Before Vin Diesel was leading his own franchises and voicing tree aliens in Marvel movies, he broke into the industry by playing the anti-hero Riddick in the sci-fi action horror film Pitch Black, a character so popular that the first movie’s title was retroactively changed to The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black just to make sure you knew this was the one that had Vin Diesel. Now that Vin Diesel is his own brand, let’s take a look back at where he came from and see if his first foray into space measures up to some of the later adventures he’s now known for.

In a far-off future, a series of catastrophic coincidences results in a transport ship, carrying a series of colorful characters, crashing on an inhospitable desert planet. Among these passengers are infamous murderer Riddick and his handler, who cuts a deal with Riddick by promising he will free Riddick if Riddick helps them get off the planet alive. As this ragtag group explores, they come across an abandoned mining facility, and a horde of bloodthirsty alien monsters waiting to eat them alive when darkness falls.

A lot of Pitch Black is fairly pedestrian, especially the criminally underdeveloped cast that never has anything to do because almost no one is written with a character beyond a broad stereotype. Keith David is completely wasted as ‘the Arab’, a character completely defined by his all-encompassing devotion to the Muslim faith, who only ever says stuff about Allah’s will and never has much to do. Even when it tries to craft interesting characters it gives up almost immediately, especially with the pilot and Riddick’s captor. These two characters have interesting concepts but never grow into what they could be, which is the problem of the whole movie. Everything is mostly competent, barring some weird moments where the screen gets an orange or blue filter, but that keeps this from being either an actual good movie or a fun train wreck, which are the best two types of movies. Without Vin Diesel’s charismatic performance, I doubt this would have made much of an impact. But! If you are a Vin Diesel fan, this is essential viewing, because he is doing all the heavy lifting here.