Pitch Black (2000)

In some kind of interstellar space-faring science fiction future we’ll learn rather more about than we ever may have wanted in the sequels.

After being disastrously hit by a meteor shower, a transport ship crashes on an uninhabitable desert planet with three suns. Some of the passengers have survived, but of the crew, there’s only Fry (Radha Mitchell) left, the young docking pilot who would have blown the passenger part with the cryo containers off the ship to save herself, though nobody knows that juicy little detail.

There are some remnants of an old mining colony on the planet, but there’s little there to secure anyone’s survival, so the small group of survivors will have to band together quickly.

Worse still, one of the passengers was a prisoner – the dangerous, amoral prick and killer Riddick (Vin Diesel). And as it goes with these kind of people in the movies, he didn’t just survive the crash but also used the opportunity to escape and is now haunting the little group (among them characters played by Cole Hauser, Keith David and Claudia Black) from the side-lines.

Riddick still isn’t the worst bit of news the film has to offer its characters: there are also monsters on the planet, monsters who only come out at night and in the dark, or, say, during the solar eclipse that’s going to hit the planet very soon.

Over the years, David Twohy’s Pitch Black has grown on me, and by now, I’m not even sure anymore what flaws exactly put me off it as completely as they once did. As it stands now, this is the epitome of clever low budget science fiction filmmaking with horror elements, the kind of genre fare whose ambitions show themselves through craftsmanship rather than huge gestures. It’s a Howard Hawks kind of film, concerning a group of disparate yet basically competent people having to come together against a shared threat.

The characters are of various stock types, but brought to life by a script that gives everyone either an interesting or uncommon little character moment or an interesting opinion in one of the more life-philosophical interactions to make them more than stock. One can never overvalue a cast of actors who know and appreciate these kinds of opportunities. This also has the neat little side effect that character growth actually feels earned and not just Twohy following scriptwriting rules.

In its pacing, this is absolutely on point; in its style, it uses some of the visual markers of early 2000 filmmaking for good: the monochrome colour schemes beloved of the time make sense given the planet this takes place on, and even add to the strangeness and otherworldliness of what was in reality the Australian desert.

The digital effects haven’t aged all that gracefully, but I can’t say I really cared about that on more than an abstract level – this is filmmaking that makes the best of what it has, and thus deserves some patience with unavoidable weaknesses.

Pitch Black certainly offers more than enough to make up for the little problems it has.

In short: Dead Presidents (1995)

The film follows young, black New Yorker Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate) from shortly before he volunteers for the Marine Corps in 1969, through his time in a recon unit in the Vietnam War, his return to the USA, the social and financial dead end he finds himself in there, and finally his pretty damn amateurish and bloody attempt at a banking van heist. I’d go into more detail, but frankly, everything you imagine will happen does happen here in the way you expect.

And of course, at least in part, that is part of the point of this film by brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, for our protagonist is supposed to stand in for the experience of the black Vietnam vet as a whole. Unfortunately, this also leads to a film whose protagonist lacks actual specificity, missing the details that would bring him to life. For example, we never learn much about what he’s actually thinking about the world, what he enjoys, what he dislikes apart from the things needed to keep the plot moving, which in turn robs the film of the feeling of having an actual person at its core instead of a representation of ideas about a type of person. The film’s historical specificity suffers in a comparable way. There is certainly the right music playing on the radio (there’s particularly a lot of Curtis Mayfield, which is never a bad choice), the people wear sort of the right clothes, the historical dates fit, but there’s no real life to the presentation of the late 60s/early 70s. The Vietnam sequences suffer from the same problem: they are a series of moments that feel abstracted and constructed to make an equally abstract point instead of lived experience for the protagonist and his peers.


It’s a shame, really, for the cast is fine – apart from the execrable Chris Tucker who hasn’t met a line of dialogue he isn’t going to slaughter – and the Hughes Brothers so clearly have the highest technical abilities and obviously very much care about the political meaning of the story they are telling. It’s just that Dead Presidents never seems to make much effort to make the audience care also.

The Puppet Masters (1994)

Warning: contains impolite thoughts about Robert A. Heinlein.

A UFO goes down over a small US town, and soon, the people there start to act a bit strangely, invite visitors into a fake UFO and are probably up to other shenanigans. Why, it’s as if they were controlled by alien parasites sitting on their backs!

An investigation by the USA’s scientific intelligence service under leadership of Andrew Nivens (Donald Sutherland) with his estranged son Sam (Eric Thal) and NASA xenobiologist Mary Sefton (Julie Warner) soon finds out that it is in fact alien invasion time. So many backs to ride on, so little time. Now, you’d think it would be rather easy to detect aliens slushing away on people’s backs, even before our heroes find out that infected humans have a heightened body temperature, but in this movie, the protagonists only like to check for this sort of thing at dramatically appropriate moments instead of, you know, regularly, so soon the whole of the US (which is of course the whole of the world for this sort of movie) is under threat.

Let’s start with the positive first: Stuart Orme’s The Puppet Masters is not a very close adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, so it spares us the weird-ass nudism as well as Heinlein’s insufferable, endless smartass bullshitting, the author being one of those people who have to demonstrate to everyone willing to listen (and also to those who aren’t) that they are an authority on frigging everything, particularly those things they don’t actually have a clue about. Personally, I always thought that Heinlein was to SF was Ayn Rand is to philosophy, popular in the US, not taken all that seriously by anyone outside of it.

The film would really rather be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or at least the lite, authority-trusting version of it (no unhappy or even ambiguous endings for this film). Considered from scene to scene, it’s not completely unsuccessful with this approach. There are a handful of effective scenes of paranoia, a smidgen of light body horror, and more than just an echo of Alien’s face hugger, and while Orme’s direction isn’t particularly exciting or inventive, it is perfectly competent.

Unfortunately, “competence” isn’t exactly what the film’s script spells to me. I’m not generally one to complain about or even just look for plot holes, but The Puppet Masters is just too sloppy and inconsistent to take seriously for me. The fact that our supposedly competent heroes seem always outgunned not because the aliens are so much more effective (they sure aren’t) but because humankind’s best hope are the sort of people unable to come up with a way to check each other for alien parasites on their backs, and who proceed to basically gift a whole army to the things in a particularly embarrassing sequence. Then there’s the film’s inconsistency towards the physical powers the parasites induce in their hosts: some get super powers and only go down after they have been shot repeatedly, others work on a classic goon power level and go down when someone looks at them wrong. It’s the same with the parasites – some seem to die with their hosts, other are sprightly as hell afterwards, and so on. Or talk about the psychological effects of getting separated from one’s parasite. What starts out as psychologically incredibly damaging in the film’s first acts turns into the sort of thing everybody is able to shrug off in a few minutes in the last.

And don’t for a second expect the film to think about the ethical implications all that shooting of infected our heroes do has, seeing as infected aren’t beyond help. But hey, this is a film that solves the alien problem with “hey, just infect everyone with encephalitis!”, so what do I expect?

It’s all a bit much (or rather too little) even for me to just shrug off in a film, so The Puppet Masters did not leave a very pleasing impression on me.

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