Surprisingly good

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2004)

"Pitch Black" cannot lay too much claim to being original, since "Alien," "Predator," and a whole array of other sci-fi and non-sci-fi films have dealt with the issues in this movie before. But that's what Hollywood is all about. The film opens as the captain of a civilian cruiser, while in a cryogenic sleep, dies. Two other crew members, Owens and Fry, struggle in vane to land the ship, dumping cargo in an attempt to raise the nose, and land on a nearby planet. After crashing and wrecking the ship, Owens is mortally wounded and the one hostile passenger, Richard B. Riddick, escapes.
The planet has three suns, so there is no nighttime. Great rib-cages of monstrous animals lie in canyons on this seemingly waterless planet. Among the survivors is an Arab holy man and his three sons, a prospector, an antiques dealer, a mischievous "boy," and an Aussie, whose job now is to dig graves for the dead. Also, there is a man named Johns, who is hell-bent on tracking down the escaped killer, Riddick. But his motives are more ambiguous than people think.
The only water on the planet comes from a well where people had previously settled here. But nobody is around. But thankfully they left some kind of lifeboat shuttle, that the crew can use to leave the planet.
Zeke, the gravedigger, mistakenly shoots another surviving passenger, mistaking him for Riddick, and discovers a hole in the burial site wall. When he looks in there, something kills him and sucks him through, and Riddick's standing right there.
Initially blamed for Zeke's death, the escaped convict, a man who has had an operation on his eyes to see in the dark, warns of something inside that hole. When indeed they do find creatures, and a model of the planet suggests that the last civilization was wiped out during a rare total eclipse, one which coincidentally is about to happen again, Johns makes a deal with Riddick to help them if he promises to play nice.
The movie features a cast of, at that time, fairly little-known actors, save for Keith David (best described as a character actor). Vin Diesel had been in "Saving Private Ryan" as a soldier who got shot by a sniper, and in "Boiler Room," but this was his first starring role. The character arcs help give this movie credibility: Caroline Fry (Radha Mitchell) was willing to dump the whole passenger load to save her own life, and now is hailed as captain for saving everyone's life; Johns (Cole Hauser) is a morphine-addicted bounty hunter; Riddick would just as soon leave everyone behind, as is his animal nature.
On one last note, Vin Diesel is not Marlon Brando, but he's not a "bad actor." Certainly not too bad here, as a relative bad guy. But now he's too big. He oughta do more movies like "Boiler Room," playing a supporting role to someone with more clout than Paul Walker.