 Pitch Black (2000) "Pitch Black is a non-stop thrill ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat" – raves The Loud Bassoon. "Pitch Black makes Aliens seem like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" – raves the Loud Bassoon. "Pitch Black has it all! It's a jam-packed action thriller that will scare the bejesus out of you!" – raves the Loud Bassoon. "Pitch Black is the first true masterpiece of the 21st Century" – raves the Loud Bassoon.
And so, with my review of Pitch Black, I am inaugurating a bold new style that is based on the shameless encouragement of pull-quotes. Every time I see a movie being advertised with a glowing pull-quote, the quote is invariably from a source I've never heard of, so I thought it would be good to make the Loud Bassoon Film Guide the primary industry source for these extravagantly glowing pull-quotes. What I intend to do is start off each review with an assortment of potential pull-quotes, and hold off the usual degeneration into porn/pedophilia references until later on. That way, studio marketers with short attention spans can get what they need, and fans of the Loud Bassoon's pure irrelevance may also be satisfied. I am confident that this bold new style will last for at least three, four reviews before I get tired of it.
Pitch Black is a highly derivative sci-fi romp, but it's a sneaky one that holds your attention through pure energy and visual panache. It concerns a team of space travelers who crash-land on a distant planet that has three suns - too bad there's about to be a total eclipse. And even more too bad that the planet is home to a species of vicious alien monster birds that only come out when it's dark!!!! Echoes of the Alien series are most obvious, but there's also a little Lost in Space, a little Predator, a little Star Wars and a little Bats for good measure—keep in mind, I have seen only one of the movies I just mentioned. (Bats was terrific!) This is one of those movies where the cast is comprised of entirely different types of people (a heroic man, a feisty woman, a deeply religious Arab, an androgynous youth, an effete antique collector, a scary convict), and you never know who you can trust. The characters are not defined at all, so when they get killed, you don't really care one way or the other—but they generally get killed in cool ways, so it's all good. The plot is contrived, but it's played off effectively, and if you just sit back and enjoy the ride without thinking too much you'll come away having really liked this flick.
The cast is functional at best, with radiant Radha Mitchell clearly stealing the show and viscous Vin Diesel teetering on the brink of laughability with his unrelenting menace. Cacaphonous Cole Hauser plays the is-he-a-good-guy-or-not character with smug indifference, which is exactly how I'm writing this review. I think there are actually two or three characters I've forgotten about. The body count is high and the alien monster birds are pretty cool, even though we've seen this kind of thing a million times before. There are some supremely creepy scenes, nothing that I'd actually call scary, but they're quite effective anyway. The cinematography is by far the best part about the film, with its blanched out texture and shifting color schemes. It lends this film an artiness that prevents it from becoming simply another claustrophobic space thriller. The lack of nudity was distressing, but fortunately I have plenty of porn and pedophilia at home. Whew, glad I put the pull-quotes up front, because it would take some audacity to use that last sentence on a poster. Review by Kevin Lyle |