Format: Syfy Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.
There are only a few basic science fiction stories. I read somewhere that the classic science fiction story involves a ship in the middle of space and a distress signal from somewhere. Pitch Black is kind of like that if you remove the distress signal and replace it with a meteor storm and a crash. This is an interesting movie for a few reasons. In a lot of ways, this follows a pretty standard science fiction/monster movie plot. There are some real differences from expectations, though, and those differences raise this above the level of the standard film of this sort.
The closest parallel film to Pitch Black in a lot of ways is Alien 3. This isn’t much of a surprise, since it evidently started life as an unused idea for that movie. The connection with the Alien franchise is evident in the design of the creatures that dominate the second half of the film as well. The connections go deeper, though. Both movies are about a group of people trapped on a planet that is inhabited (or infected) by alien creatures that are top-tier predators.
