Sidetrek: Riddick Movie Reviews

I can't say I regretted a moment of my CoH binge all weekend, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Unfortunately operating on effectively 4 hour power-naps whenever one felt tired makes one feel more than a little spaced out and airy at 4.45pm on Monday. Yay black Monday blues.

Heck, I got a lot more than CoH done. The DVD player's still not connected in the new place yet, but I had this sudden revelation that I could watch DVDs on my new computer. (Old laptop just had a crummy CD-ROM drive.) Wanted to watch the LOTR ROTK extended edition and the two Riddick flicks, and ended up picking the latter up first.

See, I wasn't impressed with the reviews of Chronicles of Riddick. It was trash, apparently, so nah, not wasting money. But well, another member of the house loves collecting DVDs, so I'm not arguing if it appears at home one day and I can just pick it up and watch it.

And then I picked up the PC game version of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay - which according to reviews, was great - and may I add my own fervent attestations that it is SUPERB. Hell, I'm playing it over Doom 3. I installed both at the same time and tried both out, and I'm gunning to complete Riddick: EFBB first. It is totally atmospheric, brilliant graphics on the scale of Half Life 2 and better (the PC version, given a presentable GPU card), the story seems nice, and it's well...it's a mix of first person action shooter + sneak game + RPG almost. As in you can talk to a whole bunch of prisoner inmates and they are all perfectly characterized. I have no way to describe it except to say go play it. It's a world unto its own. And it made me a Riddick fan. I want to know more about him cos he's such a cool anti-hero.

I was debating which to watch first. Pitch Black or Chronicles. I decided to go with chronology. Good thing I did. I have as much praise for Pitch Black as I have rants about Chronicles of Riddick.

The good first. Pitch Black is a brilliant sci-fi movie. In the good sense of sci-fi. Which means speculative elements, and solid story and so on. I can see why it has a following. I'm now a fan too.

Ok, I'd admit there are a few elements which are slightly cliched. The predator alien things have been done to death, but it is a classic theme after all, I accepted it in Alien, in Predator, in Warhammer 40K and so on, I can swallow one more.

But it's so much more. It explores human nature very well, and capitalizes on "role reversals." It's a movie that relies on suspense, rather than sheer gross-out horror or random action to move the story along.

I'm desperately trying not to spoil anything, but I must ooze about the climax. Riddick personified a Luciferian devil. It was brilliantly fitting. All the plot threads clicked together so well, even in an admittedly fairly stereotypical setting, that I have great admiration for the screenwriters of this movie. I prostrate myself before them. They know what true Sci-Fi is about. Humanity, basically.

I must watch it again to get the bad taste of the second film out my mouth.

I'm a Riddick fan. Because of the game. And then because of Pitch Black. I did everything in chronological order - game first (prequel), Pitch Black, then the sequel...

I had SUBTITLES on the damn DVD movie. It was the director's cut version which apparently fills in the blanks better. I still didn't 'get' nearly half of Chronicles. I pity the unsuspecting fools who watched it in movie theatres.

It has two redeeming features. It looks visually stunning, the CGI is amazing (almost over-the-top at some points, ala Star Wars-type "I have many powerful computers and a big budget so must crap rendering effects and multiple spaceships for the hell of it") and the action moves along like a Blade movie. Expect much ass-kicking and big flaming explosions.

Second redeeming feature is that it's a good movie for demonstrating how NOT to write a movie, especially a sequel. I could spend fifty thousand words ripping their script, story, and setting to shreds and using it to demonstrate proper world building for novels and movies.

I'm now going to have fun with a rant. Don't worry about spoilers. You still won't understand half of it even when I explain it to you. I still don't.

First criminal rule broken: Never mix sci-fi and fantasy if you don't know what you're doing. You'll hurt yourself.

Shadowrun, Palladium, these things are ok if you have the taste for them. They took choice elements and put them together. Even the Darkover series is more sci-fi than fantasy, and Pern the other way around. And they are an acquired taste, with each book focusing more on various aspects of this world.

In movies though...I haven't found any good redeeming movies of this sort. Number one, fantasy and sci-fi flicks are already hard enough to make and get right. Good fantasy movies can be counted on one hand (including the LOTR movies as three separate ones, perhaps Monty Python), with a bunch more semi-passable ones (Excalibur) and kinda watchable (Willow - didn't really like this, YMMV and Dragonheart - I liked it, others thought it was crap, I'm a sucker for a dragon with Sean Connery's voice) ones. Sci-fi has been around a bit more, so it's better off. There's still a bunch of rubbish more than good films though...

If you MIX the two, urgh. Well, you get as badly laughed at as the D&D movie trying to rip Star Wars - Phantom Menace and the Ewok village off.

Guess what Chronicles of Riddick does immediately?

I suppose some executives must have seen the success of LOTR, and said, maybe we can add this? And that?

Well...you got your crummy FANTASY all over my nice sci-fi flick.

We start with a NARRATION. There be the forces of GOOD, NEUTRAL and EVIL. Except that there's no good in this world. There's just EVIL (Riddick) and STRONGER BIGGER BADDER MORE EVIL (the bad guys) and NEUTRAL.

