Pitch Black fits very comfortably in the sci-fi / survival genre, borrowing heavily from the Alien movie series, adding just a few new twists of it’s own. This time around, a commercial passenger ship crash-lands on a desert planet, where hostile dark-dwelling aliens burrow underground. Because they’re afraid of the light, the folks figure they’re relatively safe... until they realize that a big eclipse is about to happen. As the entire planet is plunged into darkness, it becomes open season on humans.
The premise is fun enough, and it’s hard to go wrong, tapping in to one’s primal fear of darkness. To spice things up a bit more, this film also has a human villain. Riddick is a mass-murderer escaped from maximum security prison. Vin Diesel does a great job, giving Riddick lots of menace, with just the tiniest touch of humanity. He’s an even blend of Hannibal Lechter and The Terminator, and is our main source of dread for the first half of the film. Once the aliens make their presence felt, however, the crew is forced to rely on him, both for his superior killer instincts and for his unique ability to see in the dark.
There are a couple other standouts. The only surviving pilot, Fry (played by Australian Radha Mitchell) is a cute, perky blonde who delivers just the right blend of machismo and vulnerability: not too ditzy, not too “Butch”. Johns (played by Cole Hauser) is Riddick’s captor. It seems like a pretty unenviable task, but Johns seems to be enjoying himself as he is repeatedly obliged to round up his psychotic prisoner. Most of the major players evolve throughout the story, and that makes the film tangibly more interesting.
The weakest link in this film is the aliens. At first, they were plenty creepy, when we only got to catch them in fleeting glimpses. Once they revealed themselves in full-force in a great, lavish, computer-generated extravaganza, they lost much of their dread. As their capabilities became more arbitrary and they started picking people off soley at the whim of the screenplay, I stopped clinging to the edge of my seat. A little more consistency and credibility on the aliens’ part could have made this a great movie.
Even so, the relentless darkness was an effective device, and throughout the second half, I never stopped hoping that the increasingly few survivors would manage to escape. Pitch Black is not a masterpiece, but it’s a surprisingly entertaining way to whittle away two hours. Much credit is due to Vin Diesel for amply spooking us out, then proceeding to kick a whole bunch of alien ass. Don’t go in expecting a suspenseful classic like Alien or 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you’ll won’t be disappointed.