NIGHTFLYERS
A film review by Kimiye Tipton
Copyright 1987 Kimiye Tipton
I read the George R. R. Martin novella last year and was looking forward to the movie. He seemed to have taken the best ideas from ALIEN and 2001 and combined them with a drawing room murder mystery--not the most original science fiction but great drama.
Unfortunately, I couldn't even recognize his novella in NIGHTFLYERS. Instead of interesting and different female characters, we got three women who looked so much alike I couldn't figure out who was supposed to be whom (all blond, beautiful cheerleader types). The male characters went to the other extreme, with emphasis on physical differences (giant black chef, diminutive blond wimp) rather than character.
The special effects seemed decently done (I admit I wasn't concentrating) but the logic of what occurred was absent. I was too appalled at people without spacesuits conversing in a spaceship with the hull breached above them to notice whether the underpinnings were showing.
But it was the ambience of the movie that proved to be the most crushingly boring part. Maybe we could call it spaghetti space opera. It's that dark, monotonous pacing that I associate with poorly dubbed Italian s-f or horror movies (the kind Commander USA features). I began wishing for major faux pas so I could find *something* to enjoy in this picture. Well, there was one howler when a couple of women were trying to break into the ship's computer, getting garbled machine language, and one of them suggested, "Look for a menu!"
This is the kind of film that gives science fiction a bad name. I rate it 2.5 on a scale of 10. Don't even rent the video (probably due next month).
Kimiye {ihnp4, ulysses, houxm, clyde, cpsc6a, mtune, moss}!ablnc!kimi
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