Pitch Black

Pitch Black: (2000) Shot in Australia, this flick could be considered an A movie with a budget. Starring a then unknown Vin Diesel, you can see why he has become a rather large star. When I first saw the film, I expected to find a traditional special effects driven chase movie, and to a degree it is but it does manage to pull it off much better than most of the recent and more costly movies of this type. A space freighter runs into the tail of a comet (everyone is in cryo-sleep during the voyage) and the ship starts to take meteor hits. Now if everyone is snoozing, one might ask what happened to those failsafe navigating systems that had to be around to let everyone fall asleep…. but let’s not go there.

As plot would have it (yes by golly a plot) a meteor penetrates the captain’s pod and poof, turns out he had a very small part. I wonder if his agent knew. The rest of the movie deals with the 2nd’s attempts to land the ship, a couple of moral decisions she has to make, and some of the consequences of those decisions. Ole Vin plays a homicidal maniac going back to prison under the ‘care’ of a rent a cop. Over the course of the movie, it often becomes unclear as to whom the good guys really are or if anyone can be trusted or if anyone will survive. The planet they crash on is interesting in that it has three suns and no darkness. The movie changes lighting when a different sun comes up. At first I thought something had gone wrong with my TV! That is nice attention to detail if you ask me and people rarely do. Actions to get off the planet are well on their way when an interesting discovery is made that throws the proverbial monkey wrench (or spanner for you British out there) into their plans.

This movie is really about choices, what route do you take….what methods do you use…..who do you trust? Movies about choices are usually pretty good, and this one is. Naturally as with most of these movies, cast mortality is high. For those interested in obscure actors, Cole Hauser plays the rent a cop and I believe he is the son of B movie psycho veteran Wings Hauser. Ole Wings could really chew up the scenery in his day and put down many bit actors in his movies. Pitch Black is rated R for death by gunshot, death by impalement, death by beak ramming, and death by being dragged off screen to some unknown fate (ugh).