Calling this a disappointment would be misleading since I never suspected this film would be good.
What Works: The film keeps morphing from a survival tale on an alien world (in the first 15 to 20 minutes) to a bounty-hunters-after-Riddick neo-Western to a monsters-attack-Aliens-knock-off. I’ll let you guess which two of those three works best. Although the film is never good, I would say it starts off passable and only gets truly bad in the last half hour or so.
What Doesn’t: With the exception of Katee Sackhoff, the cast is straight terrible. I’m starting to think that the only way Vin Diesel can feel secure about himself is if he’s surrounded by shittier actors (the Fast and Furious movies come to mind as well). His super-cheesy but stone-serious voiceovers are, as always, unintentionally hilarious, and whenever he tries to be funny, he is…in an “I can’t believe someone would call that shit Vin Diesel just said dialogue” kind-of way. The last third is a completely uninspired rehash of all aliens-attack type movies, and the film’s abrupt changes in tone (you might even call them changes in genre) feel like the result of a creative team that keeps getting bored. If they feel that way, why shouldn’t we?
What I Would Have Done Differently: All those years ago, “Pitch Black” was a smart, surprising, and tense sci-fi film. It wasn’t a great movie but it was nearly perfect for the low-stakes genre it was in. If they can’t do any better for sequels than this, maybe they should stop trying.