Hey folks, Harry here with our first review from a contributor whom I hope hangs with us folks a while. Particle Man. For his first assembly of electric pixels, he chose to write about PITCH BLACK. A film that I like quite a lot. Warning though here... he does talk and describe bits and pieces of the plot here. Personally... If I were you... I'd walk into this theater expecting a Roger Corman film... Don't do any research.... Don't read about the FX or character moments... just... wander on into the theater and let it happen to ya. That's the best way to see this one. There ya go...
Review: PITCH BLACK
by Particle Man
_Pitch Black_ is the kind of thing that keeps me going to screenings. It comes out of left field -- I knew nothing about the film save for what I read in the invitation -- doesn't pretend to be THE MAJOR FILM EVENT OF THE NEW MILLENIUM!!!, and is just so good that you leave the theater grateful that _somebody_ still understands what filmmaking is about.
The basic plotline isn't blazingly original: a spaceship crash-lands on a desert world. The survivors -- a small band of fractious humans that includes a bounty hunter (Cole Hauser), his captured prey (Vin Diesel), and the ship's guilt-ridden pilot (Radha Mitchell) -- discover a seemingly barren and eternally sunlit world. Soon enough, they also discover _something_ else surviving in the shadows -- something that thrives in darkness, something _very_ nasty. There's more than one of them, actually, and gul-durn-it, wouldn't ya know? The planet just happens to be entering into an extended, solar eclipse...
Yup, _Pitch Black_ is your basic, things-that-go-bump-in-the-spaceship scenario, transferred here to a planetary surface and offering up all the standard features: a dread-filled first act; an escalating body-count; and the opportunity to lay bets on who of the mixed-bag of humans will be the next to buy the hydroponic farm. And if that's all it had to offer, I'd say, 'Thanks for the trip, best of luck, see you on the Sci-Fi Channel.' What saves the film is that David Twohy, the director and co-author (with Jim Wheat), isn't just going through the motions. He's reaching for something bigger. To a great extent, he succeeds.
It helps that he's rounded up a skilled cast. As ruthless criminal Riddick, Vin Diesel brings more than an imposing physical presence to his role. There's a charismatic sense of authority to his performance, mixed with a mordant humor -- you buy Riddick's brutally nihilistic stance at film's beginning and understand why he's decided to let go of some of it (but only some) by the end. Radha Mitchell, as pilot Fry, matches him well, balancing her character's guilt over a critical (and possibly wrong) decision made during the crash-landing against her knowledge that the fate of the survivors rests upon the authority she wields. Even the secondary characters -- including Lewis Fitzgerald as a self-involved antiques dealer -- exhibit a humanity that pushes them far beyond the cartoon. Maybe it's a side-effect of shooting in Australia -- Twohy seems to have modeled his characterizations to Oz standards: bristly, quirky, and all-too-human. In the beginning, they're constantly at odds; by the end, the survivors can just barely stand being with each other. One, big, rancorous family -- just the way I like 'em.
Twohy has also performed some minor visual miracles on what I presume was a limited budget. It may sound odd to use the word "haunting" to describe such a film, but _Pitch Black_ is full of moments of striking (and occasionally horrific) beauty: a massive alien skeleton bleaching in the sun; a knot of humans struggling across the desert while using a tangle of glowing, fiber-optic cable to ward off predators; a soon-to-be victim delivering a grace note so exquisitely realized that I don't want to describe it further for fear of spoiling the effect (here's a hint: fire-breather). "Haunting" may sound odd, but it definitely fits.
The film isn't perfect. There's that stock plot for one thing, and a superficial, none-too-convincing attempt at explaining how the planet's ecology manages to function when spaceships aren't crash-landing on its surface. On top of that, Twohy works so hard to realize the strife between his humans that it becomes hard to buy how they eventually come to trust each other. No, _Pitch Black_ is not an instant classic, just a good, intelligently-mounted film. I can only wish that the rest of 2000's offerings would strive for such exhilarating heights.
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