"Pitch Black" deserves attention

It's interesting to note that the SF movies that grab the most critical acclaim are often the ones that owe the least to the standards of the genre, while the ones that do tend to get responses that are, at best, mixed.

Nobody is going to say that David Twohy's Pitch Black is an intellectual exercise. It's an action flick, pure and simple. But it's a true science fiction action flick, and that makes all the difference. And it has great aliens.

The plot isn't going to win any awards for originality. Essentially, a space freighter gets hulled by passing meteorites and has to crash-land on a desert planet. The XO, field-promoted to captain when her boss also gets hulled, is about to dump the passengers to save the ship but the navigator/engineer prevents it. So, we have a cast of interesting characters, including an effete art lover whose luggage contains a dozen bottles of expensive brandy, a teenager with an attitude, an imam and his followers on their way to Mecca and a bounty hunter and his captive--an escaped murderer whose eyes have been surgically enhanced so he can see in the dark.

As it turns out, it's the bad guy who's the "hero," because an eclipse blots out the system's three suns--and when it gets dark the aliens come out to play. And they play rough. There is hope--an earlier geological expedition that ran afoul of the local fauna left a shuttle behind. If the castaways can transfer the power cells from their dead vessel to the shuttle, they can get away.

All of this is fairly pedestrian stuff. What makes Pitch Black better than the average is that Twohy and writer Ken Wheat (who based the script on a story idea by his brother, Jim) focus not on the dangerous aliens but on the more dangerous chemistry among the characters. They also make certain those same characters never cross over and become stereotypes. Riddick (Vin Diesel), the stone-cold killer, is much more complex than the average cinematic sociopath, but there is never any question that a sociopath is what he is. Twohy and Wheat set him off against XO Fry (Radha Mitchell), the alleged white-hat of the group, and the comparison is a telling one. Indeed, the fact that the juxtaposition is really between these two characters rather than the standard situation where the criminal and his captor, Johns (Cole Hauser), are held up to show that they are more alike than different is what gives this movie an aspect all too often missing from the genre.

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