Pitch Black

If you can get around the fact that it's a lot more "fi" than "sci," the latest film from director David Twohy is ample fun.

If you can suppress the urge to write Arthur C. Clarke and tell him the movie opens with a spaceship crash wherein the plucky female copilot has to land a transport with supersonic wind blasting her pretty face through a smashed windshield while inches away the same wind is melting parts of the ship, that is.

And if you don't mind that they happen to land on an initially lifeless, arid planet just as all three suns are about to go into a total-eclipse phase that once every 22 years brings out hordes of bloodthirsty nocturnal predators (what do the monsters eat in the meantime? sand?).

And if it's not too convenient that the disparate survivors each have some crucial component for their joint continued survival: in addition to the copilot, there's a collector carrying antique weapons and a lot of liquor, a resourceful engineer/prospector (played by Claudia Black, from "Farscape"), some NeoMuslim pilgrims adept at desert subsistence (at least until they learn the local camels can fly and want to eat them), a well-armed mercenary/bounty-hunter, and, most importantly, his prisoner, Riddick (Vin Diesel, who was one of the squad in Saving Private Ryan and did the voice for The Iron Giant). Riddick is a buffed, growling, double-jointed superhuman space pirate who shaves his head with axle grease and can see in the dark and smell blonde hair.

Sound like a party?

So it's not Space Odyssey. Or even Spaceballs, for that matter. But Twohy injects a lot more visual energy into Pitch Black than was evident in his 1996 pseudosci-fi entry The Arrival (one of those things where an advanced alien race is smart enough to take over Earth but can't outrun a Jeep). The script, written by a couple guys with a lot of Roman numerals in their resume (The Fly II, The Birds II, Nightmare on Elm Street V, etc.), won't win any awards, but Diesel makes a entertaining antihero, running around begoggled like DEVO on Mark McGwire's favorite muscle-mass supplement.

Somebody has to keep all those clichés alive. B-

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