these things, what they get is a video game that has surpassed itself to become a cultural phenomenon that has spread to all forms of media, including movies, or in this case, a series packaged as a film. Unfortunately for us die hard Halo fans, the film we received this time is something of a let down, especially when compared to Forward Unto Dawn, the last Halo promotional series turned movie.
While Forward Unto Dawn was more Halo like in the sense that it delivered plenty of action, Nightfall ends up being more of a sci-fi tinged horror movie, which is an interesting decision except that it short changes the viewer of the Covenant, the main villains of the entire Halo franchise. Instead of fighting the Covenant, Locke and Aiken end up squaring off against killer worms. These aren’t giant killer worms like in Tremors, which is disappointing since Kevin Bacon does make a cameo in this movie, proving that Halo is less then seven degrees of this esteemed actor.
Worms might make fascinating antagonists in a different movie, but as the central baddies in a film based on Halo, they are underwhelming. The Covenant are great villains, and one of, if not the, main reasons for Halo’s popularity. Cutting the Covenant out of a Halo movie is quite a gamble, and in this case, one that does not pay off.
While not great, this isn’t a bad movie, and for anyone who is a Halo fan it’ll be required viewing, if only as a curiosity, which is a shame because this could’ve been so much better if they’d of dropped the worms and given us Grunts, Jackals and Elites as cannon fodder.
The performances in Nightfall are fine, but some of the writing (apart from the story decision to replace iconic villains with worms) is groan worthy, specifically the narration done by Aiken, who utters some of the cheesiest, faux philosophical nonsense I have ever heard.
