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.

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Film Friday: The Thing (1982) & (2011)

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic in the world of science fiction/horror. It’s tense, it’s creative, and it’s solidly acted. In 2011, they remade The Thing. . . sort of. The remake is an ok film, but doesn’t hold a candle to the original, and it’s the “sort of” which becomes the real problem.

** spoiler alert **

Carpenter’s The Thing is the story of a small group of scientists at an American research station in Antarctica. As the story opens, an Alaskan Malamute rushes into the camp where the Americans are gathered. The dog is being chased by two Norwegians in a helicopter, who are trying to kill the dog. They fail and are killed in the process. After this, helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Doctor Copper (Richard Dysart), fly to the Norwegian camp to learn what happened. Everyone at the Norwegian camp is dead, but MacReady and Copper discover that the Norwegians found what appears to be a spaceship in the ice, and they brought its occupant back to their camp.

MacReady and Copper return home with the alien, where they examine its body and discover that the cells in the dead alien are still alive. Moreover, these cells attack any cells they come into contact with and duplicate them perfectly. Soon it becomes clear that one or more of the Americans has been duplicated by the alien, and the group struggles with not knowing who is human and who is now an alien.

Although the critics hated this film when it was first released and it barely made its money back, this version has withstood the test of time, and for good reason. This version is tense, interesting and eminently rewatchable, and the reason is that the story isn’t about these scientists being chased by a monster, it’s about them turning on each other out of fear. Indeed, the monster is rarely seen in the film and it only exposes itself when it is discovered. It doesn’t run around stalking the other characters. Instead, they fight amongst themselves.

The heart of The Thing is its characters, who are all uniquely written and uniquely acted. Russell play MacReady in the mold of all antiheroes. He’s quiet, detached, and yet highly aggressive when needed. Besides him, you have a group of actors who are easy to tell apart – some are short and fat, some are tall and thin. Two are black, one small and one muscular. You have a hippy/UFO nut, an armchair warrior, a simpleton, an old guy, etc. They all dress very differently. They all wear their hair differently. They speak in unique styles, using unique words and phrases. They have unique personalities.

Indeed, their personalities are key. These people act like people who’ve been cooped up together long enough for personality conflicts to abound. They don’t all like each other, their quirks annoy the others, and they know that not each of them can be trusted in a crisis. All of this causes them to struggle to work together, which is what gives this story it’s true tension: waiting to see if someone is an alien is tense, but not knowing who to trust with the gun to shoot the alien is inspired tension.

And that brings us to the remake. If I’d never seen The Thing before, then this remake would have been a decent if forgettable movie. It’s not stupid or nonsensical. It’s well-enough shot, though it uses the shaky cam for no apparent reason. The story itself doesn’t hold together nearly as well as the original as there are too many “yeah, but” moments, but all in all, this is better than a lot of the indifferent garbage that passes for science fiction horror today.

Still, this film doesn’t hold a candle next to the original, and I think there are two specific and related reasons for this. The first is the cast. Whereas the actors in the original really stand apart, these actors and their characters don’t. There’s the chick (two actually) and the black dude floating around somewhere, but beyond that you’ve got 8-10 middle age white dudes. They are all the same size and shape. They have the same blondish-brown hair, all cut to the same length. They are all unshaven and wear the same clothes. And even worse, they are almost all Norwegians, so they all have nearly identical accents and inflections. You won’t be able to tell these people apart easily, nor will you catch their names.

Moreover, the main characters, Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Dr. Havlorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and Carter (Joel Edgerton) are all outsiders, so this cast lacks the interpersonal relationships which drive the original. We don’t know who has gotten on whose nerves, who they have all recognized as a hothead or useless or as their natural leader, and we see no sense of any friendships. Because of this, this film is little more than a monster chase movie rather than a psychological thriller like the original.

Secondly, the main actors simply don’t compare to the originals. Kurt Russell brings an incredible intensity which tells you that he will make it through the film alive. That gives the film energy as you watch him struggle to overcome the hurdles in his way. It also gives you a shock when the film ends. By comparison, Winstead is a cutie, but you know this little girl would never survive ten seconds of a monster attack. She also never radiates leadership and she doesn’t even seem to know what she’s supposed to do -- she just looks pensive a lot.

Or compare Childs (David Keith), who was Russell’s foil in the original, against helicopter pilot Carter. Keith commands respect with his deep voice and his violent presence. He seems like a man on the edge, torn between wanting to lead and being terrified of this creature. He is tightly wound and ready to explode at any moment. Carter is a wimp who never really does anything, least of all challenges Winstead. The other foil they give Winstead is Dr. Halvorson, but he’s a wimp as well, and he’s snotty about it. He’s the type of whiner who sends sternly worded letters, not lead flying downrange.

So not only does the remake lose the interpersonal struggles which define the characters and make the original so tense to watch, but it gives you characters you can’t care about -- an indifferent girl with no heroic traits, a wimp, a jerk and some Norwegian red-shirts.

And all of this comes from the second failure. What failure? Well, I said above that this film was “sort of” a remake. As you’re watching this film the first time, you’ll notice that it basically tracks the original by and large. That makes it feel like a weak remake. But once the ending credits begin rolling, you are given a glimpse of how the story continues. This includes a new Norwegian arriving by helicopter, finding a survivor and finding a dog, realizing what it is, and chasing the dog in their helicopter. In other words, this is how the original opens and we are now led to believe that the remake is in fact a prequel which tells the story of what happened at the Norwegian camp MacReady and Copper find.

This is a mistake for two reasons. First, this feels like a gimmick since the entire film felt like a generic remake of the original. It feels like something that is tacked on to the end to give the audience something to take home, because the rest of the film had nothing to offer. Secondly, this forced the filmmakers into using the Norwegian camp as the setting, and that led to the problem of these characters being too alike. Then adding the outside Americans as the leaders feels fake, disrupts the personalities (if there are any), and probably seems a little insulting to anyone in Norway who watches this. All in all, this was a truly unwise decision, especially as it had no real payoff.

So I absolutely recommend the original and I think the remake is worth wasting some time on, but the remake ends up being a truly wasted opportunity because it failed to build on what worked so well in the original.

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