movies part 19: pitch black

we watched this the night before chronicles of riddick came out, because steiner had never seen it.

i forgot how good this movie was! maybe it was better this time than the first. i remember first hearing about it from jess or mike or austin, and the premise sounded ridiculous. whoever it was explained it as, yeah, a bunch of people are stranded on a planet with 3 suns, but every 27 years it goes completely dark. and there are these aliens (indigenous life on the planet, i guess), that can only come out at night. and vin diesel is in it, with these eye implants that let him see in the dark. it's cool, you should see it.

oddly enough, that description is accurate. and i agree, you should see it. it is definitely a cult sci fi flick. just skimming the message boards on imdb makes it impossible to classify any other way. HUGE, pages long threads over whether or not it is science fiction (some idiots don't understand what science fiction is, apparently. this movie has space travel and colonies in other galaxies). HUGE, pages long threads over whether or not is a "good movie."

i really like it. the characters (the ones that survive for a decent length of time) are incredibly interesting. almost everyone has a secret, and the development of the characters as the movie progresses is really well done. you know, what happens when a few people are stranded together and facing death.

riddick is too cool. usually those characters annoy me (as in, for example, XXX), but he pulls it off in this one. and i thought johns was sweet. "put a cork in that girl!" the aliens look so awesome. and of course, there's the requisite worthless stupid asshole that panics and tries to kill everybody with his stupidity. the pilot is kind of cute, too.

cult sci-fi. definitely worth watching. one thing that bothered me was the question of how the aliens survive. there is NOTHING else on the planet. all desert. a few trees, and some massive skeletons (really cool looking, by the way). all they have to eat is each other and whoever crash lands on the planet... it would be cool if the planet went through a 27-year cycle of life growing and evolving on the planet until it gets wiped out by the aliens, only to start all over again after the suns come back out. oh well.