Pitch Black (2000)
	Rating: 7.1/10 (177,171 votes) Director: David Twohy Writer: Jim Wheat (story), Ken Wheat (story), Jim Wheat (screenplay), Ken Wheat (screenplay), David Twohy (screenplay) Stars: Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, Keith David Runtime: 109 min Rated: R Genre: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi Released: 18 Feb 2000
Plot: A commercial transport ship and its crew are marooned on a planet full of bloodthirsty creatures that only come out to feast at night. But then, they learn that a month-long eclipse is about to occur.

The first ‘Riddick’ adventure is my favourite of the trilogy and one of those movies I can re-watch over and over again. It’s was shot with a relatively small budget, and the plot is simple: a space transport crashes on a desert planet, leaving only a handful of survivors who quickly discover that an eternal night is about to set in – and that there’s evil lurking in the dark. What follows is a tense race to reach a shuttle to get them to safety, complicated by the tensions in the disparate group.

Riddick is a convicted felon, a murderer – and a total bad-ass with freaky eyes that allow him to see at night, making him indispensable. His jailor is called Johns, seemingly a cop but actually another person with secrets – just like Carolyn Fry, the ship’s pilot who the survivors look to for guidance.

Here I have to say that I’m a total Carolyn fangirl. There aren’t enough sci-fi movies with female leads, and she’s awesome. Unlike Riddick she’s no BAMF – she’s thoroughly and entirely human. She’s scared, terrified out of her mind, which leads her to almost make a mistake that consequently haunts her through the rest of the movie and informs her decisions, her insistence on saving the other people. (The survivors are more broadly drawn, with just enough detail to make us care for them and their fate, most notably young Jack, but also Imam and Claudia Black’s Shazza.) And, on a more shallow note, she has amazing chemistry with Riddick. Read into that what you will. *g*

Overall Pitch Black could be just another sci-fi adventure, well plotted and fast-paced, but with every re-watch you see more details, more layers in the characterisations. It’s easy for me to see why this gained such a cult following and resulted in two more ‘Riddick’ movies (owing more than a little to Vin Diesel’s infectious enthusiasm) – but I have one complaint about these: there’s no Carolyn in them. She brings out the humanity in him, and because he’s much too cool to show fear it’s through her that we experience the horror of the monsters hiding in the dark.

It goes to show once again that you don’t need several million dollar budgets to shoot a movie – the locations in Coober Pedy, Australia, are effectively turned into a far-off planet with the use of camera filters and some fake dinosaur bones, and the digital aliens are mostly half-seen glimpses in the night (unless we see through Riddick’s enhanced eyes, an effect sparingly used). This only serves to make then scarier. After all, who hasn’t stood in a dark basement and suddenly felt sure that there was something lurking in the dark?