Pitch Black (2000)

This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.

I mean this sincerely: I love science fiction from the late 90s/early aughts, especially when it’s kind of bad.

I went in to Pitch Black expecting something with weightless, dimensionless CGI and a story that had never heard of the concept of subtlety, and I got what I was looking for. I also got stock characters and sloppy editing and over-exposed cinematography, the kind of moviemaking that looks like it was shot on digital (it wasn’t) before shooting on digital became industry practice. I miss that kind of science fiction. Pitch Black might look fast and loose and a little ugly, but it’s a mean little movie bursting with personality. I like its attitude. I like that it has a couple of ideas under its chassis, but it doesn't waste its time with hypotheticals or theory. There’s only the impending darkness of the eclipse, and the monsters that dwell there, and its characters’ collective need to just get out now.

I expected to like Riddick as well—the movie wouldn’t have become a series otherwise—but I didn’t expect the reasons why I’d like him. Backstory’s thin on the ground here; all we know is that Riddick is a bad man with a few murders under his belt in the kind of movie that thinks of “criminal” as a vocation without caring to explain what type of crime, let alone the logistics of it all. I wasn’t certain I liked the guy, until I realized that that was kind of the point. Vin Diesel does a lovely job of embodying the character; I realized I liked him when I started to notice the way he moves through the world, fluidly and efficiently. I can’t say the same for the rest of the movie, but I did have a fun time, and really, that’s all that matters here.