Science Fiction & Fantasy > Black, Claudia Science Fiction & Fantasy

All Pitch In

Advantages: special effects, characters, storyline
Disadvantages: none

...begins the spectacle that is Pitch Black. The beginning of the film still leaves me breathless, the visuals used when showing the ship spiralling out of control towards the planets surface as various compartments of the ship were being jettisoned are fantastic, the camera shaking violently, the speakers pushing out oodles of atmospheric noise to put us right in the middle of the crashing ship. You are willing the people on board to survive what ...
...often lost on film makers. Pitch Black is really the film that launched Vin Diesel's career (even though he was in Saving Private Ryan, who remembers him for that?), and for me it is still his best outing. And what a first outing it is. Riddick is one mean hombre, a murderer who is being taken back to the slam after escaping, he is brutal, he is tough and he is dangerous but as we see in the film he is not totally devoid of humanity, but even then ...

sjp1966 10.10.2007 · Read full review
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Review of Pitch Black (DVD)

Anti-hero Riddick fights in the Pitch Black

Advantages: Believable, good acting and direction
Disadvantages: Limited due to simple plot

...the viewer. The 2000 film Pitch Black is one such film. The fear of darkness and of creatures unseen combines brilliantly with the fear that the only guy capable of helping you is also the one most likely to kill you. Read on..... The Plot The plotline of a spaceship crash landing on another planet is a much followed one. It is prevalent in many films. This comes with a twist, as it has a passenger who is the most dangerous criminal known, being ...
...plane crash landing, the survivors form a motley crew of families, the criminal: serial killer Riddick, and the man who's been chasing him, Johns. The planet is seemingly sun drenched, but when the sun goes down and the darkness comes, scary happenings start. Strange flying creatures start hunting the survivors, and they need to reach safety on the planet. Sightless due to the darkness, they need a miracle, and it just so happens that Riddick has ...

pmcds 17.03.2008 · Read full review
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Review of Pitch Black (Special Edition) (DVD)

I'm Your Daddy

Advantages: Launch into the show's finest plot arcs, experimenting with genres.
Disadvantages: Division of the cast has inevitable repercussions.

...behind the Jim Henson Company's Farscape always enjoyed putting the characters through hell, from John Crichton's first tumble down a wormhole dumping him in a distant corner of the universe to his increasingly problematic relationship with Aeryn Sun. It's with the sixth episode of season three, a deceptively simple zombie horror adventure entitled 'Eat Me,' that this relationship takes a very drastic fork, while the separation of Moya's crew in ...
...portion of the season. Farscape was never comfortable inside the boundaries of predictable television, simultaneously a reason for its creative genius and its ultimate cancellation for encouraging its own obscurity, and the splitting ('twinning') of protagonist John Crichton, without a convenient death before the end credits to return the status quo, is one of the iconic moments of the entire series. Even without this perfect ending, the episode ...

Frankingsteins 01.03.2008 · Read full review
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Review of Farscape - Season 3 - Vol. 2 (DVD)

One Plan at a Time

Advantages: Sets the tone for the upcoming year, with Farscape's usual high quality writing.
Disadvantages: A couple of mis-steps.

The third season of Farscape still remains my personal favourite in the prematurely cancelled epic science fiction series, as the show expands far beyond its original boundaries and weaves a finely crafted story arc across a colourful season of strongly individual episodes, before creative blunders and corporate interference weakened the series in its fourth and ultimately final year. As always, very little time is spent in the first episode of ...
...I really can't praise Farscape enough, as will probably become annoyingly evident through my reviews of this finest season, but repeated viewings often favour these earlier episodes of set-up less than the more satisfying episodes towards the end of the season, when situations escalate and the show begins to deliver on long-awaited promises. As such, these first five episodes are still very entrenched in the concerns born out of the season finale, ...

Frankingsteins 23.02.2008 · Read full review
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Review of Farscape - Season 3 - Vol. 1 (DVD)

Farscape TV Series - General Review

Advantages: Brilliant TV show that is so much more than a generic sci-fi series
Disadvantages: Not enough people know just how good it is

...a brief review of the Farscape Ultimate Collection, but after about three lines I realised there was no way I could encompass what I thought about four complete & one mini-series of such a wonderful show into a single paragraph. So I finished quickly, hit save and then planned to come back when I had more time to try to explain why this is my favourite sci-fi TV series ever and why everyone in the entire world should know how good it is. "The "Ultimate ...
...probably the best thing about Farscape - it is so much more than just a sci-fi show for geeks, full of techno-babble & lycra-clad lovelies (although there are those elements to some degree). It is a human drama (albeit about some people who aren't exactly human and two main characters who are puppets) and how they cope with life, death, love, loss, the unknown and space monsters. In Farscape, the situations that arise are extreme (after all, it's ...

bodisback 29.11.2007 · Read full review
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Review of Farscape - The Ultimate Collection (Box Set) (DVD)