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It’s a sad fact that
Hollywood saves its worst films to put out in the first two
months of each calendar year. Most of these stinkers get yanked from theaters so quickly
that you may forget that they ever existed, unless you had the
misfortune of paying to see one.
For some reason, I seem to remember more of these
early-season science-fiction bombs than anything else.
If it has to do with space, and it comes out in January
or February, then run. In
the last two years, we’ve had Phantoms, Wing
Commander, Supernova and Firestorm (there’s
“space” between Howie Long’s ears, so it counts) – a
crop that represents the worst film has to offer.
Pitch
Black certainly didn’t seem like it would be an exception
to the general rule. The
pedigree is less than stellar - David N. Twohy (The Arrival)
directing from a script that he wrote with brothers Jim and Ken
Wheat (you may remember them from such sequels as The Fly 2,
The Birds 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 4).
There are no A-list stars.
There aren’t really any B-list stars, either.
In fact, the C-list might even be out of reach.
The story isn’t anything special, either.
But Pitch
Black isn’t bad. I might even go so far as to say that it’s good (how about
“goodish”?). It’s
about a passenger freighter called the Hunter-Gratzner, a
spacecraft with thirty-nine lives on board – including Richard
B. Riddick (Vin Diesel, Boiler Room), a diabolical
prisoner that can see in the dark.
The ship crashes into a strange planet during a routine
hyper-jump, killing the captain and leaving Pilot Second Class
Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell, High Art) in charge of the
crew, prisoner and multi-racial travelers.
Wait a second…Fry?
Prisoner? Multi-racial
travelers? This
sounds like a cross between ConAir and Futurama.
Of course, Pitch
Black is more like Alien than anything else.
The basic plot of the movie involves these nasty
nocturnal creatures that will only attack Fry and crew when
it’s dark. As the
title indicates, things become pitch-black when a rare eclipse
shrouds the planet in darkness.
Hey…that guy that can see in the dark should come in
handy, eh? People
predictably start getting bumped off one by one until three are
left to battle the CG monsters.
There are
three things that make Pitch Black entertaining.
The first is that the film doesn’t seem to have the
typical stock characters that plague the genre.
Black also isn’t as clichéd as you would expect
from a sci-fi flick released this early in the year.
That is to say, it doesn’t rip off every successful
space flick, like Supernova did. The third and most impressive feature is the editing (Rick
Shaine, Extreme Measures) and cinematography (David Eggby,
Blue Streak). The
crash scene is really well done, using bright flashes of light
and quick cuts, but it isn’t until after the crash that the
feel of the film is established.
The planet is essentially dead:
A desert littered with barren trees, abandoned outposts
and bones of humongous animals, and Eggby shoots it like Three
Kings – beautifully washed out with muted colors. If nothing else, it’s a visual winner.
1:52
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for sci-fi violence and gore, and for language
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