- Network: SyFy
- Series Premiere Date: Dec 2, 2018
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Critic Reviews
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Decently cast, interestingly claustrophobic and boasting occasional tiny bursts of inspiration, Nightflyers isn't going to suddenly hook those broad Game of Thrones demos, but there's an audience out there that's always thirsty for hard sci-fi and this is for them.
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There’s a sense all of this has been done before, and showrunner Jeff Buhler doesn’t quite know how to make it feel new again. It’s a testament to the pulpy dramatics of the source material that Nightflyers remains enjoyable to watch despite these weaknesses.
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Nightflyers, like YouTube Premium’s “Origin,” features a wholly impractical spaceship design, one that is expansive and minimalist, with long corridors and plenty of convenient places for something to hide. What starts intriguingly turns sillier the deeper you go.
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Nightflyers is a fine addition to an onscreen canon that’s already well-stuffed--that of the space horror story. But it flails when it comes to doing anything new with a metaphor that’s been worn thin, that of space travel as an escape from grief.
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Nightflyers lacks [Alien's] sci-fi/horror gravitas; it’s murky at best, both in its storyline and its character development, and grinds along at a snail’s pace trying to construct its elaborate scenario. It does boast terrific special effects and an abundance of blood and gore, both of which are used generously.
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A grisly hybrid of science fiction and horror, capable of claustrophobic chills but more often merely evoking chaotic confusion. [26 Nov - 9 Dec 2018, p.9]
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There’s nothing epic about Nightflyers. It’s basically a haunted spaceship story--filled with what has to be a record number of uses of the F-word on basic cable--that does a poor job in its first hour giving viewers reasons to care about the characters before putting them in jeopardy.
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Not scary enough to be good horror and too simple-minded to be grand sci-fi, Nightflyers is just another schlocky TV show pretending to be more than it is.
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Unfortunately, the show never alchemizes these touchstones into a fresh, distinctive aesthetic. And when projects like this aren’t capable of knocking you out with style, they’d better have vivid characters and a riveting story to fall back on, and that’s not the case here, either.
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A tediously generic haunted-house-in-space odyssey, one that Syfy is either (charitably) experimenting with or (more likely) rapidly exhausting by making all 10 episodes available simultaneously with its linear-TV debut.
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The resulting show is a hodgepodge of fascinating concepts bogged down by some tremendously dumb ideas and shaky execution.
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Nightflyers is no fun. It's a grim, drab, thematically underdeveloped plot delivery system. It's a network show with a bigger budget and more blood.
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The production is riddled with problems. Most of the roles are miscast, the dialogue is flat, and the pacing usually feels off. It’s one of those shows that sags right when you want it to click into place. And several of the performances are downright bad--only Sampson and Jodie Turner-Smith spark any viewer interest.
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The constant, clumsy back-and-forth story line is not [Buhler]'s only annoying affectation. He's also larded Nightflyer with references to other, better, works, from Star Trek to The Shining, probably intended in homage but really serving just to remind you how much better all of them were. And the abundant gore, no doubt a confused nod to Martin's original premise that horror and sci-fi can coexist in the same vehicle, serves no purpose at all. [Buhler] may think he's speaking in some advanced new artistic argot, but really, it's just a lot of outer-space jabberwocky.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 33 out of 78
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Mixed: 17 out of 78
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Negative: 28 out of 78
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Dec 15, 2018
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Dec 10, 2018
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Dec 10, 2018