Nightfall (2000)

Reviewed on Nov 12, 2003 under Sci-fi |

Directed by Gwyneth Gibby
Written by John William Corrington, Michael B. Druxman, and Gwyneth Gibby, based on the short story by Isaac Asimov
Starring
- David Carradine
- Jennifer Burns
- Joseph Hodge
- Winsome Brown
- Ashish Vidyarthi
Produced by Roger Corman

Say what you will about Roger Corman, the man’s a tribute to economy. He never lets anything out of his grasp that could conceivably have a future use, whether it’s props, footage (how many movies have the space sequences from Battle Beyond the Stars shown up in?), or, in this case, the movie rights to Isaac Asimov’s award-winning short story “Nightfall.”

“Asps. Very Dangerous. You go first.”

The previous film adaptation of “Nightfall,” made a decade earlier, had not been one of the finer moments of Corman’s Concorde/New Horizons production companies, with too little exploitative value for casual viewers and too much faux-depth for devotees of the literary genre. In fact, it was an all-around bad idea brought to fruition. In almost all respects, this newer version is a clear improvement on the old, though that really doesn’t say much.

The first thing you notice (well, the second thing — right after the bizarre choral themes in the score) is that the planet Aeon, blessed with six suns and perpetual daylight, looks a helluva lot like India. And just about the entire cast is Indian, with some notable exceptions among the main characters, mostly the good guys. (There are a few Western extras in the background, which can only make you wonder at the casting call. “Wanted: any and all Caucasians, to stand around and stick out like sore thumbs in low budget movie production.”)

Shai Kwang Caine versus… an onion.

Anyway. A particular group of devotees of the Temple of the Watchers is conducting excavations on their land and discovers a concealed subterranean chamber. News spreads through the workers into the city, reaching the ears of archaeology student Illyra (Jennifer Burns), daughter of Professor Gnomen (David Carradine), and her friend, astronomy student Sheerin (Winsome Brown). Their educational institution, by the way, is called University of the Scholars, which is probably the first clue that their football team sucks.

Illyra drags Sheerin to see the sight before the Watchers can establish security and cover it up again, but they’re too late: the nefarious leader of the Watchers, Brother Kopton (Ashish Vidyarthi), is already extending his iron fist around the site, justifying his exclusion of all scholars with general aspersion on the character of academics in general and their influence on the faith of the people in particular. Illyra is especially hot to check out the site because recent archeological finds show that the entire civilization of Aeon mysteriously destroys itself every thousand years, and that cycle is coming around again. Oddly enough, the Watchers’ theology foretells the same schedule of cataclysm, but blames it squarely on the moral downfall and faithlessness of the people.

“I feel so… swarthy.”

Against her father’s wishes, Illyra sneaks back into the site and down the shaft, discovering signs of violent death among the skeletons down there. She also finds that whoever wrote this segment was a big fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as snakes start slithering out from among the skeletons. Answering her cries for help is a gallant young Watcher, Metron (Joseph Hodge), who brings down a torch and then uses his psychic powers to make the snakes burst into flames. He also helps her escape the site before the guard detail comes back on duty.

As you may surmise, this isn’t the last we see of Metron. At a street bazaar the next day, Illyra finds an old but impossibly advanced camera among a peddler’s wares, and traces it back to Metron, who takes frequent journeys into the desert. She hired him to take her out to the cave at which he discovered it, hoping that other artifacts there can help shed light on the mysterious cycle of catastrophe. And there, they find something… something that shatters their perceptions of the world they thought they knew!

Man, I have GOT to go camping in the desert more often.

Actually, it’s not that cool; I was just worried that you might be getting bored. If you know the short story, or the novel, you know that eventually they uncover enough puzzle piece to figure out that what happens to Aeon is darkness: an eclipse occurs every thousand years, just when the suns line up so that only one is in the sky at a time, and a planet that usually knows no night is plunged into darkness. (In the cave, Illyra finds a fragmentary diary from the last eclipse, which contains verbatim the babbling of the last few paragraphs of the Asimov story, which at least explains why few of the characters in the movie share names with those in the story; that all was last time around.)

If anything, this version is even more anti-religious than the original story, but not, I think, because of any conscious animus; there was simply a need for more simplistic good guys and bad guys. Thus, the Watchers are intolerant, judgmental, and in the end, murderous, staging a pogrom on “those University people” to appease God. At least in the short story, the cultists, though dogmatic and irrational, were right — they were the ones who knew about the coming cataclysm, and it was the scoffing scientists who didn’t realize what their fragmentary facts were telling them until it was too late. Here, both the Watchers and the University people know about the millennial cycle; the scholars are all selfless and benign, while the Watchers are fear-mongering, self-rightous fascists. (And it’s particularly distasteful that the only major parts given to Indians are those of Kopton and his chief lieutenant, while the scholar characters are all lilly-white.)

Ooh… Pritty…

The other main flaw — and it’s common to the novel version and the previous movie as well — is that laziness prevails in imagining a human society in a world without night. Instead of actually figuring out how people would behave on a planet in which there was no designated sleeping period or daily cycle, the writers simply used as many terrestrial institutions as possible and hoped no one would notice. Believe me, I noticed. Whenever a character talked about something happening “two days ago,” I asked, “What’s the basis for measuring time in days?” (It got even worse when someone mentioned “this morning”; in a world of perpetual light, what possible meaning could “morning” have?) How does everyone in the city decide that a certain time period is for sleep, despite the light bathing the empty market? Why do Illyra and Metron, camping in the desert, light a small fire before bedding down in the perpetual daylight?

These are the very things that would make the idea of “night” at the end more jarring and climactic, and thus make a cheap but serviceable film into something more memorable, but they’re uniformly ignored. And there are few things more disappointing than science fiction that doesn’t want to think too hard.