Over-rated collection of other movies original ideas

Rating: Null/10 (17 November 2000)

Want to see the top ten science fiction movies of the last 2 decades? No time? Then go and see Pitch Black! The enthusiasm of many reviewers for this film is a mystery. Maybe they cut all the good parts for the UK release and replaced them with alternative, derivative out-takes.
If you're not too worried about little things like originality, logic or realism then Pitch Black is the film for you. It's set on a planet with 3 suns, each a different colour, two of which orbit the third AND EACH OTHER! The solar system is so small and the planets are so big and close together and orbit so fast that they come into a "pitch black" (geddit?) triple solar eclipse often enough for the dominant life form to evolve into a flying creature that thrives in the dark.
The hero is a gravel-voiced fighting machine escaped convict whose law-man captor easily kicks his ass every 5 minutes for the first half hour, and a cold-blooded homicidal menace who never kills anyone. After about 30 minutes the law-man gets a sudden character transplant and acquires the martial arts skills of a cabbage, because the con is supposed to be the hero. For added credinility, the space pilot is a curvy young blonde whose uniform is a low-cut satin crop-top and pedal-pushers. Distracted only occasionally as she found yet another reason to lean forward or crawl toward the camera, I found "homages" to too many classier movies.
Predator is threaded through everything from the aliens' point-of-view visuals to Vin Diesel's Arnier-than-thou performance. Both the good "Alien" movies are here, obviously, and cult classic Tremors, with a dose of Con-Air thrown in to justify the bad-boy hero. A desert planet with twin suns appeared in which ground-breaking Star Wars movie? The mixed bag of cardboard cut-out characters are straight out of 70s disaster movies like "Poseidon Adventure".
Real thrills are few and far between. The final chase back to base camp is hackneyed, over-extended and predictable - you really have seen it all before. The CGI monsters are animated to about the standard of the original "Species", and of irritatingly inconsistent relative size. If this had turned up 15 years ago straight-to-video I would have warmed to it as a superior cheesy cash-in. These days it really shouldn't have been a major movie release.