There’s a scene early in the 2000 film Pitch Black that is laugh-out-loud hilarious. After one of the ill-fated crew of the spaceship Hunter-Gratzner thinks escaped convict Richard B.

But it was playing an unashamed antihero in sci-fi actioner "Pitch Black" — which turned 25 a little while ago* — that would make the world take notice of the actor better known as Vin Diesel.

The Pitch Black exercise is the latest in a biennial series that began 43 years ago as a unilateral drill, before becoming a joint Australia-U.S. training event in 1983. Since then it has grown in ...