Medium: Movie
Runtime: 1hr, 49 Minutes
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Rating: R
I make no secret of my love of horror, and in particular horror monsters. There's just something darkly attractive about pulling back the veil and revisiting those same terrors that used to hold us hostage in our beds every night, leaving us quivering in place under the covers lest that thing reach out from under our beds and grab us- or stare back at us from a cracked closet door, ready to dart out and eat us before we could finish our mad dash to the safety of the hallway.
After graduating high school, I started a yearly tradition wherein I would dedicate the entirety of October to gorging on horror media in the lead-up to Halloween (quite naturally). The first year I did this, I played through the original Silent Hill and watched through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. I was a jumpy wreck by the end of the month, and to this day I maintain that it was the most fabulous October of my life. This year I'll be rocking Alien: Isolation and some classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf-Man (because somehow, I haven't ever managed to see them and that is a crime). For now, though- I still have a list to work through.
Without further ado, here is Pitch Black.
The film starts off with the crew of a cargo vessel having a very bad day, as they are awoken from hypersleep just in time to crash-land on an inhospitable desert planet that's off their course. Among the survivors is the dangerous prisoner Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, who's being transported along with the civilian cargo. As the crew searches for water (and attempts to hunt down Riddick, who mostly spends his first several appearances playing Where's Waldo with the paranoid survivors) they discover a mysteriously abandoned geological site and some bones and you know, maybe this planet isn't as dead as it first appeared.
This is confirmed when a survivor is dragged into a hole, and our crew discovers that the planet is actually teeming with hostile carnivorous creatures that live in the dark. Worse, despite the planet having three suns, the much larger planet next door to is getting ready to plunge it into an eclipse and then it'll be party time for quite literally everything that goes bump in the night.
One thing I must note is that the tone of the movie reminds me a lot of Alien: Resurrection and I don't know how I feel about that. Crew members all seem to suffer from the sort of naivete, assholery, or general bland forgettableness that plagues redshirts. It's not as unabashedly awful as Resurrection, but that may just be because this was the first movie of the series and it didn't have an established universe to touch inappropriately. It also reminds me a lot of Halo: Nightfall, which was, at best, So Okay It's Average and felt more like it wanted to be its own independent property than anything actually related to the Halo franchise. Now that I think of it, I believe that also reminded me of Alien: Resurrection... which either says something about the bland genericness of its ragtag leading cast, or despite being So Bad It's Good it still managed to inspire successors. I'm not sure which I should be more insulted at.
Here's the deal- for his first outing, Riddick stuck to very safe territory. The aliens being weak to light is sort of interesting, but otherwise the whole thing is kind of unremarkable. It feels kind of like a low-budget SciFi Channel movie, but with the added caveat that... it doesn't suck. It's not great, but it's well-acted and did manage to surprise me a couple times. The shots of the desert in full light are kind of neat- some fish-eye action here, some blue or yellow filters there. The scenes where a monster is eyeing someone are reminiscent of Predator without the brain-twisting heatvision purples greens and reds. The CGI is...... er... passable, but the monsters themselves have a cool aesthetic about them that really does feel alien. They are, however, criminally underutilized- we only see two types throughout the movie, and they're both kind of one-trick ponies.
It's a good warmup for my horror-thon, but its biggest problem is that for what is supposed to be a horror film, it's... well, not scary, and that's kind of a huge freaking problem for a horror movie to have. It works fine as a thriller, I guess. We'll call it that. At any rate, it got me kinda curious about the sequels, which I'm going to say is a good sign.
TL;DR: A sci-fi popcorn thriller with cheesy CGI that... feels pretty okay, despite having been done before.
VIRTUES: Interesting desert shots, neat monsters.
SINS: Weak characters, underdeveloped neat monsters.
GRADE: C-
Final Verdict: Yeah, I'll hold on to this one.
Runtime: 1hr, 49 Minutes
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Rating: R
I make no secret of my love of horror, and in particular horror monsters. There's just something darkly attractive about pulling back the veil and revisiting those same terrors that used to hold us hostage in our beds every night, leaving us quivering in place under the covers lest that thing reach out from under our beds and grab us- or stare back at us from a cracked closet door, ready to dart out and eat us before we could finish our mad dash to the safety of the hallway.
After graduating high school, I started a yearly tradition wherein I would dedicate the entirety of October to gorging on horror media in the lead-up to Halloween (quite naturally). The first year I did this, I played through the original Silent Hill and watched through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. I was a jumpy wreck by the end of the month, and to this day I maintain that it was the most fabulous October of my life. This year I'll be rocking Alien: Isolation and some classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf-Man (because somehow, I haven't ever managed to see them and that is a crime). For now, though- I still have a list to work through.
Without further ado, here is Pitch Black.
 |
| This one's shorter. I promise. |
This is confirmed when a survivor is dragged into a hole, and our crew discovers that the planet is actually teeming with hostile carnivorous creatures that live in the dark. Worse, despite the planet having three suns, the much larger planet next door to is getting ready to plunge it into an eclipse and then it'll be party time for quite literally everything that goes bump in the night.
One thing I must note is that the tone of the movie reminds me a lot of Alien: Resurrection and I don't know how I feel about that. Crew members all seem to suffer from the sort of naivete, assholery, or general bland forgettableness that plagues redshirts. It's not as unabashedly awful as Resurrection, but that may just be because this was the first movie of the series and it didn't have an established universe to touch inappropriately. It also reminds me a lot of Halo: Nightfall, which was, at best, So Okay It's Average and felt more like it wanted to be its own independent property than anything actually related to the Halo franchise. Now that I think of it, I believe that also reminded me of Alien: Resurrection... which either says something about the bland genericness of its ragtag leading cast, or despite being So Bad It's Good it still managed to inspire successors. I'm not sure which I should be more insulted at.
Here's the deal- for his first outing, Riddick stuck to very safe territory. The aliens being weak to light is sort of interesting, but otherwise the whole thing is kind of unremarkable. It feels kind of like a low-budget SciFi Channel movie, but with the added caveat that... it doesn't suck. It's not great, but it's well-acted and did manage to surprise me a couple times. The shots of the desert in full light are kind of neat- some fish-eye action here, some blue or yellow filters there. The scenes where a monster is eyeing someone are reminiscent of Predator without the brain-twisting heatvision purples greens and reds. The CGI is...... er... passable, but the monsters themselves have a cool aesthetic about them that really does feel alien. They are, however, criminally underutilized- we only see two types throughout the movie, and they're both kind of one-trick ponies.
It's a good warmup for my horror-thon, but its biggest problem is that for what is supposed to be a horror film, it's... well, not scary, and that's kind of a huge freaking problem for a horror movie to have. It works fine as a thriller, I guess. We'll call it that. At any rate, it got me kinda curious about the sequels, which I'm going to say is a good sign.
TL;DR: A sci-fi popcorn thriller with cheesy CGI that... feels pretty okay, despite having been done before.
VIRTUES: Interesting desert shots, neat monsters.
SINS: Weak characters, underdeveloped neat monsters.
GRADE: C-
Final Verdict: Yeah, I'll hold on to this one.
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