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Sometimes originality is an overrated commodity in a genre film, and they don't come much more genre rooted than this energetic, midly exciting effort from ace screenwriter David Twohy ("The Fugitive", "Terminal Velocity" and "Waterworld").
Set in the future on a world lit by twin suns, it follows the struggle for survival of a group of travellers who have crash landed there. They should be okay, after all with two suns the light never dies and the heat is ever present. But for a dual solar eclipse plunges the planet into darkness, and this inky black night brings with it some decidedly unfriendly creatures, who are keen to feast upon the hapless smorgasbord of human life before them.
There is precious little comfort within this disparate group who have little in common except their bad luck in the solar eclipse department. Needless to say there is much jockeying for power between de facto flight commander, a trigger happy lawman, and an enigmatic, potentially lethal prisoner being transported on the ship to begin a new sentence.
The sentences uttered by a less than stellar cast are anything but original, but Twohy's keen observance of basic storytelling conventions, the slow build-up in tension and the larger than life performance of "Saving Private Ryan" star Diesel add up to a film that exceeds the sum of its various parts.
If at times it is reminiscent of "Alien", "Mad Max" or of countless hilarious straight-faced science fiction B-movies, "Pitch Black" takes itself as seriously as it needs to and embraces every clichΓ© it comes across like an old friend. On that level at least it is refreshingly unencumbered by any sub-textual 'meaning' or sense of self-importance. It is an entertainment and quite a good one too.
