How better to begin my movie picks blog than to rant on the latest, great movie which I've seen. Astoundingly, that movie is not only a mainstream film, but it's also in that category from which you expect only dreck and Badfeelm to enjoy for its utter absurdity. I speak to you of the film... Pitch Black.
I love badfeelm. I wallow in it sometimes. There's something about the alchemizing process that turns gold into lead that just fascinates me, and because of that I often go to films that I know will be utter crap, simply to watch them unfurl before me like a wet and sodden flag. I truly expected Pitch Black to fall into this category, sports fans. I just knew that I'd walk out of the theatre, laughing about how they'd remade Aliens again (or possibly the excriable Aliens^3), and sniggering at the science that had been sorely abused by this tale of darkness and death...
By Grud, I was wrong.
Let's get the ratings out of the way first, shall we?
Gore: 7
Schmaltz: 6
Character Development: 9
Sturgeon Principle: Falls in the last 10 percentile.

First, the bad. So you'll have something to look forward to later! Pitch Black breaks very little new ground -- you've seen it all before: a group of diverse people are trapped on a planet, with a KEY ITEM (in this case, an emergency shuttle) their only way off of the world. The KEY ITEM because their primary motivation for moving from Point A to Point B and gives them a good reason to keep on questing while the BIG THREAT picks them off, one by one. In the end, you know that at least some of them will reach the KEY ITEM, prompting the film to trip into its ending mode.
Also, this film stars an old character whom it's hard to ignore. Yes, let's give it up for... THE HAND OF GOD!
Or as we know it, 'Sheer Coincidence'.
Let's face it, when a world will only become a Perilous Deathtrap every twenty-two years, and your protagonists have crash-landed on it right at the start of the danger zone, it's hard to ignore the Hand of God waving merrily at you from backstage.
Fortunately, now we hit the Good. And there's a lot of it.
First of all, the cast of characters is varied and interesting. How often have you sat, watching one of these survival films, wondering idly if there's someone, somewhere who possesses the amazing ability to tell all of these characters apart from the Archetype upon which s/he was built. And if that person exists, how many Gs per year s/he's pulling down as they possess a skill which no one else does. This cast of rag-tag castaways is a delight to watch, especially because not a one of them is the All-Around Hero Type, who philosophizes, kicks-ass, is virtuous to a fault, and will risk his life to save a kitten in the path of an Evil, Satan-Possessed tractor. Conversely, none of the characters is a two-dimensional 'bad guy' either, leaving us with lots of grey shades which can make for some interesting tableaus and contrasts.
Drawing from the above point is one which I'm sure you've all noticed in a film of this sort. How often have you yawned boredly at the screen, just waiting for 'Asshole X' to buy the farm, and been proved right, every time? Sadly, this is because Hollywood believes in the archetype principle of character-building. You have several distinctive positions for characters ('hero', 'love interest', 'ingenue', 'partner who gets killed to fuel the motivation for revenge', 'bad guy', 'old man who speaks in riddles', etc), and they're assembled into a fairly straightforward plot in which each character has his or her own duties to perform to fulfill the dictates of their casteing. The hero must get the girl, the bad guy must die, etc. Now fortunately, movies these days have been playing around with the castes of characters, but unfortunately, most of that playing has been superficial and surface-level.
In Pitch Black, I dare you to find the hero. I dare you to find the villain. Oh yes, I knew that character x would buy the farm, but the movie more than made up for that by killing off character y, and sparing character z... in short, say it with me, kiddies...
IT SURPRISED ME!
I thought that movies weren't allowed to do that any more.
Also, Scary Stories(tm) tend to have two other big problems that have begun to turn me off. One is the affirmation of Psychotic Killers being as Magic as Trumpy from Pod People. You know the kind... the ordinary psycho-killer gets shot at point-blank range by a pump-action, double-barreled shotgun, sans body-armour and then grasps the barrel of the gun, wrenching it out of the shooter's hands and wrapping it around the man's neck like a cartridge-fed balloon animal? Or the killer who can make bodies appear and disappear as though he'd just eaten David Copperfield's liver for inspiration? These tales suffer the problem of setting up rules for the audience (the killer is a Normal Person who just happens to like to eat your intestines with a side order of flaffles) and then *break* them. There is nothing more disconcerting to have the media in which you've suspended your disbelief just rear back and slam you full in the nards, telling you that you can have your disbelief right back. Pitch Black manages to avoid this neatly by setting up the rules for the aliens and then sticking to them. When a rule was added to the list of things that you know about these blood-thirsty hairdressers from another world, it was internally consistent with the movie (Maybe not with science, but movie-making *is* a science in of itself. There's just too many formulae running around...). You also received several nice scenes of 'the world through the aliens' eyes', which for me just made my day. Honestly, I think seeing how the aliens perceived the world helped me to buy why some of the things that worked did work. Kudos and hats off to the film-makers for realising that I should walk a mile in the aliens' moccasins.
Now for my other problem with scary tales these days. Folks? Movie-makers? Potential movie-makers? Gather around, please. I have something to say to you all. Closer, please, so you can hear me. Closer. Closer.
Close enough? Good.
HAVING THINGS POP OUT AT ME IS NOT SCARY!
It didn't work when you were using 3D film, and it won't work now, guys! Having someone jump out and say 'boo' is the worst form of terror-making that can be imagined! What you produce is a Cheap Thrill. It's the equivalent of making humour by waiting for someone to sit down and then yanking their chair out from under them. It works once or twice, but pretty soon it gets old, and *someone* will have a sore ass by the end of it.
Fortunately, the terror in Pitch Black is generated in much the same way as the Blair Witch Project: you are invited to empathize with the journiers as they make their way through a situation which is absolutely ghastly, hopeless, and make an emotional connection with their plight. And I, for one, loved that approach both in BWP and here. I found myself on-edge due to a need to see these characters live, and truly regretted it when some of the ones for whom I was rooting died. Now I wasn't scared at any point during this film, but then again, I rarely get scared at movies so I'm a poor yardstick.
Well, in closing, if you enjoy films that manage to do some interesting things with their characters and the situations in which they find themselves, see this movie. I think it would be well worth your while.
I give it Eight Zucchini.
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