Paint it "Black"....

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2000)

As I've scanned through here, with varying takes on how good or bad "Pitch Black" is, it never seems to have occurred to anyone that the kind of story that this movie tells is what science-fiction is SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT. Despite what the tagline would have you believe, it was never truly intended to be a horror piece ala' "Aliens" per se (though the design for these unnamed beasties are definitely ripped off from H.R. Giger's original design). Like many of the best episodes of "The Outer Limits" (where a story of this sort would have fit perfectly, I might add), it's just old-fashioned science fiction in the fashion of "The Day the Earth Stood Still"...that is, dubious science but believable human interaction.
Much of the film's power comes from Vin Diesel as ice-cold, convicted murderer Riddick. His opening voice-over sets the tone quite well. Plenty of time for things to go wrong, indeed. How they go wrong is, in much the same way the dubious scientific mechanics of the eclipse are handled, unimportant. What IS important is how the survivors react to them and each other. While Riddick is about the last person one would want to be stranded on a rock crawling with insects, he ultimately turns out to be the only one who knows how to survive...which isn't to say that he's not willing to leave the rest of them behind. It takes the guilt-ridden acting Captain of the ship to get him to follow through. He's more intrigued by her attitude than moved, I felt. It's not until she comes back to save his bacon that he begins to change (and not that much, considering how he says "Good night" to the aliens). Add a junkie merc with a badge who becomes the party's biggest liability and the most important components of the story are in place. Practically everything else, by itself, would not have been able to sustain the movie.
All right, so "Pitch Black" is no more "The Matrix" than it is "evil vs. evil" (more like "alien nature vs. human sociopath"). That still does not make it any less a small gem in the all-too barren wasteland of sci-fi.