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Into The Night gives us a premise similar to ITV’s 1999 drama, The Last Train, in that the end of the world is seemingly on the way, and it appears that the only potential survivors will be a random group of individuals, only brought together by events. ITV’s series was for those individuals on a train that was going through a tunnel, while this rag-tag bunch are on a plane.
Amongst the characters we’re introduced to early on, Sylvie’s (Pauline Etienne) partner has died and she wants to scatter his ashes, Ines (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) is a famous celeb whose friend on the phone is inexplicably choking to death, yet, once they’re up in the air, she’s more interested in her social media following than whatever’s going on around there; Terenzio (Stéfano Cassetti) works in NATO and he clearly knows what’s going on because he’ll take any flight going West; and Mathieu (Laurent Capelluto) is the plane’s Captain who has the unfortunate task of piloting them through this mess.
What exactly is the mess? Well, not quite exactly, since all we know at first is that the sun is causing people to die, and no-one knows why.
So, is the answer to take a flight and just keep going for as long as you can stay in the dark? How much fuel does a plane hold? You’ve got to land at some point, and if you do that, then the police will surely take over, as they won’t believe the story about the sun bumping everyone off… and they’re hardly going to send up endless in-flight refuelling aircraft for one jet.
A few random observations:
- Each episode starts on one particular character, but only as a jumping off point to fill in a tiny bit of backstory about them.
- Sylvie helps out flying the plane because she can pilot a helicopter. After all, a chopper and a jumbo jet are similar, yes?
- Oh, and amongst those on board is a climate scientist. Oh dear… Thank Frank it’s not Greta Thunberg!!
Now, Into The Night is natively in more than one language because those on the plane are from different countries. While I’m used to watching foreign films and dramas with subtitles, for simplicity, I put on the English-dubbed version and while that works in the main, there is still the occasional few lines, here and there, which are in their original language. I’m not quite sure what the reason is for that.
However, it’s amazing how different the text can be between what’s spoken and what in the subtitles. I don’t expect them to always be exact, but it’s as if the translations were done by the same person, yet they had to ensure both NEVER said the same thing!
One spoiler-free example, spoken by a man on the plane:
- Spoken: “No, but I know that anyone down on the ground right now, would pay anything to be up on this plane with us, believe me!”
- Subtitles: “No, but I promise you, if you could talk to anyone down there now, they’d trade places with us.”
Even aside from all that, the story plays out like a Channel 5 TV movie, and the writing is pretty poor. On the plus side, it has some incredible end credits ’80s-style music from Photek which I’ll link below.
So far, I’m two episodes in, out of a total of six, but it’s really going to have to ‘take off’ if it’s going to retain my interest.
UPDATE: I’ve now seen the rest, and it was similarly daft, with bad scripting, but it still was oddly gripping. And one bit for a spoiler…
Into The Night is not available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, but is on Netflix from today.
Overall Series Score: 6/10
Directors: Inti Calfat, Dirk Verheye
Producer: Sébastien Delloye
Creator: Jason George
Novel: Jacek Dukaj
Music: Photek
Cast:
Sylvie Bridgette Dubois: Pauline Etienne
Mathieu Daniel Douek: Laurent Capelluto
Terenzio Matteo Gallo: Stéfano Cassetti
Ines Mélanie Ricci: Alba Gaïa Bellugi
Richard “Rik” Mertens: Jan Bijvoet
Osman Azizi: Nabil Mallat
Gabrielle Renoir: Astrid Whettnall
Horst Baudin: Vincent Londez
Zara Oblonskaya: Regina Bikkinina
Laura Djalo: Babetida Sadjo
Ayaz Kobanbay: Mehmet Kurtulus
Jakub Kieslowski: Ksawery Szlenkier
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.