Vin Diesel two-pack!

I saw Pitch Black back in the dawn of time, maybe even in the theatres, and I remember it as being a surprisingly good SF horror film, kind of a combination of Asimov’s “Nightfall” with Zork’s grues. And that’s what I mostly remembered about it.

So all that’s true, but it’s mostly about a group of passengers on an interstellar shuttle bus who are woken up from cryofreeze by crash-landing on a hostile planet, and who need to work together to survive, even as alien creatures try to pick them off one by one. The obvious worn-on-its-sleeve inspiration is Alien (which I think I hadn’t seen at the time I saw this), but what’s also surprising to me is how much the ’90s indie low-budget vibe comes through — the green-screen with shitty videogame-cutscene level CGI (it is probably not a coincidence that the most effective creature scenes are the ones set in the, y’know, pitch black, which forgives a lot of budgetary compromises), the cast of quirky characters, the way that so many of the scenes are characters just talking to each other.

And of course, Vin Diesel wasn’t a big star back then, such that it felt less like a Vin Diesel vehicle, and more like an ensemble piece, of which he was just sort of the breakout most interesting character (even though he’s mostly playing a monosyllabic, assholish ambiguously-evil prisoner).

Watching it now, I still think it’s decent, but… alas, it’s not as good as I remembered. Genuinely surprising to me from a perspective of today that they tried to spin a whole franchise off of this (though if they hadn’t, I couldn’t describe that ambition as chronicles).

The next day, we moved on to Vin’s latest movie, Fast X. Throughout most of the movie, I was kinda lowkey enjoying it. Like, sure, it’s definitely waaaay too far up its own ass in terms of its tangled mythology, the way the characters are just blatantly international super-spies with no day jobs (and yet they still live in a regular middle-class house and have backyard barbecues on the regular) is weird, and the part where they keep introducing new characters who are related to existing characters is self-parodic.

(And the whole “Paul Walker’s character is canonically still alive, just always offscreen” thing is getting really obtrusively unworkable: When a villain’s whole scheme revolves around threatening everyone’s family and loved ones, and he’s shown a surprising ability to do that, infiltrating spy agency black sites and the like, just saying “Bryan’s staying home to protect the kids” doesn’t really work. But we get it, you can’t show Bryan because Paul Walker is dead, and killing him off offscreen would be even weirder, so okay, handwave it.)

But for all that criticism, it’s doing the job that it tries to do, and Jason Momoa’s gleefully Joker-esque villain was fun, even if none of his plans made a lick of sense. I didn’t like it when Mission: Impossible turned into a Fast movie, but this is a Fast movie, so hey.

And then we get to the end, where it all falls apart. I’m going to spoil a thing for you, but it’s a thing that should be spoiled: The movie does not have an ending. The protagonists get put into a cliffhanger position, and then the credits roll. Apparently the next movie in this franchise is entitled “Fast X: Part 2”.

At this point, I am barely resisting an angry rant about how maybe a reason that nobody gives a shit about theatrical movies anymore is that the studios are busy turning movies back into TV, where each movie is just another episode in an ongoing saga without its own beginning, middle, and end. The MCU’s “this is setting up the next movie” vibe is the worst offender here, but this recent trend toward two-part movies is arguably even worse — and the mini-trend toward not clearly labeling two-parters even moreso.

The ridiculous thing is, there’s no reason at all for this story to span two films. It’s not like they’re adapting a book and couldn’t fit its contents all into a single movie, like Dune. It’s not like the plot is so fiendishly complex that it couldn’t be resolved in two and a half hours (the plot is nonsensical fluff, and could have ended at literally any time; you could put ten more minutes of footage into this movie and wrap it up in a clean ending if you wanted). They just decided they wanted to do this, and they did, and I will die mad.

At least until they release the next one and I forget about how salty I am right now. But definitely don’t bother seeing this until you have the second half of the movie available to you.