Dir: David Twohy
Starring
Vin Diesel
Rhada Mitchell
Cole Hauser
2000
R, 108 m
RATING: 3 out of 10
When a spaceship carrying dangerous criminal Disel crash lands on a three-sunned, desolate planet, the crew attempts to find a way off. However, they discover the seemingly-lifeless planet is inhabited by vicious, deadly, nocturnal creatures, and they have unluckily arrived in time for a total eclipse of three suns.
The story has promise, since we expect the cew of misfits will band together to fend off the aliens in a hugely exciting way. Instead, what we get is a film that plods along for half of its way with bantering, lame dialogue, unappealing characters, and long, stretched-out, pointless conversations about planning and gathering supplies. We are also introduced to the ship's crew, all one-dimensional characters whom we couldn't care less about. Just for the heck of it, we also see children in danger.
Directed by David Twohy, Pitch Black could have benifited from more chaotic, gripping scenes of the crew attempting to survive the hideous, stealthy beasts. Instead, he's tried to make the film brainy and fails miserably. We are treated to excruciatingly dull dialogue interspersed with long pauses, outbursts of profanity, and gore aplenty. Vin Diesel, the only actor amongst the sun-bleached cast, is the only one who comes off as somewhat intriguign and appealing, but it's mostly because of his physical attributes and hunky demeanor. The special effects also fall curiously flat, with the aliens coming off as video games or cartoons.
Pitch Black could have been a wild, thrilling, even scary movie if Twohy had decided to make the dialogue more terse, addem more action sequences, or give the characterizations more weight. The film, however, decides to plod along, falling prey to the Hamlet syndrome: thinking too much and doing not enough.
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