PITCH BLACK

When Steven Spielberg directed JAWS in 1975, he never expected the movie to be the summer blockbuster it turned out to be. The movie fantastic success, however, changed the face of motion pictures. Ever since then, Hollywood has used the summertime to release most of its biggest movies, especially those of the popcorn variety.

JAWS created another important trend in motion pictures. This trend has had an effect on science fiction movies, action movies and horror pictures. It gave those motion pictures a new kind of movie villain –the cold, animalistic predator/killer who relentlessly pursues his victims. The ALIEN movies and the TERMINATOR movies are perhaps the most famous examples of this new narrative paradigm. Other movies reflecting this motif include the HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH horror movies and their stillborn children.

PITCH BLACK, a new movie from Australia that is being marketed rather heavily, operates pretty much in this vein. Like the last two ALIEN movies, it has some strong objectionable content in it. Unlike those two movies, however, it has a mild redemptive worldview supported by some provocative dialogue and other elements.

In the movie, Vin Diesel, one of the soldiers from Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, does a star-making turn as a hardened, violent criminal named Riddick. A mercenary named Johns (Cole Hauser), hired as a semi-official bounty hunter, is taking Riddick back to jail on a commercial passenger spaceship. In narration, Riddick calls Johns a “blue-eyed devil.” Unhappily for Johns, but not necessarily for Riddick, the spaceship they’re in hits a rogue comet and crashes on a desert planet. Debris from the comet penetrates the ship’s hull, mortally wounding the captain. One of the two co-pilots dies during the crash landing. Upon exiting the damaged ship, the survivors discover that the desert planet has three suns and a sister planet orbiting nearby that is surrounded by Saturn-like rings.

The remaining co-pilot, a young woman named Fry, takes charge of the surviving passengers, including Johns and Riddick. The passengers don’t know, however, that Fry was ready to jettison their compartment when it looked like the spaceship was going to completely break up into pieces. “I’m not going to die for them,” she tells the other co-pilot or navigator before she manages to stabilize the ship a little bit. Her comment will play an important role in the movie’s redemptive finale.

Among the other passengers are a female prospector, a young teenage boy, a male antiquities dealer, a middle-aged Muslim man named Imam (Keith David) and his three sons, and a seventh man named Zeke. Riddick escapes his bonds and hides while the others search for water. They come upon a seemingly abandoned geological compound, where they find a water generator and a space shuttle that’s out of power. Fry decides they should use their power cells to fly the shuttle off the planet. Before they get a chance to do that, however, Zeke is killed by some large, bat-like, dinosaur-type creatures living in the planet’s underground caves. Meanwhile, Johns recaptures Riddick, who, in his previous criminal life, has had special implants surgically inserted into his eyes so that he can see in the dark.

Led by Fry, the crash survivors begin to carry out their plan. They learn, however, that the ringed planet next to the desert planet will create a total eclipse very soon. They also learn that the last eclipse occurred 22 planet revolutions ago, when the bat/dinosaur creatures killed all of the people in the geological survey team. Fry, Riddick, Johns, and the others fail to carry the power cells back to the shuttle before the eclipse. As total darkness begins to fall, the planet’s predatory monsters come out to play. Now, the survivors must rely on Riddick’s night vision, Johns’ skills and Fry’s leadership (not to mention the prayers of the Muslims) to live.

Like nearly all R-rated action flicks, PITCH BLACK contains plenty of strong foul language, including many “f” words and several strong profanities. This content, and the movie’s strong, scary violence, require an extreme caution and an adult level of discernment. The movie’s story also contains predatory, pagan behavior from Fry, Johns and Riddick. In fact, their predatory actions (every man for himself) mirrors the predatory behavior of the flying creatures, who also “devour” one another to survive. Eventually, the other survivors learn that Fry was ready to abandon them during the crash, that Johns has an addiction to morphine and that Riddick previously had murdered the crew of a spaceship during one of his many escapes. In this way, the movie leaves in doubt the survival of everyone. Viewers may therefore well ask themselves, What will happen between Riddick and Johns, who keeps reminding Fry about Riddick’s previous escape? Will Riddick really abandon them in the end? And, can Fry overcome her own fear of death to take real responsibility for the lives of her passengers?

The movie’s answers to these questions are finally what give PITCH BLACK its redemptive worldview. Without giving away the details, one of these three characters does indeed decide to finally abandon the others, but one of the three decides to sacrifice their life for the others, and, one of the three experiences a kind of resurrection in the story’s ending, a resurrection which the very last line of the movie directly illustrates. References to God and the importance of prayer illuminate this redemptive content.

It may be no mere plot contrivance, therefore, that the survivors must rely on light to keep them safe from the demonic flying creatures around them. To paraphrase Job 29:3, Psalm 27:1 and John 1:4 and 9, “By God’s light, they walked through darkness. For the Lord is their light and their salvation. In Him is life, and that life is the light of men. The true light that enlightens every man.”

In this way, even the blind shall see . . .