A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Pitch Black

Date Viewed: 2/20/00

Details:

Vin Diesel

Radha Mitchell

Cole Hauser

Director: David Twohy

Score: 0

The Review: Crash-landed and marooned on an unknown planet after being knocked out of cryo-sleep passage by debris from the tail of a non-Solar comet, the remaining crew and passengers encounter a desolate planetscape, and eventually discover that they are not alone. There's a minimal plot: figure out how to get off a dead(ly) planet before joining the previous human explorers in the bone pit at the bottom of an exploratory coring shaft, and figure this out under cover of darkness (so to speak). The survivors include a bad-ass escaped convict (Diesel), his keeper and bounty hunter (Hauser), a few Muslims on an interstellar Hajj, and a few others, all led by the docking pilot and erstwhile captain (an attractive Mitchell).

Pretty good visual effects, especially the night-vision simulations through Diesel's modified eyes; reasonably decent critter design and effects; pretty poor ecological design; but a good driving beat in the soundtrack. As befits a planet in a system with three suns, the lighting is either harsh, oversaturated, high contrast and monochromatic..., or dead darkness.

Shot in the wilds of Queensland, Australia, with a cast of about a dozen, mostly unknown, people -- the film crew probably outnumbered the human cast. Minor grumbles... How convenient for the crew that visited earlier to build and leave behind a working orrey of the native system with digital calibration in Earth years. The ecological system is a bit frayed, with a surfeit of predators and a dearth of prey, and no explanation for the unstable imbalance. And let's not mention why a sleep-ship was on a course so close to a planetary system that it encountered cometary debris.

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