: Some of the concepts and story ideas present in Nightfall are interesting,
: such as the Alpha Shard and Aiken's backstory, but the execution left a
: LOT to be desired. The script was pretty clunky, the effects were not very
: good, and the plot was really predictable. It felt very much like a video
: game movie.

: The thing that bothered me the most was that there was a couple of threads
: that just went nowhere. What was the "element", and how come it
: could target specific species? Was it a Forerunner-engineered bio-weapon
: used to kill in their war with humans? What was up with that Yonhet dude?
: What's up with the Lekgolo worms? Were they there with the Fleet of
: Particular Justice? There were interesting things going on, but the story
: seemed to favor a boring survival story.

: I think it's fair to compare Nightfall with its predecessor, Forward Unto
: Dawn, since both mini-series served to introduce important Halo
: characters. Lasky's story in FuD was pretty simple, but he did have some
: growth, and I was left wanting to know what happens next with him. I was
: not left with that feeling about Locke- I'm just not sold on his
: character. The only character trait I really picked up was that he's not a
: dick.

I don't think the issue was with the survival story--it was that there wasn't anything else there. I didn't feel like the pace dragged in Nightfall, yet I couldn't come up with anything of consequence that happened in probably the middle 30 minutes besides people getting picked off.

I don't even think the issues with Locke not growing had to do with Colter, although I understand why people say he maybe isn't the strongest actor--it's that he had no one interesting to bounce off of. The second-in-command had little interesting to say and we got no real sense of their relationship prior.

The Icelandic terrain was beautiful but sparse, and didn't help address the monotony that sort of set in for me. The Lekgolo created more questions than answers, and I didn't feel like they introduced questions I thought could have satisfactory answers. Wish it was the Flood, really. Since if the only point of the Hunter worms was to act as a force of nature to screw with Locke and co., the Flood would have not opened up these weird questions.

Overall it certainly wasn't bad, but it was [i]bland[/i], and that kind of hurts more since FUD set us up to be pleasantly surprised. I think 343 has learned their lesson, and hopefully the partnership with Spielberg they focus more on the basics of storytelling.