Pitch Black (2000)

 Re-evaluated: Pitch Black (2000)

   It's fascinating to look at what a famous actor's first works were before they became the acting and box office powerhouses we know them to be today. Most actors start their film careers as minor, supporting, or lead characters in low-budget horror films. Examples include acclaimed actors such as Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Johnny Depp (A Nightmare on Elm  Street), Tom Hanks (He Knows You're Alone), and Leonardo Dicaprio (Critters 3). However, out of all the horror film debuts of such recognizable and acclaimed actors, Vin Diesel will be the subject of this review. Let's look at the 2000 David Twohy sci-fi action-horror flick that introduced audiences to the mega action star Pitch Black. 

  Vin Diesel is one of the most recognizable action stars of the last two decades, emerging as one of the most bankable stars of the new millennium. He earned boatloads of millions at the box office, appearing in many blockbuster franchises as either a leading man (The Fast and the Furious series) or as part of an ensemble cast (Guardians of the Galaxy films). With a recognizable deep voice and a tenacity to take on any role, whether it be a comedy (The Pacifier) or a drama (Find Me Guilty, Boiler Room, Strays). It's safe to say that Diesel is not stopping to achieve the well-deserved success he had worked for, which is to say that it is hard to believe how it all started for the action star. 

Screenshot from Multi-Facial (1995)

  Vin Diesel, born Mark Vincent on July 18, 1967, had his humble beginnings as an actor at the age of 7, where he began working on the stage thanks in large part to his stepfather, Irving Vincent, a former acting instructor who taught drama in New York City. He adopted the name of "Vin Diesel" after taking a job as a club bouncer and getting into fights, which helped him develop the tough-guy image we associate with other notable action stars of the time. He enrolled in Hunter College to study acting, but he dropped out to pursue a career in the former in Los Angeles. Diesel began his career as a struggling actor who did a wide variety of jobs, one of these jobs was working as a telemarketer selling power tools. Curiously, one of his first notable roles was that of being a promoter of a line of toys called Street Sharks at the 1994 Toy Fair in NYC, where he returned after finding little success in LA. If you are curious, you can find several videos on YouTube that show a leather vest-wearing Vin Diesel advertise the line of toys, most specifically from Entertainment Tonight and TV Days. 

  After he found little success in LA, Diesel's mother gave him a book about producing low-budget films titled Featured Films at Used Car Prices. It motivated him to write, direct, and compose his first directorial effort, Multi-Facial (1995), a semi-autobiographical short film about a multi-racial actor named Mark struggling in the audition phase of his career, along with the emotional struggles that come along with it. Shot for a meager budget of $3,000 over three days, Diesel drove around LA with a trunk full of VHS copies in hopes of finding someone that can help him out with his career. Eventually, his short was accepted for screening at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, a significant triumph for the struggling actor. Two years later, Diesel directed his first feature film Strays (1997), where Steven Spielberg watched the film. He was so impressed by the actor's previous two works that he cast him in his epic WW2 film Saving Private Ryan (1998), which finally provided him with a film role in Hollywood.

Director and screenwriter David Twohy (A Perfect Getaway, Below, The Arrival)

  Diesel followed this success by voicing the titular character in the highly acclaimed box office failure The Iron Giant (1999). It wasn't until 2000 that Diesel had his big break, thanks to screenwriter and director David Twohy. Twohy is a rather interesting figure, as he has a pretty prolific career as a screenwriter. He wrote a rejected screenplay for Alien 3 in 1988, which would have been a standalone sequel that focused on new characters in an orbital prison trying to survive hideous experiments and a new Alien. It makes you wonder what it could have been. Twohy also wrote a handful of films throughout the 90s, most notably the Harrison Ford actioner The Fugitive (1993), which won him a Best Screenplay nomination, as well as cult classics such as Warlock (1989) and Waterworld (1995). 

  Pitch Black was Vin Diesel's first true lead role in big studio production, but it was Twohy's third or fourth directorial effort, depending on different sources. The film's concept came from a script titled Nightfall, which originally featured a female protagonist named Tara Krieg. She was a space outlaw with body enhancements and tribal tattoos. She is also from an interstellar tribe of barbarians. Imam, a significant character in the film, was originally a technology-based Christian named Noah Toth, who came along with no pilgrims. The original draft also didn't feature the eclipse. It instead featured a day and night cycle that lasted two months each, ancient ruins, a distress beacon, warrior ghosts, and a planet named "Hades." Most of the original storyboards of this rough draft of what it would eventually become are available in the bonus features of the Arrow Video Blu-ray release. 

