Too many absurd premises but visually interesting and good cast

Rating: 6/10 (16 July 2001)

Pitch Black begins with the most spectacular and harrowing spaceship crash ever put on film. Unfortunately, while the film is superior to most other recent screen SF, the rest of the film doesn't quite live up to the promise of the opening. It is also unremittingly bleak and violent, and some plot premises rob the film of credibility. A long-range space transport is carrying about 50 passengers and crew in a distant region of space. One of the passengers is a captured escaped convict (Vin Diesel). The ship flies through a comet's tail (why couldn't the ship's nav computer automatically avoid this?) and micrometeorites punch holes in the hull and kill part of the crew before they can awaken from cryosleep. The docking pilot (Radha Mitchell) manages to bring the ship down on a nearby planet (where did it come from?) but the ship is wrecked, with only a handful of survivors among the passengers. The planet is actually a large moon of a Jovian-type ringed planet in a 3-sun system, so it never gets dark---they think. The ragged band of survivors discovers an encampment (lucky it was so close to their crash site) set up by mining geologists for test-core drilling, but it has been deserted apparently for 22 years. They find a small emergency rescue vehicle, functional but without power. The survivors return to the wreck for power cells when the planet passes behind its primary and "pitch black" night falls, which, it turns out, happens every 22 years (you guessed it, these folks arrived just in time). This is the signal for thousands of winged creatures to issue forth from underground roosts (why do they have wings if they don't come out but once every 22 years? And how does this barren wasteland support thousands of these creatures?) The surface rover is solar powered, so the rest of the film involves the steadily dwindling group toiling to get to the escape shuttle, on foot over open country, with a shaky supply of artificial light to ward off the photophobic creatures. Their hopes are pinned on Riddick (Vin Diesel), who was incarcerated on a prison planet where it was perpetual night and who had his eyes surgically altered to be able to see in the dark. The climax is not the final dash to the shuttle but what happens immediately afterward. The eyeless creatures (created by CGI that is not as good as we have recently become accustomed to in other SF offerings) are a cross between Ridley Scott's Aliens and pterodactyls, and the noises they make are quite unconvincing; they sound like the electronic music soundtrack for "Forbidden Planet" rather than the more realistic animal sounds of, say, Jurassic Park. The human characters are more complex than the average SF or action thriller. The two leads, the gorgeous Radha Mitchell and the imposing Vin Diesel, both play highly flawed characters; viewers who note that the film also features Farscape's foxy Claudia Black will be disappointed as she plays only a supporting role and her character's demise is rather gruesome.