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PITCH BLACK Director's CutIntroducing . . . "Richard B. Riddick, convicted felon, murderer." (2000) Writer/Director David Twohy
"Fight Evil with Evil."
Lost In Space
The ship resembles a freight train with cars linked together. On the nose of the craft, the communication antennas break off in the heat of entering the planet's atmosphere at great speed. The rear of the spacecraft has four things that look like engines, but which also serve as rudders when extended. When one breaks off, the ship begins to spiral out of control. Fry deploys the upper air brakes and is able to stop the spiraling, but the lower air brakes jam, and the nose of the ship still won't come down. The ship's guidance system voice (the Director's voice) recommends Fry purge ballast in the rear to try get the nose down. She begins to jettison segments from back to front starting with the engines and 3 remaining rudders. Next she jettisons what looks like storage tanks, and then all that's left is just cargo and passengers in the one remaining compartment that is separate from the helm. The nose of the ship still won't come down, so Fry is ready to jettison the passengers. She seals the air lock between the helm and the cargo/passenger area, and grabs the handle that will purge them. Owens realizes what she is about to do and tries to stop her from doing this by screaming "Don't you touch that handle, Fry!" She pauses. With quick thinking, he manually jams the air lock between the two compartments to prevent her from being able to release it, should she try anyway. Meanwhile, Fry has thought things over for a few seconds, and decides, screaming: "I'm not gonna die for them!" and yanks on the handle. Nothing happens. Thanks to Owens, the passengers are still alive. He tells Fry she still has 70 seconds to level the craft out. Fry's only option now is to keep trying to get the lower air brakes (flaps) down, which she finally does by stomping hard on the handle. Fry's willingness to jettison the passengers sets up her character arc and the main plot point of the movie. The ship levels off, and either she manages to crash land
it, or it
lands, luckily, on its own. All we see her do, besides be
terrified,
is cover her face when the windshield breaks. They don't show
her hands until she covers her face, so you don't know if
she trying to steer, although you could assume either that, or that
the ship was just on the right trajectory to slide to a stop.
"We're
All On The Same Hajj Now" Fry's feelings of guilt over Owens dying, plus the misplaced gratitude of the passengers, starts her on the path (her hajj) of redemption in trying to be worthy of their gratitude.
"Danger, Will Robinson1!" Vin Diesel was fairly new to acting and in my opinion this film made him and he 'made' the film. Guys don't give him enough credit; but women love him. This movie needed a Bad Ass and he delivered. After surviving the crash, the passengers feel lucky to be alive, but how lucky is it to be alive on a planet with no visible life (no food, maybe no water) and no way of getting off? This certainly is a who-dies-next movie, and I loved the guessing game. They do too good a job of making us scared of Riddick. Or maybe Vin Diesel does that. Or both. Riddick escapes from his holding cell after the crash, and hides in the interior of the wreckage. Still blindfolded and shackled, he nonetheless manages to set a trap for the Bounty Hunter Johns. He takes Johns' gun as bait and puts in a certain spot on the floor below where he is 'stuck' hanging from some cables, so he can use his foot chain to strangle Johns. But when the cables supporting Riddick break and he drops to the floor, Johns is saved. Johns tells Riddick "Somebody's gonna get hurt one of these days; it ain't gonna be me." So you know, it is gonna be him. It's just a question of when. Thus begins the cat-and-mouse game between Riddick and Johns.
The
Grateful Dead Fry judges Johns for his lack of empathy because she feels guilty. Johns, on the other hand, is more lucky than capable, and a conniving, cold-hearted addict. He hides behind his badge, gun, and drug habit. When the chips are down, he tries to use Riddick to kill for him. (All the while you know Johns doesn't mean a word he says, and will not keep any promises to Riddick once Riddick does his dirty work.) [This life-sized ship from the movie is on display in Coober Pedy, 9 hours north of Adelaide, Australia.]
Fresh Meat
Riddick the murderer is now loose on the
planet, but is mainly exploring and staying out of the way, and
you don't know what to expect from him, except what you get told
by Johns. It gets creepier when you realize that when the
survivors try to bury the dead, the are
serving 'fresh meat' to the as-yet-undiscovered underground
monsters. Zeke is the one digging the graves and the noise and
vibrations
attracts underground attention. He is also watching out for Shazza
(his wife) who is back at the crash site, and in trying to protect her,
he shoots an innocent survivor who turns up. Zeke thinks the new survivor is Riddick
(everyone thought there were no more survivors) trying to
attack Shazza and Jack (the young boy who turns out to be
a girl). The
audience and the passengers are terrified of Riddick who really
hasn't done anything yet besides observe and hide (if you don't
count trying to kill Johns). What Riddick was doing at the moment
Zeke shoots the survivor is sitting in antiquities dealer Paris P. Ogilvie's perch.
Classic!