  The script would receive many rewrites by Twohy. He changed the main character from Tara Krieg to an escaped convict named Richard B. Riddick. Twohy also eliminated the concept of space barbarians, ghost warriors, ancient ruins, and the distress beacon. He also changed Noah to a Muslim named Imam and giving him three teen acolytes. The setting shifted to a desert planet orbited by three suns, having an eclipse that lasts a month, giving Johns a morphine addiction and replacing the previously mentioned elements of the script with a human race called Furyans, alien creatures, a geologist settlement, and an emergency shuttle. 

  The film's plot revolves around a group of passengers who survive the crash of their transport ship after it went through a meteor shower. Among the group is Riddick (Vin Diesel), an escaped convict who was previously captured by Johns (Cole Hauser). The group soon finds out that Riddick is the least of their problems, as the planet they are marooned in is closing in on its month-long solar eclipse, which will cause its alien population to emerge from the underground to hunt for sustenance. With no other option, the group has to team up with Riddick to escape the planet.

  The film was made on a modest budget of $23 million ($34.7 million in 2020) and had a cast of relatively unknown actors. These actors were Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill), Keith David (They Live, The Thing), Rhiana Griffith, Lewis Fitz-Gerald, and Chloe Frazer herself Claudia Black. The film was released on February 18, 2000, with the memorable tagline in the poster saying, "Fight Evil With Evil." The film became a surprise hit at the box office, pulling in a respectable $53.2 million ($80.2 million in 2020), introducing moviegoing audiences to future action star Vin Diesel. The film earned mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, who praised Diesel's star-making performance and the film's concept but found fault with the film's familiar feel and derivative nature. 

  The film holds a 59% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 111 reviews, but has a high 77% user score. The consensus reads: 

  "Despite an interesting premise (and a star-making turn from Vin Diesel), Pitch Black is too derivative and formulaic to fully recommend to sci-fi or action fans." 

  Audience reactions towards the film lean towards positive, as I had mentioned, with the film having a very high 7.1/10 on IMDb. It obtained a cult following among sci-fi fans and became a success in the home media market. 

  The film catapulted Vin Diesel into stardom, as he would cement his status as one of the rising action stars of the 2000s by starring in The Fast and the Furious (2001), which kickstarted a brand new action franchise that is still going strong today. With this newly found success, Diesel threw his hat in the ring for another Riddick film in 2004 with The Chronicles of Riddick, which followed up the original 2000 film by introducing a race of intergalactic invaders named "Necromongers" and moving the franchise to the sci-fi action genre. Unfortunately, it failed both critically and financially, with critics lamenting the neutered PG-13 rating, the sudden and abrupt jump to sci-fi action blockbuster territory, and being a disappointing follow-up to the original. 

   However, the video game based on the film, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay received unanimous acclaim from both critics and gamers, who praised the game for being one of the best exclusives for the original Xbox console. Rather than being a shameful cash grab that followed the plot of the movie, the game acted as a prequel to the 2000 film and followed Riddick trying to escape from the titular maximum security prison while also having to fight against inmates, guards, and a host of robotic and biological terrors. The game combined elements from stealth games such as Thief and first-person shooters such as Doom and Half-Life. Escape from Butcher Bay went down as a classic highly revered by fans and critics alike. It's seen today as a standout game in the world of shovelware titles of games based on movies. It's also one of the rare movie-based games better than the actual movie. 

   We wouldn't see another installment on the Riddick film series for almost a decade; there was a remaster of the Xbox game in 2009 which was titled Assault on Dark Athena, released for the Xbox 360 console. Interestingly, there was an OVA in 2004 that served as a side sequel to Chronicles, titled Dark Fury and it was directed by Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung. Much like the Nightfall storyboards, it was included as part of the bonus features in the Arrow Video Blu-ray release. We finally got a sequel in 2013 titled Riddick, which moved away from the big scope of the previous film and instead went for a back-to-basics sci-fi action film and giving it a more appropriate R-rating. The film's plot centers around Riddick once again, who is left for dead on a desert planet and must lure in mercenaries to find a way out of the planet, which is populated by a wide host of creatures, including hostile alien threats called Mud Demons. 

