When their ship crash-lands on a remote planet, the marooned passengers soon learn that escaped convict Riddick (Vin Diesel) isn't the only thing they have to fear. Deadly creatures lurk in the shadows, waiting to attack in the dark, and the planet is rapidly plunging into the utter blackness of a total eclipse. With the body count rising, the doomed survivors are forced to turn to Riddick with his eerie eyes to guide them through the darkness to safety. With time running out, there's only one rule: Stay in the light. PitchBlack is the original sci-fi hit that introduced the world to the character of Riddick, the ultimate anti-hero. Take a ride on the pulse-pounding adrenaline rush that USA Today calls "the best excuse to root for the bad guy since Arnold in the original Terminator."

The scene is grim and very familiar: a hulk of a space ship crawls through the starry darkness, then runs into unexpected trouble, such that its crew is awakened from travel-slumber ahead of schedule. The camera ricochets around the chamber, dark and hard to read, save for the standard emergency beeper lights. The narrative voice over offers a context: "They say that most of your brain shuts down in cryosleep, all but the primitive side, the animal side." Unidentified as yet, the speaker identifies his fellow travelers, a "hoodoo man," "some kinda woman," and, as he puts it, "my real problem, Mr. Johns," while you see the usual fast-cut, skewed frame pod-shots. Then you see who's talking or perhaps, thinking this introduction, an imposing musclehead wearing chains, jaw-lock, and blindfold, in the only pod labeled "Lockout Protocol." For all the regular visual and narrative cues attending his preamble, this single shot suggests that this guy is not your averange narrator.

Damaged by something "unknown," the ship crashes onto a planet surface, hunks of it burning and breaking off as it accelerates through the atmosphere. During this terrifying descent, you witness a conflict between the pilot, Fry (Radha Mitchell) and that problem fellow, Johns (Cole Hauser): she wants to save at least the front part of the ship by ejecting the "passengers," he wants to try to save everyone. Her attempt is thwarted, not by his entreaties to her humanity, but by the fact that the mechanism doesn't work. And so, everyone crash-lands together, excepting the Captain, who's still in his pod when he's pierced through by whatever it was that assaulted the ship. The survivors are understandably afraid and angry to be stuck on a desert planet, but they take a few moments to thank Fry for her excellent piloting, for saving their lives. Unsurprisingly, she's a little uneasy with this display.