Vincent Diesel-Engine.

I love Pitch Black, so watching it for the tenth time instead of watching newer movies I’ve never seen was an easy ask. Especially after watching the crap that was The Cigarette. Sometimes daddy just needs his reliable films, ya dig?

Pitch Black could easily be called Vin Diesel Is Also Here and the title would be just as descriptive of the film. Directed by David Twohy and written by the Wheat brothers Ken and Jim, Pitch Black is the first movie to kick off everyone’s favorite anti-hero Richard B. Riddick. As in Richard B. having a ridiculous ass name. You can tell why everyone just calls him Riddick, because having characters refer to Diesel’s Riddick as Richard would just be gross in an uncomfortable way.

Vin Diesel for his part loves the Riddick character and has stuck with it despite the films not having a great track record of success. Pitch Black takes us to the future on board the ship Hunter-Gratzner that is carrying a great cast of actors. Following an incident where a bunch of meteors attempt to get Vin Diesel’s autograph and end up crashing the ship on a deserted planet, the crew fights for their life against the hostile alien species native to the lands and tries to find a safe way off.

Among the crew is Carolyn Fry played by Radha Mitchell who you may recognize from her lead role in the Silent Hill movie. Also on board is William Johns (Cole Hauser), the asshole of the film who has captured and is transporting Riddick to a prison he’ll eventually get to anyway. Johns loves capturing Riddick almost as much as he loves injecting morphine directly into his eyeballs, and let me tell you he loves that a lot.

And we get a young Keith David as Abu “Imam” al-Walid, a leader of a group of Muslims traveling to New Mecca and these are the things I love about sci-fi. If you’ve read my other reviews, I really enjoy science fiction that only imparts some small bits of information onto the viewer without explaining everything about the world. Keep the imagination oiled up. New Mecca does get more exposure in Chronicles of Riddick, but overall its existence is just another part of the world that everyone is already aware of and has no reason to ask about or explain. Why is it called New Mecca? How did it get created? When did it become the holy land? It’s all up for speculation.

But Pitch Black is great because it completely fakes out the audience. The first part of the film teases us with the idea that this is going to be a slasher movie. Riddick escapes his chains and will hunt down the other characters one by one out of revenge. Only he doesn’t, and the characters start getting killed off by the wildlife instead. As Riddick says, “all you people are so scared of me. Most days I’d take that as a compliment. But it ain’t me you gotta worry about now.”

I wonder if the eye shine bit was supposed to be canon but was retconned or if it was meant to be that way at the time. The earlier Riddick stuff does seem to imply that Riddick getting his eye shine surgery at prison in exchange for 20 Menthol Kools was supposed to be canon. And then in Chronicles of Riddick they change it because now Riddick is Furyan instead of just a human. And it works both ways. It’s reasonable to assume Riddick would just flat out lie to the people he doesn’t respect on why his eyes are how they are.

One area where Pitch Black really sets itself apart is the lighting. To showcase the multiple suns and also to make the world more alien and foreboding, they threw on a ton of filters and lighting changes. The lighting changes over the course of the movie as the suns change position in the sky, and while it is disorienting it’s also a great effect. It makes Pitch Black unique. Kinda like Sin City where you look at a screenshot and immediately identify the film.

And of course the character writing is top notch. I love how the film throws everything on its head by taking the characters from the start and completely rewriting them by the end. With only an hour and 47 minutes pretty much all the characters go through their own arcs and change over the course of the movie. Riddick for instance starting off as the murderer criminal and ending up being a hero of sorts. I’ll let you figure out the rest.

Anyway, Pitch Black is a great movie and my legs are now pudding because I spent the entire film walking on a treadmill.

Rating: A