Pitch Black

Pitch Black reminds me of Mad Max.  Both are low budget science fiction movies, filmed in Australia, whose cult status spawned a series of movies which expand the world and story of the central character while getting wackier with each new iteration.  So, is Pitch Black any good?  Does it justify the movies, comic books, and video games it has spawned?  The short answer is yes. In fact, as the freshman film of the franchise, I think it is actually better than Mad Max.  Of course, arguably the Mad Max films get better with each entry, culminating in the sublime Fury Road, and scant few critics would say the same of Riddick.  Still, Pitch Black does so much with so little, one can’t help but be impressed.

This movie is like a master class in low budget science fiction filmmaking.  Everything is kept small and efficient. The protagonists’ ship crashes in the opening minutes.  This gets us right to the action. The movie needs to establish some exposition about what equipment the crew has on hand, especially weapons.  A prisoner (anti-hero Riddick) escapes and the crew must prepare to hunt him down. While a handful of these were scifi weapons, carried by a lawman, the rest were sourced from a passenger who collects rare old weapons and happened to have blades, blow guns, etc. on the ship with him.  This brilliantly justifies, in narrative, the cost cutting measure of not making a ton of expensive custom futuristic looking prop guns, while also showing the audience another way in which the protagonists are woefully unprepared for what is about to happen to them.

The movie is also very clever in how it hides its lower quality computer graphics, for the most part.  When the movie introduces the planet’s indigenous animal life, it establishes that they don’t like the light. As a result, in the day time, the CG beasts have their unrealistic polygons hidden by shadow, and during the night time, they are largely shown through Riddick’s eye implants, which disguises the polygons by rendering them like heat vision. The only place the graphics are noticeably bad is when the neighboring ring planet, close enough to be seen from their planet’s surface, is shown moving through the sky. It should have been made to appear hazy from atmospheric distortion, or something similar, because as is it looks incredibly fake.

Another way that the movie does more with less is with its setting.  The movie smartly keeps its number of locations low. This makes for cheaper set design and production costs but it also makes it easier for the audience to understand the geography of the action.  They leave the ship looking for help. They travel through the canyon and find the abandoned settlement. They leave the settlement to salvage the ship, then must return to the settlement with what they have salvaged.  The camera is also used to amplify the audience’s emotional reaction to the settings, and amplify the difference between the planet during the day and at night. In particular, I noticed how breaking the typical exposure guidelines helped day feel like a scorching otherworldly desert and night feel terrifying and unknowable.  Simple and efficient storytelling.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the film, however, is its character work.  Not that the acting is bad, per se, but there is a lot of wasted potential.  The audience is presented with an ensemble full of potentially interesting characters, only for three of them to get all the attention: the pilot, the lawman, and Riddick.  I didn’t care for Riddick at all, and remain baffled by the number of critics who considered this a “star-turn for Vin Diesel.” In the beginning, he is a kind of dark and mysterious figure.  At times, this is handled somewhat clumsily, but at least there is some fun to be had entertaining the idea that Riddick is actually dangerous and evil, as the lawman says he is, and not an anti-hero in the making.  However, once he comes into the fold as an important member of the team, and graduates to anti-hero status, his dark and mysterious demeanor becomes a kind of total detachment from what is happening that just isn’t believable.  Riddick epitomizes a “too cool for school” attitude that is completely out of place in a horror movie.

The other two characters of the central trio were far more interesting to me.  Radha Mitchell is excellent as the pilot come captain. In many ways she is the character with the most defined arc, and therefore ought to be the emotional and narrative core of the movie.  Unfortunately, while she gets to start the movie as effectively the main character by the end she has been demoted to side kick to make room for Riddick, the badass anti-hero. Similarly, the lawman is a complex and flawed individual who reveals his true self little by little throughout the movie.  I found this aspect of his story compelling in the first half and annoyingly cliche in the second. It is a shame that Pitch Black falls so thoroughly in love with Riddick in the final half of the film that it gives little time for anyone else, other than their direct interactions with the taciturn ex-con, because it robs them of the opportunity to be fully realized characters rather than meaty props.  For example, I kept waiting for Claudia Black, who plays one of the passengers and is an actress I’ve loved in other science fiction properties like Farscape and Stargate SG1, to get a chance to do something cool but alas, that never happened.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the movie, especially from a technical standpoint.  Art from adversity is a phrase I particularly like and is well encapsulated by Pitch Black.  It can be a bit clunky at times, with some awkward directing and acting, and an ending that didn’t work for me, but if you can look past that and just appreciate how expertly the production team was able to cover their weaknesses with clever design it is not a bad time.

Would Recommend: If you are a student of indie filmmaking and a diehard science fiction fan.

Would Not Recommend: If you need the human drama of a story, regardless of genre, to be deep, meaningful, and well acted.