February 20, 2000 -- "Pitch Black" is yet another riff on the old "Alien" formula of a group of people walking around in dark places while a monster picks off members of the group one by one. It is better than most of this genre.

Actually, the genre goes back farther than that, to the old 1951 sci-fi classic "The Thing From Another World," starring James Arness as the monster, and maybe farther than that. In this version, the survivors of a crew and passengers of a spacecraft crash land on a distant planet only to find, lurking in the shadows, vast quantities of monsters, something like swarms of giant, flying piranha.

Thanks to the wonders of digital effects, these things look real, and so does the planet with multiple suns and a giant Saturn-like companion planet whose eclipse allows the monsters to come out and play. The effects are very well done. From the glare of multiple suns to the partial eclipse caused by the ring of the neighboring planet, you get the feeling of being on another world.

All the characters are complex, from the devout followers of Mohammed (this is one of those rare films that portrays Islamic characters as normal, not as terrorists) to bounty hunter William J. Johns (played by Cole Hauser of "The Hi-Lo Country"), who is not at all the person he at first seems to be, and neither is the convicted killer, Riddick (Vin Diesel of "Saving Private Ryan"). Almost every character has a dual nature, with one side hidden from the rest. It makes for a more interesting story.

The science in the science fiction, however, leaves much to be desired. The monsters are such efficient predators, they have killed off nearly every other form of animal life on the planet. With nothing to eat, they have resorted to killing each other off. A predator species with nothing but itself to prey on (and the occasional human) will not last long. What the monsters need to do is send off travel brochures to earth so they will have more humans to eat.

Other parts of the story do not bear close scrutiny either, such as the way the crash survivors get caught out in the dark, even though they know the eclipse is coming and they have found a usable spaceship a short distance from their crash site. They also happen to find a complicated model of the solar system which shows how and when the eclipse will occur. Furthermore, this is an old-fashioned (even by today's standards) mechanical model, not a computer model as one would expect in the far future. It works well, however, for purposes of illustrating the plight of the survivors.

Despite the scientific and logical lapses, it is a pretty good adventure yarn with some interesting twists and turns. The pace is fast enough to keep one from worrying about small details like I mentioned above. The three-sided battle for control of the group of survivors between Riddick, Johns, and Fry (Radha Mitchell "High Art"), the pilot of the ship, is strong enough to power the film ahead. This film rates a B.

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