Flashback Friday

Flashback Friday

Morning everybody- this is my first attempt at what come become a regular feature. I want this to become a regular piece – but need some feedback whether you think it should. If you want a particular movie reviewed – drop me a line,leave a comment or hit me up!

(smoke signals are a no no however)

Anyway onto the Flashback

Pitch Black

OK first let’s get a confession out of the way; I like Vin Diesel. Now I am not going to go and argue he is the next Daniel Day-Lewis or Anthony Hopkins but he has a certain muscular charisma when he is on-screen. He possess a certain dangerous attitude when he acts, a certain devil-may-care arrogance that boosts his overall mediocre acting. He is in the primal sense an Alpha Male. This muscularity falls way when he is forced to move outside his comfort zone or interact with other actors. Not bad for a guy with a Dungeons and Dragons tattoo on his chest.

So the perfect role for Mr Diesel is a quiet, tough, loner who possesses some sort of dangerous abilities that set him apart from the average human.

Hence why he is perfect for the role of Riddick.

Danger shipmates – spoiler filled waters ahead

The title of the film gives it away. Pitch Black takes place on a lonely planet in the middle of deep space and it is very,very dark. The ship carrying all our characters crashes due to space debris and they begin to decide to how to get off the planet and back to civilization. This rather common plot is complicated for the better by the additions of Riddick, a former criminal who inspires fear in all of the characters, but particularly William Johns (Cole Hauser) and a looming threat that soon reveals itself to be a species of man eating aliens that thrives in the dark. The tension is heightened when the crew realize the planet, which has so far seemed more like a desert than anything else, experiences a prolonged period of pitch black night every 22 years. After the set up, the third act devolves into a standard chase scene with the characters sprinting for their spaceship and generally failing.

This is my favourite type of Sci-Fi, what I call the ‘Low Sci-Fi’ sub genre. To give you a quick run through of what this entails, Low Sci-Fi is the run down everyday science fiction (compared to the ‘high Sci-Fi’ of something like Star Trek. So this entails no lightsabers, blasters or super powered beings and requires a more ‘realistic’ take on what the future could be like. The Sci-fi abilities such as Riddick’s night vision are not presented as a give from above or some divine intervention, they are “surgical shine job” that he got in the slammer. The spaceships are more like long haul trucks than sleek interstitial vessels. As a rule, think Aliens over Star Trek (however Galaxy Quest is dope.)

Anyway, lets start with the central performance.

Diesel is the man who drives this movie. As mentioned above, the character plays directly into his skill set. Diesel’s deep growl of a voice gives him the authority that is needed in a survival situation, he is totally believable as the leader of the crash victims. His ‘superpower’ is suitably cool to raise him above the ‘rough and tough’ hero cliché and his prison past (and the fear it inspires) causes him to interact with the characters differently to your average B-movie hero. He looks the part, acts the part and this is to date his ‘best performance.’ Honestly, the man needs more work – he could do far better than the stuff he is doing now ( this writer is hopeful for the upcoming sequel soon to be released )

The director David Twohy also play around with the use of light and background colour (in a similar way to Jet Li’s Hero). The first third of the time the characters spend on the planet is in intense, reddish sunlight so bright it almost burns the viewers retinas clean away. This red light alternates with the blue of a second sun and both eventually give way to a the darkness of the final act.

The use of Riddick also ties into the use of lighting. The darker the film gets, the more prominent he becomes. He does not feature much in the ‘red phase’, becomes more apparent in the ‘blue phase’ , returns to quiet brooding when the red sun returns and by the ‘night phase’ he is clearly the main character. One highlight is the fight between Johns and Riddick set to the background of some green flares, again using the darkness as a backdrop to produce some decent cinematography.

The CGI is pretty good (considering the $23 million dollar budget) and does a good job of creating an interesting menace of man-eating aliens of varying sizes from bat like hunters to huge creatures the size of cars (apparently, according to the Riddick wiki they are adults and juveniles.) The pitch black setting allows the director to stretch his budget to the limit, as only five or six creatures are needed on-screen at one time, aside from the big set piece when they emerge from their giant burrow.

The negatives the end. While I did not want Imam to die (the others not such much), Riddick’s change of heart is totally out of character. To me it feels like a change made in a rewrite. The tag line for the film is ‘fight evil with evil.’ So lets see some evil! Riddick should have hopped in that spaceship and blasted off. However, to satisfy the studio I suspect the change was implemented to give a Hollywood ending. While this change is irritating, it is not as irritating as the ending in something like Source Code which practically ruined the whole film for me.

Of course the film is pretty much the standard survival horror, just with an interesting setting and better characters. Remove Riddick from the movie and you have a pretty boring, pretty average slasher flick set in space. Diesel really does carry the movie on his two, rather muscular, shoulders. Every other character (one exception is Keith David who excels as the religious Imam who struggles with the loss of his young charges – the scene where him and Riddick discuss God is perhaps the most touching moment in the movie) is pretty much a template cut out. The tough captain, the corrupt guard, the scared youngster (with a really botched twist) all are easily replaceable and forgettable. They are not especially bad, they just are not particularly memorable.

Watching this in daylight also lowers the atmosphere of the film. The film relies so much on its ability to generate the fear of the dark that you need to experience a similar level of darkness to understand what the characters are going through. Nyctophobia (fear of the dark) is fairly common amongst people and probably dates back to the days we were hunted by nocturnal predators. The film makers could have preyed on this more, by making the scenes of absolute dark more prevalent but this is a minor quibble.

Overall this is a movie worth checking out. The cinematography is nice, the setting unique and the main character is well worth a watch. The creatures a suitably weird and threatening and there is the odd jumpy moment or snigger to be had.

The Triple M score?

65%

Well worth a watch – particularly for Vin Diesel in his breakthrough performance.

I own nothing of the images,links and quotes I have used. I make no money of this so cannot afford a lawyer, so major mega companies please don’t sue- Thanks! Also shoutout out to the Riddick wiki site (http://riddick.wikia.com/wiki/Riddick_Wiki) for all their sweet juicy brain juice knowledge.