source: Nightfall

Trailer—Nightfall

Nightfall

This... thing... was the most awful 89 minutes of my life... and I'm spinal injured... and I was married for five years to a woman with four spoiled daughters. I seriously don't know why I didn't walk out after the first ten minutes. The amount of money they spent on this movie (NOT "film") is roughly the amount I have in the mayonnaise jar by my bed. And it's not full yet. Don't know what I was expecting from a movie whose Big Name Star was David Birney. Bet he wishes he'd gone golfing that weekend. Thank goodness for IMDb, now I know the name of the people responsible and I can ask for my $6.50 back. I'll never see that 89 minutes again though.

As a poor student I was searching the video store's budget rentals for something to see. I was beside myself with joy when I found a film version of an Asimov classic. The 25p (40 cents) I spent on the rental is the worst investment I've ever made. Nothing happened in the film. Nothing at all. Then it got dark and the titles rolled. I'll never get those 90 minutes back. Do not watch this film, unless you are some mad masochist.

Save your money and your time. This was a pathetic, putrid, waste. Asimov's original short story is a classic of the storyteller's art. What happens when a world bathed in sunshine experiences darkness for the first time in a thousand years? Leave it to Hollywood to take a good story and turn it to meaningless drivel. To say this was a disappointment is a cosmic understatement.

Oh, the humanity! There must've been a budget for this, but it must've been used for advertising! The sets are boring, akin to filming in someone's backyard with no attention to detail. The acting? Well, it's just not really. Continuity of story? Must've taken a vacation that day. Were the filmmakers ambitious? Maybe, but it was a heartless attempt to tell a story with film. It's not Asimov's fault, rather these film-makers lacked vision. The other reviews here I can truly say are valid, since I sat through this turkey in the theater, hoping desperately for it to get better. I mean, it had to didn't it? Alas, it never did... Skip it, go watch the Georgio Moroder version of Metropolis again instead... Or read Issac's story, either way you'll be happier, trust me.

Everything about this film is bad: a pathetic adaptation, a boring screenplay, absurd sets, a soundtrack that is worse than my dog's barking and acting that can only be described as perpetrated. There is not one single redeeming quality in it, and it is completely useless except maybe as a textbook example of how NOT to make a movie. Bad as it is on its own, it is all the more painful if you are familiar with Isaac Asimov's classic short story, on which this absurdity is allegedly based - even though any similarity... no, there are no similarities. If IMDb allowed negative scores this film would deserve one. A chimpanzee with a home video camera could (and would) have made a better film than this on the first try. Just skip this junk.

I must have done something very bad in a previous life to deserve to watch this. Very very bad. If you took plot points between this movie and the book, there would be approximately 0.5% similarity. make no mistake - this is not one of the fun bad movies, it is just plain bad bad bad bad bad. Two sex scenes with a fine lookin' woman and they ruined them - b*****ds. Whatever it was I did, I am sorry. So sorry.

Nightfall is pretty much accepted by the Science Fiction as the best short work of SF ever. Surely therefore it ought to be possible to make a halfway decent film out of it. This certainly isn't it. Although some plot elements are the same, nothing else is. The original story has almost a stock disaster-movie style build up in a society very similar to 20th century America. You'd never have guessed this from seeing the movie. I don't know why such drastic changes were made, but the original style would have made for a far better movie script. This story is crying out for a decent version by a director who has some feel for SF - preferably of the extended version of Asimov's original story co-written with Robert Silverberg.