Herald rataing: ****
Cast: Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell, William Johns
Director: David Twohy
Rating: M (violence, offensive language)
Running Time: 108 mins
Opens: Thursday, Village, Hoyts cinemas
Review: Russell Baillie
Unless you count Buzz Lightyear's scenes in Toy Story 2 or the spoof Galaxy Quest, it's been rather a bad time for movie
sci-fi of late. Isaac Asimov got the full Robin Williams treatment in Bicentennial Man and Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars has been anointed the first great turkey of the new millennium.
Thankfully, Pitch Black is just what the genre needs - some real excitement, smart storytelling and inventiveness that isn't beholden to a special-effects budget.
There's something a bit Asimov about this (shades of his story Nightfall) with its tale of the survivors of the crash of a routine space passenger flight finding themselves on an apparently barren planet bathed in perpetual daylight.
Under its three suns, the incompatible bunch soon find they have to deal not only with murderous convict Riddick (a scene-stealing Diesel), but subterranean nasties which fortunately won't come out into the sun-baked surface. Unless there was, oh no, a solar eclipse ...
That approaching blackout really gets the clocks ticking on the repair job, and starts showing the true coIours of the survivors, who include female space pilot Fry (Aussie Mitchell, last seen here in New Zealand telly series The Chosen) who is thrust into group leadership, Riddick's bounty-hunter escort Johns (Cole Hauser), as well as a dressed-for-the desert Muslim cleric and his three sons.
That nobody turns out to be who they seem is half the fun of this. The balance is in its tautly-paced execution, unpredictability and fright-factor. Filmed in South Australia around the desert of Coober Pedy, it's a sci-fi horror that makes a virtue of its less-is-more approach.
It may suffer a little sunstroke in the dialogue and acting, and you don't win any prizes for guess what other alien movie it resembles. But it's a solidly entertaining genre piece.
