A perfect sci-fi movie

Rating: 9/10 (26 May 2004)

If you're a science fiction fan, and you've only seen this movie once, please, PLEASE go and treat yourself to a second viewing. I just did, and I was AMAZED about how good I thought the movie was, as opposed to when I first saw it three years ago. The first time around I was certainly impressed by the astronomical vistas we're treated to in this movie, but by and large I didn't think that much of the movie as a whole. It was an Alien rip-off, and I thought the description of the monsters was a case of really bad science. That they were allergic to light was something I found especially ridiculous. Based on my first viewing, I recently rated this movie a 5.
However, now that the sequel, Chronicles of Riddick, is on the way, and the movie poster for that one looks amazing, I thought I'd better brush up on Pitch Black once more, so I borrowed the video from a friend. I am so glad I did. There's so much of what I thought I remembered from the first viewing that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. I thought most of the characters died very early in the movie. This was not so. I thought Claudia Black's character was the first to die. This was not so. I thought Riddick was the sole survivor. This was not so.
I see now that the movie works *extremely* well. There isn't an excessive, tiresome focus on the monsters. It's much more of a human drama. The main characters are appealing and capable of some convincing acting. And there are so many little details that make the Pitch Black universe coherent and believable, such as the shortage of oxygen in the atmosphere of the planet they crash on, and the fact that the monsters have eaten everything on the planet, and so they turn on each other.
And I have to mention the astronomical vistas again. I mean, we start out seeing the spaceship passing through a comet's tail, with bits of spacedust zapping through the hull. Then we come to a planet with three suns. Just as the shipwrecked people think it's about to get dark, a blue sun rises on the opposite horizon, and everything is engulfed in a blue glow. As the eclipse approaches, we see the huge, neighboring, ringed gas giant rise across the sky, and in the final scene of the movie we see the ship skid closely above one of these very rings. These scenes are created with a sense of beauty, wonder and detail, and I don't think I've seen any other SF movie that really made such a point out of including these things. I hope we see much more of it in the sequel.
Pitch Black now gets from me a rating of 9 out of 10. A cult classic? You bet!!