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movie review - Pitch Black

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

This is a 'sci-fi' piece that's set in the future, on a distant world. In the early frames, a spacer is knocked off its path by a cloud of tiny meteors that perforate the hull. The spacer's crew is woken, and the pilot makes a crash landing on a world lit be three suns and utterly devoid of light. There are lots of spooky bones lying around, and they find the remains of a human habitation that's been long deserted (but strangely, still flying laundry, though 20+ years are supposed to have gone by).

Scientific errors aside (such as the multilevel rings that surround a second planet in the system; and that that planet is so close, you can make out surface details as it hangs over the horizon; and that infra-red lenses set within human eyes would simply give a view of hazy red at all times; and that a world without oceans or green plant life would have no breathable oxygen at all; or that the initially too-sparse oxygen the characters complain about early on suits them just fine when they're running from the local fauna later), this is not an overly engrossing story about a pack of rugged individualist characters struggling for survival on a world full of flying nightmare critters.

Strongly recommended.