Film Friday: Pitch Black (2000)

Despite being advertised as a horror movie, Pitch Black is high quality science fiction. It’s also one of my favorite science fiction films. What makes it high quality is both the scope of the world described in this film and the fact it’s a character drama rather than an action flick.

** spoiler alert **

Sadly, most science fiction produced today is little more than action films set in the future. Typically, you have a hero who uncovers a vast conspiracy, who will be chased, and who ultimately must turn from prey to predator to end the movie. The science fiction elements are little more than bells and whistles added to the film to separate it from all the other action films. No effort is made to present the viewer with a realistic glimpse of the world presented and the characters are little more than throw-away pieces meant to hit certain plot points to justify the explosions.

At first glance, Pitch Black falls into this all-too-familiar pattern. Pitch Black is the story of a group of passengers stranded on a desolate world when their intergalactic transport ship crashes after passing through the tail of a comet. This planet appears to be a desert with three suns, which bathe the planet in perpetual light. As the survivors look for water, they come across an abandoned research station with a functioning escape craft. They are saved. All they need to do is get power cells from their crashed ship to recharge the escape craft. But within minutes of this discovery, they learn that when the planet’s moons align perfectly, they will block out all three suns, plunging the planet into darkness. When that happens, bloodthirsty light-sensitive creatures will come pouring out of the ground and kill anyone who isn’t standing in light.

Sounds like an action flick, doesn’t it? Well, Pitch Black isn’t really an action flick. What it is, is a character drama taking place in a science fiction setting. Moreover, the universe in which this takes place is richly detailed even though you never see anything but this single planet. Observe.

The real story of Pitch Black is how this group of survivors cope with each other. Among the group, you have a hard-working prospector (Claudia Black), a effete merchant, a Muslim Imam (David Keith) and his two disciples, a young boy named Jack with a secret, the ship’s pilot Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell) posing as the captain after she tried to jettison all the passengers to save herself, a bounty hunter named William Johns posing as a cop, and Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), the baddest human being alive.

With these characters, the story quickly becomes whether they can work together to get off this desolate world before the monsters eat them. More specifically, the story centers around each of them trying to maintain their secrets and struggle against their own flaws, while the entire group worries about what to do about Riddick, who may or may not be planning to kill them or abandon them. The result of all of this, is that Pitch Black gives you a strong story with an intriguing mix of personality conflicts as the characters are forced to trust people they cannot trust in the hopes of saving themselves.

Moreover, to challenge them, they are given the time limit that once the moons align, the world will go dark and the monsters will be free. They are also presented with various mysteries along the way before they can even learn about this challenge. For example, they need to discover the creatures and learn that the planet will go dark. They find these clues within another mystery of what happened to the scientists who set up the abandoned station. Each of these mysteries is done gradually with clues piled up before any solution is reached and makes for a satisfying story against which the character drama plays out.

What’s even more interesting is how rich the universe is that these characters inhabit. At no point does the film leave this planet to show you the rest of the universe, but you get an incredibly layered picture of what the universe is like from these characters. Riddick suggests a rather brutal criminal justice system, with prisons sunk into darkness. Indeed, his eyes have been shined by a surgeon he found just so he can see in the dark. Johns shows us that drug abuse continues to plague the future. He also shows us that bounty hunters continue to exist, meaning law enforcement is very similar to the modern United States. Black tells us that mankind (or womankind) still treks off to the wild looking for riches. The merchant lets us in on the fact that wine and antiques are still valuable. And Keith presents us with the idea that Islam continues in the future, though it’s still only a small portion of humanity, and his version of Islam is nonviolent and more like Buddhism. He was actually traveling to New Mecca and he cannot drink alcohol, even though that’s all they have to drink.

Enough detail is given by these characters, their traits and their words that, by the time the film is over, you truly have enough information that you know what the rest of the universe looks like and acts like. That’s really impressive when you consider that most science fiction films today give you little more than a quick CGI glimpse of a futuristic city and then one or two new technologies to represent “the future.” The audience is never given a sense of what people do for a living, what their religious beliefs are like, what their leisure habits are like or what they value. But each of those things is made clear in Pitch Black. And consequently, the film feels very immersive because it is easy to lose yourself in their world.

This is why people wanted a sequel to Pitch Black, because the world it shows the audience was so rich that people wanted to see more of it. Compare that with films like Green Lantern or Star Trek or Pandorum, where you knew nothing beyond what was on screen and you really couldn’t care less about their universe. It’s too bad that more science fiction films don’t take a lesson from Pitch Black.