Once upon a time, before all games had graphic interfaces, there was a text adventure called Zork. If you were traveling underground without a lit lantern or torch, the computer would tell you "You are likely to fall into a pit or be eaten by a grue." And 3-4 steps later, if you hadn't found a light source, you would get eaten by a grue (or fall to your death). I was eaten by many grues through the course of adventuring. You were never provided with a description of a grue. You just knew they were nasty and lived in the dark.
Pitch Black is about a bunch of people who crash-land on a planet -- not just any planet, but a planet in a system with 3 suns. The surface appears to be lifeless but every 22 years, all 3 of the suns are eclipsed by the surrounding planets then thousands and thousands of grues emerge from underground. Normally, they munch on each other. Now they have munchable vitamin supplements in the form of our castaways. Gilligan would have been the first to go had he been on that planet. After all, who found every cave and pit on that island by accident? But I digress.
This movie was actually entertaining. It's actually not bad enough to be considered a bad movie, and it's not good enough to be called a good movie but it does a lot of nice things that are worth mentioning here:
1. Great visuals! Finally, we see a planet where the sunlight is not Earth yellow! You can see the almost washed-out appearance of the characters in the trailers. I liked this approach a lot, although I wondered about the whole sunburn thing. The scenes that take place in the dark are also very cool and there's some nice action scenes that are shown in clips and hints that you have to infer. My favorite visual is the planet that eclipses the sun.
2. No stupid, pseudo-scientific expositions. A stupid, pseudo-scientific exposition occurs when something marginally, scientifically explainable happens that all the characters understand except for one bonehead who always asks what's going on so that the less-informed audience members will understand. This was the only purpose of Wendy and Marvin in the 70's Superfriends series. Whenever there was pseudo-science to be done or polarity to be reversed (reversing polarity was the deus ex machina of every science fiction and action show from the 50's to the 80's), those two would be right there asking why. Often though, the writers underestimate the knowledge of their viewing audience, making those expositions more insulting than informative, and more irritating than entertaining. A lot of stuff happens in Pitch Black that is either left up to the audience to figure out or that the characters themselves don't know and no attempt is made to clarify it. One great example is the ecology. Science buffs may have some fun trying to construct and deconstruct the ecology of this planet. This movie's lack of stupid expositions gets high marks in my book.
3. Medium to low amounts of stupidity. To me, a good horror movie has characters dying in spite of their best efforts, not because of their worst. Because the good screenplay writers mostly tend to shy away from horror, you have movies advertised as horror-filled where you spend half the time, not shivering in your seat but yelling at the screen, hopelessly trying to offer common sense advice to the stupid characters -- stuff like "Don't split up!" and "Don't go into that room with the blood oozing from under the door. What are you? An idiot?" This only happened a couple times in this movie and even then, given the character's personality and the situation, their deaths were almost relatively understandable -- still stupid and senseless, but marginally forgivable. The rest of the dying made sense and was done fairly well.
4. The plot didn't get in the way. Many genre screenplays seem to forget that the purpose of the genre is to provide structure for the characters and the plot. Thus, most of them never really grow past their initial gimmick. This could have been a bad movie about characters that get munched in the dark. That's what the title implied. In fact, if this thought were carried through to its ultimate conclusion, the last hour could have been a black screen, an ominous soundtrack, and lots of screaming and dying (which I would have enjoyed watching but that's just me. Think of the savings on production costs!). Fortunately, there was an okay plot and some interesting characterizations. And the dialog didn't suck.
All in all, I recommend this movie as a not-bad time and worth seeing for the above reasons. This isn't a science fiction movie deep in characters or premise, like Gattaca, or with stunning action sequences, like The Matrix, but, on the other hand, it probably couldn't reach those levels given the starting premise. Pitch Black does very well with what it has to work with: a random group of people, lost in the dark, trying to get off of a planet full of hungry, ravenous grues.
Our Drive-In Totals
1 gratuitous butt shot
1 gratuitous cleavage shot
A needle in the eye
1 stand-alone foot
2 dis- and re-location scenes
3 dismemberment scenes
3 Deaths By Stupidity
1 Lemming Death
The longest planetary skid mark since Star Trek: Generations
Great grues!! Gigantic, galumphing, garroulous, ghastly, ghoulish
gangs of gruesome, gobbling grues.
Kung Fu
Gun Fu
Knife Fu
Claw Fu
Fang Fu
Fire Fu
Light Fu
Meteorite Fu
Grue Fu (or Kung Grue. J.D. pointed out that the ecology was
slightly in-Kung-Grue-ous.)
Good Movie Scale: 7 out of 10 (Good enough to be watchable)
Bad Movie Scale: 6 out of 10 (Not bad enough to be amusing for being
bad)
