Posted: 02/28/2000

Pitch Black

(2000)

by D. Patrick Seitz

Diesel fuels Pitch Black.

Pitch Black wasn’t as good as I would have liked, but it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Let’s face it—when you first hear about a film a week before it opens, you approach it with a pretty hearty sense of trepidation. “If it’s any good,” one thinks, “they would have been hyping it up for months and months prior to now.” In retrospect, though, it was to USA Films’ credit that they opened this film to only modest forewarning.

Caught in a meteorite shower, a transport vessel is forced to crash-land on a desolate planet. Like any movie of this genre worth its salt, the ship is damaged beyond repair and most of the passengers (locked in cryo-sleep) don’t survive the impact.

Those who do survive the landing are your run-of-the-mill trail mix o’conflicting personalities. You’ve got Fry, the docking pilot turned hesitant leader (Radha Mitchell). There’s Johns (Cole Hauser) as the uber-macho lawman, and Riddick (Vin Diesel), the sociopath murderer he’s escorting back to prison. There’s also a Muslim cleric (Keith David), an effete antiquities dealer (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), and a punk kid (R. Griffith).

The survivors go exploring. Just as they stumble across a deserted mining settlement, complete with escape craft, they discover why, exactly, the settlement was deserted in the first place. It turns out that “deserted” is something of a misnomer; the original inhabitants were messily devoured by nocturnal aliens during a total eclipse 20 years ago. Of course, the next occurrence of said eclipse is about to begin.

Luckily enough, Riddick has night-vision (an operation he underwent while in jail to avoid any potential midnight shankings). From this point, the film degenerates into the standard “stay one step ahead of the aliens” routine, with the added subplot of whether or not Riddick is going to leave everybody holding the short end of the stick and just try to save himself.

Frankly, Vin Diesel saves this movie. He doesn’t make it a great movie. He doesn’t even make it the sort of film that you’d want to see twice. Still, I do have to give the man credit for preventing me from leaving early and haggling with the box office for some sort of partial refund. Pitch Black isn’t an example of sterling dialogue, and Diesel’s character certainly is no exception, but his look and sound fit the character to a ‘T’.

You have to feel a slight twinge of pity for any movie involving predacious aliens. If they end up looking like something from Aliens, folks complain that they’re a cheap rip-off. On the other hand, if they don’t take a page from the Aliens book, folks complain that they don’t “look” right. Pitch Black enlisted Patrick Tatopoulos (creature designer and supervisor for Godzilla—take from that what you will) to come up with a unique look for their aliens. The end result: odd dinosaur/bird hybrids that only look terrifying when they bare their teeth.

Pitch Black is the sort of film where, from the moment the lights go down, you know that a good number of the characters aren’t going to make it to the ending credits. Pitch Black keeps it pretty obvious. As in most alien movies, mute characters whose names we don’t learn within the first ten minutes of the movie aren’t long for this world.

Perhaps they taste better. Who knows? Still, I would have liked there to be more question in my mind of who gets chomped, rather than just wondering about the order in which it happens.

My feeling is that Pitch Black should have scrapped some of the decapitations, dismemberment, and morphine injections into people’s eyeballs, and put more focus on the dialogue. We’ve already proven that the sky is the limit as to what one can accomplish with computer-generated images. The pendulum of what audiences expect from a science-fiction film is starting to swing the other way.

D. Patrick Seitz recently put down roots in Los Angeles, where he’s trying his hand at acting, writing, and singing.

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