Weak in places, but with some redeeming virtues

Rating: 6/10 (1 August 2000)

A curious little movie, this one. It seems to hover between the world of 'straight to video' derivatives and something rather better. Perhaps it deserves to be classed with "Slipstream" - a low-budget SF film with plenty of failings but enough interesting features to make it worth a look.
On the face of it, the main theme of the film - stranded space travellers on an alien planet must struggle for survival against nasty local creatures that eat them one by one - has been done to death. The "Alien" series pretty much wrote the book on this one, and by reinventing the theme slightly with each iteration, more or less exhausted the possibilities of the idea. The makers of "Pitch Black" also deserve a hefty virtual slap for using another of science-fiction's tired cliches, the dreaded meteor storm.
One thing that redeems "Pitch Black" is the focus on characters. While the characters are cliched - plucky but vulnerable pilot, superhuman serial killer, tough-guy bounty hunter, serene holy man, and a handful of the usual monster fodder - the director allows each of the actors room to work with the material that they've been given and the results are surprisingly good. Vin Diesel's sardonic Riddick is "Hannibal Lecter" Lite, but with greater room for depth and development, while Radha Mitchell turns in an impressive performance as the young pilot pushed into taking command in an impossible situation. Between them, they establish an intriguing and often plausible human dynamic that is rarely seen in similar films. That "Pitch Black" is able to rise above the level of the usual "eat-'em-one-by-one" picture (something that, for example, "Event Horizon", with its much larger budget and celebrity cast, was not) is because it becomes a film not about monsters but about flawed humanity, and the largely unknown cast are good enough to make their characters - even the most minor - believable and often likeable.
The picture also looks better than you would expect. The cast wear their clothes and equipment as if they lived in them, and the back story hints at a complex, multi-faceted civilisation (albeit one without any wild leaps of creative imagination: the technology and concepts are all fairly twentieth-century). The spaceship sets have a gritty, workaday feel, while the bleached, washed-out tones of the daylight exterior scenes actually make the alien setting seem real. When the characters emerge from the dark confines of the hull into the glare of day, your eyes narrow in sympathy. This is a Star Trek universe, where crash-landings are always made on planets that have breathable air, water and (usually hostile) life, but for all that, the nameless planet of "Pitch Black" is as barren and brutal as the plot will allow.
"Pitch Black" is not without serious flaws: there's much, beginning with the main plot premise, that's hackneyed or unconvincing. But at the same time there are definitely things to like about it and food for thought. The fact that it is ultimately a film about the best and worst in human nature makes it deeper and more gripping than the broad outlines of the story might suggest.