It must be a difficult fate to be the creator of what is probably the greatest television event of our generation. Everybody is talking about your story and everyone is looking forward to the broadcast of the last season. With the start of the eighth season of Game of Thrones in April, based on the fantasy world of George RR Martin, perhaps the big series boom of recent years will end, an era that has begun with The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and many other good and successful series. Something similar is not in sight at the moment. A series that is more than the sum of its parts, a pop cultural event that fascinates everyone...
There are now tryings to build on this success with something new. The easiest way in such cases is to take a new story of the same author and bring it to the screen - with the hope that the old fan community will enjoy the new stuff just they did it before.
Nightflyers is a short story by Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin, he wrote in 1980. In 1987 the story was filmed but with little success. Now the SyFy channel dared to go for a series edition.
In the year 2093 the world is at its end. The planet is ruined and the end is near. Mankind is looking for a way out of the abyss. A group of scientists and colonists sets off with the spaceship Nightflyer into space to meet a discovered alien race with the hope that it will save mankind and the earth. The scientist Rowan, who is on board the spaceship, expressed the situation very well: "We are a virus that has killed its host. Now we are looking for a new one."
The series begins directly with a bloodbath. You can see the psychologist on board fleeing from another crazy scientist with an axe in his hand. Before the psychologist slits her throat with a circular saw, she can send a message warning everyone not to visit the Nightflyers, to stay away from the spaceship.
How it came to these events one does not know yet and the series tells itself until then and further out. Was it a man with supernatural powers, was it the schizophrenic on-board computer, who is also the mother of the captain of the spaceship, who is a syntetically made man and who only shows himself as a hologram to everyone? We don't know...
As you may have noticed, there isn't much that's new. Old familiar things that you know from many other series and movies are gathered here - like jogging on a spaceship like in Stanley Kubick's '2001 - A Space Odyssey'. The female on-board computer is a red eye, like in Terminator, Matrix or many other well-known movies and the crew has brutal horror visions like in Shinning.
The series is in the genre of horror science fiction. But the horror factor is completely missing. You can always see scenes that are brutal and bloody, pasture and body parts on mass, but the horror tension and the horror factor that makes the word horror so special is missing !
The story has no tension. the characters are mediocre in their structure and don't convince really well and seem more angular than rounded. The ideas are not new and although they are well thrown together, you can still anticipate the events.
You notice that George R. R. Martin is not involved in the series. He only serves as an executive producer and therefore has no influence on it. That's forbidden by his contract with HBO, where the mega hit Game of Thrones is playing. But I think it's good that way too!
The series lacks suspense, action, depth and its own story. A lot of blood and brutality don't make Horrorgenre. Some CGI scenes show how to use the computer and applications are well done but can't trump. But if you want to have some entertainment by the way, the series is good...