  Riddick was released on September 6, 2013, becoming a sizable hit with audiences, pulling in $98.3 million, plus $23.026 million from home media sales, for a total gross of $121.3 million ($135.4 million in 2020), against a budget of $38 million ($42.3 million in 2020). Although critical reactions towards the film were mixed, it was agreed that the film was an improvement over the previous sequel and that it was an entertaining and bloody action film that would satisfy fans of the original. 

   I remember watching Riddick in theaters when it first came out, it was my birthday, after all, so I was taken to see the film, and I found it to be a pretty good movie, even though I vaguely remembered seeing Chronicles of Riddick, only able to remember bits of the movie when it aired on TV back in 2005. I did see Pitch Black before Riddick's release, back in fifth-grade class, in the form of the 2004 DVD release, which was titled The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black. I revisited the film when it was released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video in 2020, thankfully dropping The Chronicles of Riddick from the title and having a cool "day and night" cover art on the slipcover and reversible sleeve respectively. 

   Going into Pitch Black, I found it to be a very well-made sci-fi horror action flick, with a pretty interesting character at the helm and a star-making turn for Vin Diesel. It didn't feel like a formulaic and derivative horror film by any means, although there have been some issues that I found with the movie, they aren't too detractive from the film, but nevertheless, they're noticeable in the film. The setting of the film takes us to a desert planet, where we meet our cast of survivors, who become stranded on a planet that is known as "M6-117", after their ship, the Hunter Gratzner, which carried a wide array of passengers on their way to "New Mecca". 

                             

                           

  Our cast of survivors consists of Carolyn Fry, mercenary William J. Johns, Sharon "Shazza" Montgomery, Muslim Abu-al Walid "Imam" with his 3 acolytes Hassan, Ali, and Suleiman, antique collector Paris P. Ogilive, prospector John "Zeke" Ezekiel, runaway Jack B. Badd, and convict Richard B. Riddick. This is a pretty interesting cast of characters, the reason for this being that I always heard Chloe Frazer whenever Shazza spoke or how I didn't recognize horror and animation veteran Keith David, who is best known to animation fans for voicing Spawn in Todd McFarlane's animated series, Flame King in Adventure Time, and Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog. These characters are decently written, although most of their backstory comes from the bonus features and having to look up their info sheets in the official wiki. However, some characters, like Imam's three acolytes, are cannon fodder and only serve their purpose to die at the hands of the alien creatures, although, to the director's credit, their deaths are different and amusing and aren't recycled one after the other, and show off the hunting prowess of the predatory aliens that inhabit the planet. 

  

  Speaking of the predatory creatures inhabiting M6-117, Pitch Black features a terrifying alien in the form of the Bioraptor. Designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, these bipedal monstrosities are what inhabit M6-117, living underground and only emerging from the caves when the month-long eclipse engulfs the entire planet in total darkness, hence the title of the movie. These highly aggressive creatures tend to hunt in groups, using echolocation to find any sort of prey, and usually hunt by smell, with their hammerhead-like heads featuring ears connected to the extreme ends, which allows them to hear with excellent precision. Yet, as frightening as these creatures sound, they are pretty vulnerable to any form of light, which makes them easy kills if one uses a flamethrower or has a powerful firearm that can tear through their rather fragile skin, in addition to being capable of limited flight. Nevertheless, these are fairly formidable alien hunters, and ones that really make me say "Thank fuck these creatures don't exist in real life."

   I have to say that David Twohy directs this film with finesse and elegance; I liked the way Mad Max cinematographer David Eggby shot the film, giving some scenes a blueish tint that reminded me of the blue-tinted flashback scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. It gives the desert planet a distinctive feel, with the said planet being orbited by three suns that give it a different shade of color, whether it's an orange-tinted shade or a blue shade in different parts of the film's first act. I also liked how we were placed in the perspective of the Bioraptors and Riddick, both having their own unique eye vision. The creatures have this monochrome tinted vision that lets them see through echolocation, though the monochrome vision comes from their ears rather than any actual eyes, I actually thought they were blind, but they are more likes bats. Riddick on the other hand has eyesight that allows him to see in the dark but makes his eyes vulnerable against sunlight, which is why he wears these aviator-like sun goggles to protect them. This ability is referred to in the film as "eye shine", which is a trait that is inherited by alpha male Furyans at some point in their lives, which allows them to see in this "ultraviolet" shade, something similar to cats, as the eyes tend to shine in the darkness. 

