Review of Pitch Black (Unrated)

Introduction

A group of passengers are marooned on a planet after hitting space debris and falling into the gravitational field of the nearest planet. From here they do their best to find water from a planet that has three suns, and find transport that will take them from this inhospitable place. Unfortunately, this rogue band happens to crash land here just before a 22-year cycle that will eclipse the suns from the planet… there are creatures living here, afraid of the light but love the darkness, and our crew happen to make wonderful snacks for our alien prey.

So essentially this is Alien revisited for the late 90s, and whilst Alien and Aliens can stand up as classic examples of sci-fi horror; Alien III, IV, Sphere, Event Horizon and a host of others unfortunately cannot. How refreshing then that this one actually delivers! Similar outline to Alien, but this crew crash land, rather than being sent there by the Company. They wish to get off, but encounter problems along the way.

Whilst this isn`t as accomplished as Alien, which involved Company sub-plots, rogue droids and an air of intelligence about it, it still is a very good film. The characters are all independent, tough and a little emotionally cut off giving the film its sense of cruelty and hostility from the start. Twohy uses the camera well, a 2.35:1 print giving the width of vision necessary coupled with some handheld `behind-the-shoulder` camerawork to pull the scares off effectively. This as well as some excellently placed sound effects gives some genuine frights as the film moves along. Twohy went to the `less-is-more-when-showing-aliens` film school and this works in the films favour. The aliens are introduced subtly - there`s something there but you don`t know what it is; however the nature and tone of the film up to this point tells you of their cruel purpose.

Video

As mentioned before the DVD is an anamorphic print with a 2.35:1 ratio. The first part of the film takes place under three scorching suns and has an overexposed, bleached look, the second part deals with the eclipse and the subsequent darkness and shadows. I don`t think I`ve ever seen a film which has to cope with differences as wide ranging as this one, and to pull it off effectively, the transfer to DVD has to be good. Well, this transfer isn`t good, its not even excellent - its exemplary! If you ever needed a disk to thoroughly test and stretch your DVD`s capabilities, this is it!

The transfer is stunningly crisp without a single hair, scratch or pop to mar the print in any way. The opening scene with the ship cruising through space shows just how sharp this image is - every single star is a visible entity in its own right. On the occasional shots when actors are lit under normal conditions you can see very accurate skin tones and flesh colours.

Then the eclipse happens, and everything gradually darkens and falls into shade. Eventually the suns disappear… and boy, can this film do black! This disk has to have one of the most, if not the most, impressive representation of black that I have seen on a DVD - it matches the top and bottom black borders on your TV exactly, they just bleed into each other, and the shadow detail is nothing short of fantastic. You see glimpses of creatures, a head on shot here, a tail there, and they just flash by you; but they are noticeable and you can place them very easily in a 3D environment which is a pretty hard feat for a very dark picture with a glimpse of an alien.

It`s all rendered very well, so what I suggest is this - get to know this film, and play certain scenes over and over until you are very familiar with them. Then, when you go to buy a TV or DVD player, take Pitch Black along with you as this should be the reference which will show how well the TV or DVD player handles bright whites with hints of red and blue, skin tones and colours, shadow detail and black levels. It is that good. This is a reference quality picture!

Audio

And you won`t be short changed in this department either. The Region 1 DVD features both Dolby Digital and DTS formats and sounds excellent in both. Whilst this DVD does have its crash bang wallop moments (witness the spaceship plummeting onto the planet at the start), it tends to be more about sound effects placement around the room - putting those aliens right in the corners, or flying round your head somewhere. And this is where the DTS soundtrack really shines above its DD counterpart. The movement from speaker to speaker is smoother giving the appearance that these aliens are really gliding round your room. Speech is clear and articulate on both soundtracks.

Features

This DVD is heaving with extras, so lets go through them one by one:

Featurette on the making of Pitch Black: Better than most `making of` featurettes simply because there isn`t the high level of back-slapping which seems to be the de-facto standard. This sticks to giving you the facts about the film, it shows the location of the shoot that was a very remote part of Australia with nothing else around for miles which the actors found a little disconcerting at times. The featurette lasts for just under 5 minutes, but packs enough in to gain interest to go and see it.

Commentary with Director Twohy and Actors Diesel and Hauser: This is a very interesting commentary from the 3 people involved. Each has something to say and there are many interesting facts given about the film, the actors and the editing. This is the Unrated Directors Cut of the film and Twohy does explain which scenes have been added in, what they originally were, and why they are included in this version. One of the other highlights for me was learning how cold it was on location in Australia. They were all really cold but had to act as though there were 3 suns beating down on them - and this is also credit to the visual effect department who gave the impression of such a hot place. There is a lot more to be gleaned from this commentary and is well worth the time listening to it if you`re interested in this sort of thing. One bugbear is that at no point was the sound of the film discussed, and since it is such a good soundtrack with imaginatively placed effects it would have been nice to have a mention.

Commentary with Director Twohy, Producer Engleman and Visual Effects Supervisor Chang: Again, another very interesting commentary which covers a broad range of visual effects topics, and goes into sufficient detail on certain effects shots for you to understand how it was put together. The process where Diesel`s character has to rotate both arms 360 degrees whilst handcuffed. Also there is an honesty here - if there is a shot they didn`t like then it is discussed and explained, which means that for the shots they did like it seems more genuine. There is also a discussion about two-thirds of the way through the commentary about how black is black? How dark did they want to go, how they decided to light it and how much you the audience should see.

Raveworld Pitch Black Event: A 20 minute piece showing a rave party which apparently took place at the launch of the film. This has a good thumpy dance soundtrack showing the live rave intercut with scenes from the film. Whether this was actually used to publicise the film I don`t know and as an extra it doesn`t hold much in the way of value to me.

Rounding up the list are trailers, production notes, cast and crew biographies, 5 recommendation DVDs (but no trailers for these - sorry) and a board showing where you can sign up on the internet for the latest Universal Pictures newsletter.

Conclusion

This for me was a risk buy. I don`t particularly remember it being on general release at the cinema, and I hadn`t heard anything about the DVD before I bought it. It was an impulse buy when I had more money than sense. However this definitely worked to my advantage! This was a good risk - an excellent post-alien(s) film that delivers genuine scares by the `less-is-more` policy of showing their creatures. All actors have a good sense of their character, and whilst none of them fit the traditional role of people you feel are worthy of saving the creatures are creepy enough for you to hope that no-one falls prey to them.

I think I`ve already waxed lyrical enough about the picture. However I will restate that this is one of the best encoded disks I think I`ve ever seen. Its cleanliness, sharpness, 3D quality and broad range of contrast and colour stretch the DVD medium to its maximum potential. It succeeds with this without so much of a glitch, scratch or pixel out of place. One to show off to your friends and should be used as a reference DVD in my opinion.

The sound also deserves an extra mention for creating a wonderfully imaginative soundstage. All of you who have a 5 or 5.1 channel system will find this a treat. I say a 5 channel system also because the sub isn`t the main attraction here, it is the placement of sounds around your system. If you have anything less than 5 channel sound I believe you will enjoy this but you will be missing out.

The extras are also very abundant with two very interesting commentaries to listen to and some other stuff added to give even more value. Most studios packing a DVD with this amount of extras would have given it more prominence and rated this as a Special Edition, but Universal decides to package this as a normal DVD. Brilliant - great value for money.