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Rated: 15
Running Time: 108 mins

Pitch Black is more feature length deodorant advert than film which, for all its tight pacing and neat effects, stinks.

Set in a world of unbearable, three sun heat (which the characters manage to saunter through just fine) vest tops and combat gear mingle with sweat beneath stark, muted colours and a distinct direction of style over content.

Director David Twohy (writer of Waterworld and GI Jane) creates a two-tone world of bleak oppression into which are thrown a ragged band of "misfits" and "outcasts" (see pretty much every other science film for details). It should have been Mad Max (but then Waterworld should have been too), it should have been Aliens (hmm, GI Jane anybody?) but unfortunately the result comes closer to Happy Days meets Event Horizon.

The characters are pushed through this survival horror like puppets. Histories are recited with auto-cue sincerity and numbers whittled down with dull regularity. Live, die - who cares?

Well two people who do seem to care are the newly installed captain whose deep dark secret is revealed early in the film and the token bad apple who brings the aforementioned Happy Days link into full effect with a Fonzie ruffneck-with-a-heart-of-gold act.

Corny line after corny line tears away at the visuals to leave a deeply dissatisfying experience. People don't so much evolve here as change outright for little or no reason. Predicting the outcome of the film offers no challenge whilst not even the ever present idiot in the cinema was moved to explain the plot to the person in the next seat.

Pitch Black is a true example of style over content. I can think of no justification for making this film. It makes no point and only serves to lower the collective expectations of the movie-goer.

As for survival horror - you're doing well if you stick with this past halfway.

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