Pitch Black
That’s goddamn Riddick-al, an incredible thriller until the last scene.
A space bus hits space weather and crash lands on some uncharted planet. While a lesser film would just turn that into a mindless action scene, it’s actually the setup for the sub-captain, since she wanted to “purge” every passenger to save the crew, but her partner stopped her. He’s the one who got killed in the landing, but she is praised for saving the passenger’s lives.
There’s actually a bunch of characters left, including some prospector types, a smuggler in luxuries, an imam with some kids in their pilgrimage to New Mecca, and the core pair: Johns the bounty hunter and Riddick the murderous Furyan. That Furyan thing is unmentioned, he’s just a stronger humanoid.
The planet they just landed on has three suns, so doesn’t seems to be any pitch black anywhere. A search party goes looking for any supplies, and they find some mining outpost, with plenty of solar powered stuff, including a machine that sucks water out of the air. Weird that the prospectors left so many functional appliances…
Ah, there’s an orbital craft of some kind. It’s not very big, but should be enough for all survivors. They also find a solar powered sand buggy, perfect to get the missing power cores from the ship. All seems to be going well, looks like there’s not much drama.
Digging around some more, one of the Muslim kids dies, but they find the reason why the prospectors are all gone: all their bones are at the bottom of the dig site. It seems they were attacked by animals, took refuge there and were rushed from underground.
The other able bodied prospector dude also disappears down a hole, and our sub-captain Trinity gets down there and confirms the animals are waiting for the dark to kill them all. Until now, Riddick was still restrained, then he escaped, but now he’s one of them.
They also found a diorama of the solar system, they discover some kooky orbital mechanics that make the planet be drowning in light for decades, then an eclipse happens and it goes pitch black for a while. The time is now…
They hurry back to the crash site to load the power cores in the buggy, but the sun is gone, it’s dead, Jim. They hole up in some other spaceship piece, and weld cut their way back out, since the animals are sensitive to light. Survivors keep dropping out like flies, but their disagreements mostly result in yelling.
It seems there’s only one way to survive: carry the 140 kg of power cores to the working ship while jury-rigging some way to keep the lights shining around them. They have a wicked setup, but it falls apart when the useless twat luxury dealer runs off into the dark and gets torn apart.
Riddick can see in the dark, so he leads the way. The herd is thinning, and Johns is willing to kill someone to leave as bait, so they can survive, but Riddick fights him and leaves the bounty hunter as a bigger bait. Ah, this is where the reveal of Jack’s gender is made, since she is menstruating. The animals smell blood…
They make a run for it, but one of the remaining Muslim kids is hurt, it slows them down. He’s captured, so there’s only a couple people left: the imam, Trinity, Jack, and Riddick. When it stars raining, they feel that’s it, they need to hole up in some cave while Riddick runs off, looking for “help”.
They scrunch up some glowing slugs to get Trinity to the ship, where she stops Riddick from leaving and convinces him to save the remaining imam and Jack. They can do it, but Riddick stays back to fight one of the animals. Trinity could have just left, but she comes back for him and gets taken away by an animal.
Trinity redeemed herself from her first cowardice, but there was no need to die. Now Riddick is brooding over her sacrifice. Luckily, Riddick can fly the ship too, and the remaining three guys fly away, to be discovered in the future…
The cast is incredible, just about all the characters are awesome. Radha Mitchell and Claudia Black are two awesome cool ladies, Vin Diesel alternating between dark messiah and James Bond, Keith David as an holy man. Even Johns is kinda cool, even though he’s not s “bad guy” per-se, this is more PvE.
A character called “Jack” with a gender bender appearance, shaved head, subplots about menstruation. I know where Mass Effect 2 got its ideas.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.