Pitch Black (2006, HD DVD)

Can someone please come up with an alien movie that's totally original? I can't imagine all of Hollywood's screenwriters have no unique ideas (so they all bite off older movies...)! Plot: A spaceship gets hit by some little meteors and ends up crashing on an uninhabited planet. Or so they think... The survivors are Fry the co-pilot, Johns, Iman (a Muslim holy man) and three followers, two miners, an antiques dealer, Riddick, and a young "boy" (a gender confused girl). Shortly after recovering from the crash they realize that Riddick has gotten loose. He poses a threat so a bounty hunter named.

When I first saw the trailers for "Pitch Black" last year, I thought, "Man, what a nasty Aliens ripoff THAT is. No way I'll see that one." A year later, BOOM! It got me. I was standing around in Hollywood Video with a 99 cent rental coupon, and just decided I needed some sci-fi. Pitch Black is an okay movie. It entertained me for ninety minutes. But it's nothing to write home (or even an Epinion) about. The basic story is that a Sleeper Ship headed from Earth to a colony hits some turbulence and crashes on a hostile desert planet. There are 12 or so survivors, and they're picked off one by...

PITCH BLACK is one you might be tempted to pitch back. After all, it seems like a fairly late, delayed-years-later ripoff of ALIEN. But it is another compelling performance by Vin Diesel, and that makes the fun factor on even a dim-lit movie like this one go up from 2 to at least 9 on the fun-factor scale. An ALIEN ripoff? Surely not. Well, sad to say, check out a few similarities. The opening shots of the PITCH BLACK spacecraft are remarkably (and formulaically) similar to the opening shots of the Starship NOSTROMO in ALIEN, complete with ALIEN's kind of minor-key intro music. Then you see...

I've been wanting to see Pitch Black for some time, and that time finally came last night. The Plot It's a pretty simple plot. A space ship carrying a dangerous murderer, the bounty hunter taking him to prison, pilgrims bound for New Mecca, and a few other random people crash-lands on a desert planet with three suns (producing eternal daylight). They discover that other people were there before them, twenty-two years ago, and that they all died. Then the eclipse happens, and they find out what killed the last group of people as the monsters come out to play. The criminal has special eyes that.