Vin Diesel as Riddick

Pitch Black takes place in some unspecified future where traveling across space and time to hunt down escaped psychopaths or to colonize new worlds is a no-brainer type of activity. As the film opens, a spaceship with over 40 fresh-frozen passengers is forced to crash land on an unknown world due to unexplained mechanical error. Foreshadowing the unexpected behavior that is to come, shortly before landing, pilot Fry (Radha Mitchell) tries to cut her losses by cutting all aboard loose, without so much as a bag of free peanuts, and to definite doom. How rude! Somehow the craft crunches down without killing absolutely everyone and among the fistful of survivors are a mercenary named Johns (Cole Hauser) and his prisoner, a murderous convict named Riddick (Vin Diesel). Joined by a family of missionaries, an intergalactic entrepreneur, a hot brunette ("Farscape's" Claudia Black) and the requisite precocious child, the survivors must find water in their new desert home which is baked around the clock by not one but three suns.

A seemingly deserted geological outpost provides the needed aqua but also reveals a mass grave and the fact that their happy family is not alone in their new home. It soon becomes crystal geyser clear that the planet's previous inhabitants were devoured by swarms of huge bloodthirsty bat-like creatures whose only weakness is their inability to attack in the light. Ordinarily this wouldn't be so bad considering the planet doesn't get dark, however, the new inhabitants soon realize that an eclipse is coming and holy heck is about to break loose. What remains is their struggle to survive the night and recharge a newly discovered spaceship with the fuel cells from their own wrecked vessel and hopefully escape without being torn to shreds by the flesh-tearing hellions from the Pitch Black sky. Man, what a night.

Radha Mitchell as Pilot Fry

Director and co-writer David Twohy does a first-class job of keeping Pitch Black’s plot moving, while still allowing his characters the chance to develop and often reveal themselves to be quite different from originally assumed. "I'm really presenting a character drama at the heart of it. With monsters. In the dark," he recently told Sci-fi web magazine The 11th Hour. Along the way, the number of survivors dwindles faster than defectors from George W. Bush's campaign office. The rate of attrition climbs and takes its toll on a number of types who aren't supposed to get killed. The plot twists keep the audience guessing as to who will and won't make it to the ship and safely back to where ever they were going in the first place. Much of the movie is unexplained, but at only an hour-and-forty-seven minutes, it's over before you have a chance to think about it too long.

Thanks to the good work of Pitch Black’s army of special-effects artists, the most is made of the movies' "shoestring" $25-million-dollar budget through the creative use of both computer-generated and handcrafted artwork. But it's really the depth of its characters and quality acting (king-size kudos once again to Vin Diesel for his strength and subtlety) that helps Pitch Black shine in a genre that has become diluted with cookie-cutter sequels and big-budget bombast at the expense of truthful human drama. The movie is never boring or predictable which alone makes Pitch Black worth braving the darkest balcony or even the stickiest front row.