Riddick (2013)

I am one of those weird people who loved The Chronicles of Riddick.  I thought Pitch Black was okay, but Chronicles is what sold the character, and the universe he inhabits, to me.  Through the efforts of low-budget director David Twohy (whose films, like The Arrival and Terminal Velocity, I had enjoyed previously) and Vin Diesel, they scraped up what they needed to make a grand space adventure.  And it failed, miserably.

This was largely due to a number of cuts to make it PG-13, and a good part of the story being lost.  Happily, I never saw that version.  I saw the version, as Twohy and Diesel intended, once it came out on DVD.  So did a number of other people, and the movie was somewhat redeemed.  What both of them had in common, though, was an abrupt ending.  Riddick (Diesel) had become the Lord Marshall of the Necromongers, a barbaric scourge upon the galaxy that destroys entire civilizations in their quest to find the mythical Underverse.  Riddick's home planet of Furya was destroyed by the Necromongers, and at the beginning of Riddick he has been led to a planet that was supposed to be Furya and, in his blunt way of describing things, is "Not-Furya".  The guide, and Vaako (Karl Urban), he second in command, betray him and leave him for dead on the uncharted desert planet.  Thus, his association with the Necromongers is dealt with - at least for now.

As usual, Riddick proves to be a survivor, which is important on a planet with little surface water which is largely inhabited by wolf-like creatures (one of whom he befriends as a pup) and venomous serpent-like creatures that live in the pools of water that do exist.  Survive he does, but once his companion starts showing nervousness when the rare rains begin to approach, Riddick decides it is time to leave his new home.

Although not currently inhabited, a mercenary base was at one time established on the planet, and Riddick uses it to make sure his survival is broadcast far and wide, knowing mercenaries and bounty hunters will show up trying to claim him.  And show up they do; Santana (Jordi Molla) and his band want to bring Riddick's head back in a box, while Boss Johns (Matt Nable) has been looking for Riddick for revenge for his son's death in the events that took place in Pitch Black.

Riddick informs them that they should leave one ship for him so he can escape, and promises to leave them alive.  However, driven by greed and revenge, they disable the ships so he cannot steal them and go after him.  Tension mounts as Riddick's attacks take their toll, Santana's advances on Johns's associate Dahl (Katee Sackhoff) become more violent and, with the coming of the rains, the true danger of the planet rears its ugly head.

The first part of Riddick features little dialogue other than the titular character's narration as he survives what the planet throws at him, and this is where the movie really shines.  While it is fun watching him deal with the mercs (especially Santana's group), the last part of the movie, though not the central plot as the previews may have made it appear, does resemble Pitch Black more than a little bit.

Another quibble is that Dahl is presented to be a lesbian, but it appears that Riddick "turns" her heterosexual by the end.  The truth, as explained by Sackhoff, is that Dahl was straight all along, but pretended to be lesbian due to people in her profession like Santana who look at women as pieces of meat to take advantage of.  It would have saved a lot of controversy if this would have been made clearer, but it is obvious that Twohy still has some of the narrative troubles he's had in the past.

Riddick, despite some similarities to the first movie in the series, stands on its own, even if it does more tying up of loose ends from Chronicles than it does significantly advancing the story.  Still, it is quite worth seeing, and the end says that the whole situation with Furya will be handled with the next movie.  It is also nice that this time around they remembered that Riddick's universe is supposed to be brutal, and didn't bother releasing a lifeless PG-13 version.

Riddick (2013)
Time: 119 minutes
Starring: Vin Diesel, Jordi Molla, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
Director: David Twohy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more