Archive listings for Pitch Black (2001)

Observer (11Jan01): Pitch Black is a minimalist SF horror flick arriving belatedly in the slipstream of the Alien cycle. A space bus gets into a meteor storm and crashes on a deserted planet of seemingly permanent sunlight. Underground lurk hordes of blind, carnivorous, bat-like creatures who live off visiting earthlings during brief periods of solar eclipse. The film was shot in uninviting parts of the Australian outback, and because there are no stars it isn't easy to predict the order in which the characters will die. The most striking presence, playing a psychopathic criminal equipped to see in the dark, is Vin Diesel, one of Tom Hanks's platoon in Saving Private Ryan

Evening Standard (11Jan01): David Twohy's Australian-made SF thriller is all right, but no landmark. It's heavily indebted to Alien, Starship Troopers and other movies that put spaceship crews at the mercy of monsters aboard the craft or at large. Diesel's hard man (who shaves his pate with engine oil, lacking water and soap) drives the story with gravel tongue and brute muscle. But it's Graham Walker's production design - a blanched landscape with contours like shattered ribcages inspired by the Australian outback he made look similarly unearthly in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome - that provides it with its nightmare distinction.