Pitch Black (2000) – Look, for years and years the majority of the movies I watched were those I was reviewing. That meant that I often didn’t see the movies that everyone else was talking about, okay? DON’T JUDGE ME.
Anyway. This movie is a perfect illustration of how a motion picture, with its visceral appeal and sense-based reactions, can get away with things that would sink a novel. It’s such a well-paced tight little character-tinctured SF action thriller that the utter impossibility of the setting is easily ignored for the time being; you just have to keep beating on that little voice in your head saying, “AKSHUALLY…”
“Like what?” asks the plant.
AKSHUALLY… there’s no way to have a planet in anything like a stable orbit when you have multiple stars far enough apart that they keep the surface in continual sunlight 22 years at a time. (Just because Asimov did it too doesn’t mean it makes sense.) By “stable orbit,” I mean “one in which a planet could actually form, much less remain stable for long enough for life to evolve.”
AKSHUALLY… there’s only one animal species on the planet, and it’s predatory? What do they eat when they can’t get hobbit?
AKSHUALLY… why does a planet with no vegetation have oxygen? (Sure, we could assume that other zones are more habitable and they just managed to crashland in the middle of that planet’s version of the Sahara, but that forces us to assume facts not in evidence, and is that also where a scientific outpost would set up shop? And anyway, that makes it even stupider that a huge colony of predators would be there, instead of going where there’s actual prey.)
AKSHUALLY… why would a predator evolve to only take advantage of that one-day-every-22-years darkness and sleep underground all the rest of the time, instead of the other way around? (Not that there’s anything to eat in either case, but…)
Anyway. Good movie. Bad SF.
Gunless (2010) – The wanted and wounded Montana Kid wanders across the border into Canada, where he’s semi-accepted into a small town (and into a semi-romance with the town’s available abandoned wife) despite having a standing appointment to shoot-out with the town blacksmith for an honor infraction. Also, there are bounty hunters on his trail.
Well, I’ll be! A Canadian-made and Canadian-set Western which still manages to be entertaining, despite being visibly Canadian? Will wonders never cease?
It’s a light-hearted adventure, which occasionally strays into comedy territory (this is what happens when a flyspeck town is populated by nothing but comic relief characters). Granted, that doesn’t always mix well with the Montana Kid’s ruminations on whether repeated killing makes him nothing but a killer… But I’m not going to hold that against this movie.
(Although it looks like this was actually a theatrical release. Yeah, if I had paid to see it in the theater, I wouldn’t have felt like I got my money’s worth.)
Dracula’s Daughter (1936) – Immediately after the events of 1931’s Dracula, as Van Helsing is being held on suspicion of murder, a mysterious woman shows up to steal Dracula’s body and talk psychology with Van Helsing’s psychiatrist friend.
I’m apparently in the minority on this one. A lot of people consider it a worthy successor, nigh an equal to Dracula, whereas I think it’s mostly a bunch of running around waiting for something interesting to happen.
Abandoned movies:
The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015) – Too much “cringe comedy” poking fun at Boy Scouts before we get to the meat-and-potatoes.
The Good the Bad the Weird (2008) – And cringe comedy doesn’t get any better with subtitles.
Wait, whaddya mean, no judging? NOW? Now you’ve just gotten around to Pitch Black, which launched Vin Diesel’s career, effectively? Dude….
Funnily enough, me and mine said exactly the same things about the scientific impossibilities–the orbit, the monsters, the lack of monster-food, and on and on and on. It didn’t remove our enjoyment of the movie, though. It’s been a long time since I saw a movie that remotely tried to not bastardize Sci-Fi. (2001…the movie, not the timeframe since.)
I used to enjoy Paul Gross when he was in that “fish out of water” Mountie TV show stationed in the US, that TV show. It was pretty good that first year, but the 2nd was abysmal. The Husky (dog) was cool!
Anyway, glad you (mostly) enjoyed PB. The two sequels are…interesting. The next one is…odd, with all sorts of unanswered questions, etc. The third one irked me, because it used a plot element, a ploy, designed to tear-jerk and I don’t care for that sort of thing. But, you should see them anyway.
Hitch
I’m sure I will eventually. 🙂
Eh, you won’t hear any complaints from me: I haven’t seen any of the Riddick movies; only really noticed they were at all a popular franchise when I happened across some fan fiction about them on An Archive Of Our Own a couple years ago. Popular culture was already beginning to splinter into numerous tiny subcultures around the turn of the millennium, and the fragmentation’s only gotten worse since then. It doesn’t help that Hollywood’s increasingly pumping out propaganda-masquerading-as-movies that no one wants to see these days, but the breakup and dissipation of popular culture’s mainstream was already in progress decades ago.
That little “AKSHUALLY” voice in your head is the nitpicker in all of us: annoying as he may be, he serves the important role of inspiring the fan theorist in all of us to come up with “AKSHUALLY” statements of his own to counter the nitpicker’s natter (if you enjoyed the story anyway). In this case (if I were to find the movie enjoyable as you evidently did) the fan theorist in me would probably reply:
“AKSHUALLY, maybe like Tattooine in Star Wars, the planet’s not in its original orbit, and wasn’t always like this. Maybe it used to be a much more habitable world before it suffered some ancient calamity that knocked it out of its original orbit and into this hellish new situation.”
“AKSHUALLY, maybe the planet is in fact dying, and these predators have only survived as long as they have because they can somehow go into hibernation for such ridiculously long periods of time. (Cicadas do something like that here on Earth, you know.) As for what they’re eating when no prey conveniently crashes on their planet? They’re all basically cannibals now, and yes, they probably won’t last too many more of these 22-year cycles before they follow all the other species that used to live on this planet into extinction.”
“AKSHUALLY, the planet used to have plants too, but they (and the herbivores that used to eat them) were among the first species to go extinct during the calamity. Also, that one remaining predator species probably would end up using up the oxygen and suffocating in all the carbon dioxide it’s producing, were it not already doomed to go extinct from cannibalizing itself first.”
“AKSHUALLY, those predators were already genetically programmed to hibernate during the day long before the planet suffered its orbit-changing calamity. In fact, that they could hibernate for so long is pretty much the only reason natural selection hasn’t already eliminated them the way it already did all the planet’s other former inhabitants; and even that useful trait has only served to delay their inevitable extinction. It’s not as if natural selection has any mandate to produce and preserve life, you know.”
Fan theorist’s bottom line: those monsters menacing the protagonist(s) are nothing more than nocturnal cannibals on a dying planet.