Everything Alien 3 and 4 should have been.

Rating: 9/10 (16 June 2000)

Now, this is how you do an Alien movie !
Altough i find it a bit unffair to compare this to the Alien series, because in a way this is nothing more than a classic 50´s flick , (where Alien got its idea also), where a bunch of astronauts get marooned on a strange planet and they get attacked by creepy alien life forms. Replace the giant crabs, snakes and spiders with three heads by some great modern looking aliens and we got PITCH BLACK. With a diference...in this movie the human characters are interesting, have personality and we end up caring for them, much more than we expected, after seeing dozens of alien monster movies through the years.
In fact the characters was the thing in the movie that surprised me more, after all i already was expecting good special effects. In fact i wasn´t even counting to get much more out of this movie than just some good action sequences. I was surprised to find such well writen parts for such diferent characters, in a movie that didn´t asked for it to make money in the box-office.
And i loved the fact that there were no Hollywood superstars in it. Just this fact made this story much more credible, and right untill the end we are never to sure about who´s going to survive. This movie has achieved something that rarely we see in a movie. That is, inside a story that almost doesn´t exist, there are some excelent characters wich realy keep us interested and fill the usual "empty" bad-aliens-eat-good-dudes story with small details and characteristics. The details in this movie are another good thing, and i particulary liked the idea of using Arab characters stranded in a desert planet.
There is not much to say about this excelent movie, the characters are excelent particulary the prisioner Riddick, the special effects are excelent, there are some good scares, it´s a great space adventure movie like it wasn´t seen in ages, nice little twists during the plot, fantastic sound particulary during the crash scene, it has plenty of little details everywhere on sets and script, and the visual style is magnificent. In fact i don´t care much for this type of MTV edditing style, ( i didn´t liked it in Matrix for example altough it´s a good movie), but in this case i think it works wonders for PITCH BLACK because it doesn´t exagerates, trying to give style, instead of being used just to tell a story.
In fact the direction gives a nice personal feel to this movie, and we can see the director trully likes sci-fi. I never heard of this guy David N Twohy before, but he sure is on my favorites list for sci-fi, and i can´t wait to see his next film. An excelent little movie, that i recommend to everybody who preffers substance over style. Particulary in an apparent empty plot.
PITCH BLACK is a real good surprise, and to me one of the best three movies i´ve seen this year along with MAGNOLIA and the SIXTH SENSE, altough they have nothing in common.
More please.