“Alien” captured the struggle of a group of people surviving against a less-intelligent life form brilliantly. However, I’ve seen endless movies such as “Snakes On A Plane”, “Alien 3”, “Anaconda” and “Night of the Living Dead” that feature the same formula but without any of the brilliant execution. Unfortunately, “Pitch Black” is another one of those movies.

A commercial spaceship crash-lands on a planet with three Suns and the survivors are marooned. At first it seems like a lifeless rock but soon the forgettable bunch find that in the shadows and other places of darkness, horrible creatures (some look like rip-offs of Alien/Xenomorph from “Alien”) lurk but then they must find a way to escape the place as they discover an eclipse is on the horizon.

The group are very forgettable and lack any form of personality. The only crew member that stands out is the criminal Riddick played by Vin Diesel (“xXx”, “Saving Private Ryan”), simply because he’s got lights surgically put in his eyes. Diesel was clearly cast because he’s a bit of an action star but here he does nothing until the last ten minutes or so. The aliens featured are nothing original, some of the small ones are simply bats and the larger ones are just clones of Alien.

“Pitch Black” is a lifeless movie that did absolutely nothing for me as I never felt scared, I never felt thrilled and I never felt intrigued so it fails to be a good horror movie, a good action film and a good sci-fi flick. This is yet another film that is made to showcase some rather unimpressive special effects and make a quick buck by using what must be a template script for this kind of survival picture. I was very disappointed with “Pitch Black” to say the least. However, to the film’s credit, it is just about tolerable.