The 2000s Movie Project: 'Pitch Black'

The latest entry in the 2000s Movie Project is Pitch Black starring Vin Diesel and Radha Mitchell. This movie gave Diesel the cult movie cred to match the blockbuster cred he earned from Fast and the Furious.Pitch Black is hardcore, dystopian sci-fi with blood, guts, and a body count. Directed by David Twohy, Pitch Black has a very standard, and perfunctory feel in every way except for its star Vin Diesel who gives the film an edge with his tough guy cheeseball persona.

Pitch Black stars Vin Diesel Riddick, a future criminal. We meet Riddick in full Hannibal-Lecter-in-chains get up. Riddick is being transported to a prison planet by a bounty hunter, Cole Hauser, who is set to collect big on Riddick, as one of the most wanted men in the galaxy. On this ship, Riddick is the only passenger not in stasis, he’s awake, something he claims in voiceover is due to his well-honed survival instinct.

The rest of the passengers are awakened when the ship is nearly blown apart in a space storm. Radha Mitchell portrays the ship’s pilot, who becomes the ship’s captain, when the actual captain died in the storm. Mitchell is stopped by another passenger when she attempts to jettison the rest of the passengers to save herself, and another of the ship workers to save herself. This guilt drives the rest of the plot for her.

The ship crashes on a desert planet that appears to be an empty wasteland. Eventually, the survivors, including Hauser and Riddick along with Mitchell, and a cadre of lesser characters, locate a mining outpost that happens to have a workable ship. They will need to traverse the desert planet from the mining outpost back to scavenge pieces from their crashed ship, in order to get the mining ship running.

This shouldn’t be a problem given the planet is barren, and has plenty of light from two suns. However, darkness is approaching, and with it, creatures that only attack in the dark, and they may be the reason why the mining colony was abandoned. For the early portion of the film, we presume that Riddick is the bad guy, and it’s going to be him versus the remaining survivors. What we get instead is some dodgy CGI aliens, and the badass persona of Riddick who looks awesome killing even the dodgiest of the dodgy aliens.

Vin Diesel is exciting and fun to watch as Riddick. His buff physique, and strange cat eyes that allow him to see in the dark, are a figure of mystery and fascination, and when the killing starts, he’s genuinely rousing. As much as I wanted to reject Pitch Black for some predictable plotting, and cannon fodder characters, Diesel kept getting me invested in Pitch Black. When Diesel tells the story of how he can see in the dark, the brief bit of dialogue is every bit of tough guy awesome, reminiscent of classic tough guy scenes in history.

Radha Mitchell is a nice counterpart to Diesel’s badassery. Though it’s more than a little clumsy in introduction, I liked the way that her guilt defined the character. She was ready to kill everyone on the ship to save herself, and her journey will find her repeatedly risking herself trying to save those same people, even, eventually Riddick. I enjoyed the respectful chemistry between Diesel, and Mitchell. Their slowly-evolving mutual respect builds to a surprisingly strong, and affecting ending. I was legit invested in how Pitch Black played out, and the ending had some weight to it for me.

I enjoyed Pitch Black when it arrived in theaters in 2000, and I remain a fan. I like the low budget aesthetic, and I really enjoyed Vin Diesel expanding his star persona into hardcore genre work. Diesel may be a tad limited as an actor, but his limitations are not on display in Pitch Black, which helped launch him into his current place as one of the most uniquely bankable performers on the planet even nearly 20 years later.