Pretty good sci-fi/action

Rating: Null/10 (5 April 2009)

"Pitch Black" is basically a simple story about a crew landing on a planet and fighting off creepy aliens. There's more to the story, mostly to do with the character of Riddick played by Vin Diesel, but I'm not interested in writing about that at the moment. The whole thing plays out like a relatively sub-par version of "Alien" with sub-par versions of the action scenes from "Aliens". The film features competent visual storytelling and looks okay considering its relatively low budget but I found the fact that the planet the crew lands up on having three suns meant cheap and annoying use of camera filters detracted quite substantially from the film overall. Entertaining, but I like the sound of "The Chronicles of Riddick" far more, as "Pitch Black" contains hints of an in interesting mythology but aside from Riddick himself could have been a SyFy original movie with a bigger budget, and brings almost nothing truly interesting to the table.