Here There Be Monsters Shazza is terrified of Riddick who is crouched above the entrance to the bloody hole holding a knife—but the knife is not bloody. When Shazza appears, Riddick runs away, and Shazza wrongly assumes he killed Zeke. Johns, having heard the shots, is waiting for Riddick and trips him as he runs by. Then he pulls off Riddick's goggles. Riddick's special purple-tinted "shine job" vision and the way he's writhing and letting himself get hit makes you think it must be very painful for him to have to see without the goggles. You wonder too what kind of place he came from that it was so dark that he altered his eyes to survive. As dangerous as he seems, he really hasn't done anything while he was on the loose. They tie him up, assuming he killed Zeke, and Carolyn comes to speak to him about it. This shows great courage and it seems she trusts Riddick. Something no one else is willing to do. Riddick says she should look deeper into the hole Zeke disappeared into. Johns ask if she's trying to prove something and tells her "Being balls-y with your life doesn't change what came before" but he's wrong. It may not change it for the passengers and crew who are dead, but it does change how Carolyn feels about what she did, and that is her hajj. She goes into the hole to investigate with a rope tied around her waist. She finds a lot of blood and Zeke's severed foot still in the boot. This is our first glimpse of the creatures and it's scary. The moment when she realizes there really are dangerous creatures down there, she starts to climb the hell out through the nearest opening. The things start pulling on her rope and it's a struggle for her to climb and not be pulled back. She starts screaming for help. Riddick can hear this and starts banging his restraints. You feel like he is trying to attract attention away from her, to distract the creatures. It's a protest, almost. (It was Vin Diesel's idea to do this and it goes a long way to humanizing Riddick and making him appear sympathetic, even heroic, to try to help even when tethered. What if the creatures stopped trying to get Carolyn and came toward the noise Riddick was making went through my mind.) The look of terror and helplessness on Carolyn's face is really something as she is struck dumb with fear. They do find her in time and get her out, only to have her get yanked backwards again. Finally, they are able to cut the rope and she is freed—Now they know: it wasn't Riddick.
Fry and Riddick have a talk about the
creatures.
Riddick tells
Fry about Johns' addiction to painkillers and the fact that Johns
is
a reward-driven bounty hunter and not a cop (which Fry assumed
and Johns did not correct her on—omitting the truth is the same
as lying). Johns tells Fry that
his painkillers are for a wound he says was caused by Riddick that should
have taken his life. In Fry's eyes, however, this does not
mitigate the fact that Johns let Owens the Navigator die a painful death when he
could have shared some of his painkillers with him. Fry
seems eager to give Riddick the benefit of the doubt from the
start. The other passengers do not. Only when
Johns re-captures Riddick after his second escape and they find out he is not responsible
for the death of Zeke, do they realize their predicament and
want Riddick's help. That we're-all-in-this-together moment
begins the who-dies-next-horror-movie aspect of this film.
This is a still a Monster movie, and neither Fry, nor Johns, nor
Riddick is the real monster; it's the creatures.
Ticket
to Ride
As the colonists go back to camp and get the fuel cells and test the drop ship, darkness descends all too suddenly. They are forced to abandon the trek back and Shaza is killed by the creatures as they all come above ground now that the suns are gone. The two suns and no moon is wicked cool, like Tatooine. Even cooler that they are different colors.
A Question of Faith cave to leaving them behind)
"7 Stones to Keep The Devil At Bay"
When Riddick tries to get her to take off with him, the old Fry weeps and the new Fry takes a stand. Now, finally, she is willing to die for them. How do you not admire courage like that? It gets Riddick to go back with her for Jack and Imam.
THE CHRONICLES The movie is visually interesting. The landscape is desolate enough to be believable as the surface of another planet, but as good as the image of the three suns is, the smoking ruins of the crash are bad. That's my one tiny 'didn't-work-for-me' element, and I mention it only because it broke my escapist illusion and took me out of the movie for a moment. The TOTALLY awesome script brought me right back in. Carolyn hears Riddick scream and goes back for him. He's wounded in the leg. She helps him up, he falls and she screams at him to get up. It seems like he was about to lose consciousness. They stagger together until one of the creatures spears her. They cling to each other for a second before the creature flies away with her. Riddick screams after her. Not for me. Not for me! And he rejoins the human race. Tell them Riddick's dead. He died somewhere on that planet. He died and was reborn in Fry's arms.
________________________________________________________________________ 1 "Danger, Will Robinson!"
2 GLASS HOUSES The one
thing that I couldn't figure out about the establishing scene was why
the spacecraft is moving as slowly as it appears to be if it's
on a voyage so long they have to put the passengers in cryosleep?
Wouldn't it be going as fast as it could to shorten a long
voyage? The comet doesn't appear to be moving quickly either, so
what gave the rocks the velocity to pierce the hull? Why didn't
they just bounce off "plink". It's got to
be one or the other, either the ship is moving really fast or
the rocks are, or both, but it appears to be neither. It might
have created some tension and sense of impending danger if they
showed the comet whiz by just missing crashing into the ship and
triggering the proximity alerts, and then the expectation of the
flying shower of rocks would have seemed dangerous as they meet
with the hard surface of the ship—Add the ship speeding into
the path of rocks head on and double the velocity.
3 After shooting the new survivor, then
having to wrap and drag his body back to the grave site, Zeke
flings the shade tarp covering the site off to one side. but when Shazza
comes running over when she hears Zeke's screams and gunshots,
the tarp is not only covering the site but re-tied and
she has to uncover it (oops). This reveals not only the bloody hole but Riddick
crouching above it. This is a dramatic (scary) reveal but until
I was writing this, it didn't occur to me that it wasn't just an
oversight. Maybe we're meant to think Riddick retied it
for cover, but why would he hang around after? I think it's just
a mistake, but any time we noticed things like that, it takes
you out of the movie fantasy.
Pitch Black Screencaps: PitchBlacker.com [ :-(
this site is no more 6/1/72023]
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