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.
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