Pitch Black (2000 film) = Finished

I just finished Pitch Black. It's 2 AM, I have class in a few hours, and I really want to see it all over again.

Let's dig into that a bit.

I love the colors. The blatant overuse of distortion, saturation, and grading. Sometimes, for artistic effect. Sometimes, to communicate a character's perspective (like Riddick's 'shinejob'). Sometimes, just because it looks cool.

I love the environment and prop design. Yes, you could say it's functional or textured or any other manner of descriptive words, but at its core, I'd say the aesthetic of this movie is just that it revels in its own stuff. It's a movie desperately in love with the embellishment of sci-fi, as much as it is the morally ambiguous worlds that can be constructed within it. Everything's just a bit chunkier than it needs to be. There's a few too many knobs and levers in the cockpit. The guns look like they weigh about twenty three pounds each, pistol included. Shots often use hanging wires or obscuring detritus in their compositions. Pitch Black revels in the litter and junk, which has an added bonus of cutting down on what could have been a horrifically bloated budget.

I love the mechanics of how this whole damn thing works on a narrative construction level. It's a sci-fi thriller with a ton of intricate but stunningly mundane dialogue, that still manages to be compelling and characterful in exposition due to its interpersonal foundation. It's a monster movie, where we happen to know the monster...or at least, we think we know him.

Riddick is spoken about in hushed whispers, used as panicked defenses for horrible actions--meanwhile he'll just be cracking a beer in the background of the scene. Somewhere else, he'll beckon a character closer before lunging at them in a sudden scare--but he doesn't quite go all the way to getting her close enough to kill. Yes, he can murder people with what he claims is relative ease, but he'll also toss out this weirdly macabre, dry sense of humor. There's a moral compass somewhere in there too, among the muscles and the calculation. Riddick is unsettling for people both within the reality of the movie, and outside of it, by virtue of his 'added' dimensions. Dimensions that were, in fact, always there.

See, Riddick doesn't particularly grow, at least not in the way we typically use the word in relation to character development. He doesn't become more nuanced over the course of the movie, or reveal a particularly sympathetic backstory. By turns, he's badass, kind, joking, and visibly vulnerable. However, he doesn't deepen or change, per se. We just see different dimensions of him at different times. As he tells a character near the end of the movie, "You don't know anything about me." Riddick doesn't have a ton of character development (again, as it's typically used), because Vin Diesel's performance, Riddick's characterization, and the life he's had as a character means he's already developed. Riddick is a fully realized, SELF-CONTAINED weird stealthy warrior dude who I can't decide whether to run from, or chill out with on a lazy weekend.

It's cool!

I think that's what draws me back, actually. Aside from the extremely fun dialogue, world design, and intriguing visuals, there's Riddick himself.

After two hours, I still don't quite know him...But I'd like to.