Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000)

An unsuccessful mish-mash of George Lucas, Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twohy betrays his occasionally keen visual eye -- I actually the movie's burnt orange, overexposed look during the early sun segments -- with nonsensical editing, cutting irregularly between various shots of the same action in a confusing flurry of activity that diminishes, rather than heightens, the tension of an unknown predator hunting them. The film's writing is similarly miserable, relying on tough guy '80s one-liners in place of characterization, often resulting in characters who do things without explicable motivation. This latter problem wouldn't be of great concern in what is, essentially, a retread of Alien if the movie didn't leave such little else to worry about. I value a well-made suspense sequence far more than, as Rosenbaum once put it, modern cinema's "tendency to turn people into garbage," but this movie spends most of its time on jump scares and red herrings before devolving into a completely wasted premise. There are so many cool ways to make a suspense film based on the idea that characters have to stay in the light in order to survive, but nearly all of them are mangled. Exactly how many light-making objects they have is constantly unclear, leaving the loss of one or two less disastrous seeming than it should be; the characters fail time and time again to manage the priority of surviving above petty bickering, making them seem like childish infants; and each individual sequence appears and is gone before the gravity of the situation has time to properly settle in, giving the feeling of very little consequence. This feeling of empty action is heightened by the film's rather glib attitude towards death. I count at least four deaths in the film that we are, at least slightly, encouraged to guffaw at. And this encouragement of laughter, other than being admittedly a little icky, serves to break the tension that the chaos of trying to survive on a hellish alien planet is supposed to instill.