  I found the script to be very smart and intelligent, rife with dialogue that I never once felt was cheesy, bad, poorly delivered, or just plain redundant. There were even instances of well-executed moments of humor, even if they wouldn't fit in a horror film like this, they are brief and don't distract away from the overall film. Some of my favorite lines of dialogue in the film are one too many to count, but I managed to find a handful that stood out to me. 

1) Riddick: 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.       

2) Johns: How's it look?

    Riddick: Looks clear.

[John steps forward, and a creature flies out towards them. They duck and it flies into the night]

    Johns: You said it was clear!

    Riddick: I said it looked clear. 

    Johns: Well, how does it look now?

    Riddick: Looks clear. 

3) Imam: Where's Johns?        

    Riddick: Which half?      

4) [Riddick slits a raptor's throat, then snaps its neck]

    Riddick: Did not know who he was fuckin' with. 

5) Jack: [after Riddick comes back] Never had a doubt! 

    Riddick: Anyone not ready for this?

    Imam: There is my God, Mr. Riddick!

 

   I liked how the script didn't succumb to the typical action movie clichés; the main character didn't do dozens of unbelievable feats of strength or be shown off as an unstoppable killer or even spew dozens of cheesy one-liners. Riddick was an overall great character, brought to life by an excellent performance from Vin Diesel, who really sells the cold, menacing, highly adaptive Furyan who knows how to put up a fight and survive dire situations. As the film progresses, we see that Riddick isn't the villain he was made up to be, he is more of an antihero, someone who kills to survive and not out of sheer psychopathy, not being afraid to kill those who threaten his life or his freedom; he is a perfect example of chaotic neutrality in a protagonist. Yet, despite his menacing and threatening look, Riddick does have some empathy for others, notably Jack, who he saves from being dog chow for a Bioraptor, or when he becomes disgusted by Johns' suggestion to use Jack as bait when it's discovered that Jack is a girl. 

  What I liked about the film was how Riddick wasn't the awful convict and murderer he was made out to be; Johns, who we initially believe to be this goody-two-shoes cop turns out to be a merc with a morphine addiction who is willing to use a kid as bait to save himself, something that profoundly disgusts Riddick, who even being a convict and remorseless killer, wouldn't stoop to that low level of cowardice. Carolyn Fry, one of the pilots of the ship, considered ejecting the whole passenger bay from the ship to save herself, even if it meant killing everyone in their sleep. Yet, as the film progresses, Carolyn changes her tune, willing to ensure the survival of the remaining passengers, even if it means that she would die saving them, this is a sacrifice she is willing to make. This change in character is further reinforced when Carolyn goes to the skiff and tackles Riddick into the ground, telling him that she will go back for Imam and Jack. This, in turn, causes Riddick to ask Carolyn if she would die for them, to which she replies yes, a response that Riddick himself deems to be "interesting". 

  There have been many films that have tried and failed to go for a blend of action and horror, but only a few have succeeded in blending scares with thrilling action sequences (Aliens, 28 Days Later). Pitch Black succeeds in being both an action film and a horror film, giving us an even balance of unnerving scares and brief yet thrilling action sequences. I never found the film to be too derivative from other great sci-fi horror films; it has enough characteristics to stand on its own, even packing a devastating gut-punch of a surprise at the end of the film, something that should be seen and not spoiled by yours truly. 

   Pitch Black did for Vin Diesel what The Terminator did for Arnold Schwarzenegger; introducing audiences to strong action stars that would dominate both the screens and the box office. The film gives us compelling main characters and a breakthrough performance from Vin Diesel, with whip-smart direction from David Twohy, who puts a top-notch spin on the creature-feature genre with a rare film that successfully blends intense action with nerve-racking horror, as well as using the dark to its full terrifying potential. 

No copyright infringement is intended with the use of these images. All images belong to their respective authors, images used belong to the films. Information obtained from Britannica.com/biography, IMDb, Pitch Black (2000), Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office Mojo, and usinflationcalculator.com.