Excellent Sci-Fi
Pitch Black was arguably one of the most overlooked films of the early year. Although the setting of the film could seem routine to a casual viewer(space travelers stranded and bickering on a hostile planet infested with alien nasties), director David Twohy's wonderful use of color and stylistic flourishes more than makes up for any trivial complaints.
For those of you curious about the film's plot, it deals with a group of marooned space "passengers" who spend the majority of their time searching for a way to evacuate a harsh desert planet. Their efforts are unexpectedly forced to quicken however when they discover a particularly vicious type of nocturnal alien ready to emerge to the planet's surface during an eclipse.
Viewers can't help but like the film's villainous hero(played by Vin Diesel of Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room)who brings to memory Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous role as the Terminator.
The film looks and sounds great and has more...
Sadly missed from the theatre
I rate movies along simple lines. There are classics, there are flicks and there are horrible pieces not worth the film that they were printed on. I sorrily skipped Pitch Black in the theatre. The trailer was horrible. I couldn't make out *anything* about the movie and had no interest in seeing it. Thankfully, on vacation, I was holed up in a hotel that had Pitch Black on pay-per-view and decided to give it a try. I was stunned. Not only did I wish I had seen it in the theatre - to truly appreciate the special effects - but I enjoyed the quirky dialogue between the characters. I appreciated the seeming abandon with which character upon character is removed from the story line without my abilities of prediction serving me in the slightest. The dialogue is often cheesy. These people are space faring commoners and the movie revolves around the predicamnet they face and not their lives. Their lives form the substance to which I temporarily attached care for each...
Taut, smart, enjoyable filmmaking
Hell has surely frozen over. That's the only way to explain how David Twohy, writer-director of the so-bad-it's-hilarious Charlie Sheen skydiving epic "Terminal Velocity," has made a movie this good. It's not high art, but "Pitch Black" is a triumph within its genre: a suspenseful, intelligent monster movie with surprisingly deep characters.
A damaged spaceship loaded with cargo and cryo-sleeping passengers crash-lands on an alien world where three suns create perpetual daylight. At first, the survivors think their biggest problem is the vicious convict who's escaped from the wreckage. Then they discover the light-fearing predators lurking beneath the planet's surface. And then comes the total eclipse...
"Pitch Black" is a Diesel-powered movie-- Vin Diesel, that is. As the menacing convict Richard P. Riddick, Diesel gives a ferociously intelligent and charismatic performance, backed up by Twohy's surprisingly nuanced script. You'll come to root for...
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