The evil guys are Riddick, whose actions in the present film consist of going around saving and rescuing people and killing the bad guys, so you had to have watched Pitch Black to know he was supposed to be an evil guy, he's an ex-con who murdered people, you see. And his "love interest" an previously androgynous girl previously known as Jack, now Kyra, as said by the drop dead sex appeal oozing actress pretending to be an animalistic killer and only succeeding in oozing WWF catfight lady.

Oh, and Riddick is revealed to be the lone surviving member of a race called Furyans or Furions, with unimaginable power, except they're all dead, killed by the other surviving member of the race who has turned bad and is Lord Vader/Emperor Palpatine/Lord Sauron/That evil overlord from Willow - oops, wrong movies?

You see, PROPHECY states that a young boy who survived the evil overlord's purge will grow up to depose of said evil overlord. (Henceforth shortened to EO.) EO proceeds to purge and kill all young boys but misses lone survivor. EO finds lone survivor after he has grown up, and is now terrified that PROPHECY will come true. EO tries to hunt down lone survivor through the course of the movie, sending literally armies after him, but of course, EO fails. EO dies as PROPHECY states. This is supposed to surprise or entertain us in some fashion.

The neutral guys consist of these funky people called Elementals. Fire, Water, Earth, Ether, Air apparently, though only one Air Elemental lady ever shows up. She plays the role of narrator/fortune teller/seer/prophecy speaker/time waster/plot device. They apparently do nothing but Watch. And somehow manage to fuss with the balance just watching and talking to both the evil guys and the really evil guys. For some unexplained reason, neither side kills the neutral lady and engages her in dialogues where she proceeds to expound in joyous detail about the scriptwriter's fantasy world.

Oh, and the really evil bad guys? Actually the premise is kind of interesting. Even if it sounds like someone wrote it when they were twelve. Reminds me a bit of Sheol and the Shadowsuckers (in-joke to Kelizendis).

You see, they are some kind of death-worshipping cult army who enslaves people to their side, making them exist as twilight shadows of themselves in a Nazi-esque Star-Wars Stormtrooper army, or turn them into pathetic tormented zombie wretches who are leashed and forced to sniff out living beings in a fairly sinister Nazgul fashion. They come to planets and tell people "Convert or Die." Too bad they never go into detail on the forced conversion process in which people afraid to stand up for their beliefs are /turned/. Because I saw a lot of White Wolf Wraith-like potential.

Apparently the Die part is more nasty. (Or at least provides greater opportunity for CGI effects without giving the movie an R rating for brutal violence, torture or something.) Nope, people who stand up for their beliefs get their souls sucked out by Emperor Palpatine, um..sorry, I keep getting confused, the Lord Marshal. And for those who don't warrant this personal treatment, well, they just get cut down randomly by the stormtrooper army or turned to ash when they release their giant planetkiller bombs. [However, they also forgot to have anyone standing by watching in horror a la Londo Mollari or the B5 crew as they did this. And as everyone knows, without decent human beings expressing shock and horror at billions of people dying, all movie audiences will simply accept it as more flash, boom, bang CGI.]

Here is where the cardinal rule of fantasy is broken. This was established by Tolkien for goodness sake's. If you're going to use fantasy, how about respecting it.

NAMES.

It's not about stringing random syllables together, dears. And yes, symbolic meaning is important, but there's no need to whack us over the head with it either. I can accept things like Hellion Prime (sun) and Crematoria (ashes). It's ok, even if some other critics hated it. At least they sound respectable.

But um...the name of my most evil bad guys are...NECROMONGERS?

I keep seeing fish mongers. That are dead, I suppose.

Either that or I think of Powermonger, the Amiga game that seemed pretty good when I played it then, but has not aged well through time.

Yes, Necrons are copyrighted by Games Workshop, no doubt. (Disclaimer: this is not an intellectual property challenge to them.) How about The Necromium. At least it sounds slightly bit more threatening?

I'm not even going to get into the suspension of disbelief and logic required to accept the existence of their organization. Suffice to say that a motto of "You keep what you kill" does not seem to make for a stable, lawful evil sort of army.

The term "Breeders" is never explained. Does it refer to Riddick soley, because he's some kind of special Furyan who must be 'bred' - nothing of the sort ever happens, by the way, would have been nice to see Vin Diesel's muscled bod like Brad Pitt's Achilles, might have redeemed the movie like Troy. :( All they do is mind-read him. Heck, the blue lipped overlord from the D&D movie, Damodar, did a better ham-fisted mind-rape type scene. (At least he did it to a girl, you know.)

Or is that the general term for all non-Necro(shudder)mongers.

Lensor is also a stupid term. Sensor + Lens? Because it's a plate glass lens-wearing zombie who can Nazgul sniff stuff? Um. Try again. Shame because those zombies -were- cool. Even a non-descriptive term like 'revenants' would have been better. "Set the revenants to hunting and sniffing out the living!" vs "Set the Lensors blah blah" Which would you rather shout? This movie is suffering from a surfeit of capitals.

It's about the sound, guys. It's fantasy. Tolkien the linguist showed you how. Even Games Workshop can do better, with their latinesque Space Marine Brother Chapters and graceful sleek Eldar, wraithbone and Khaela Mensha Khaine and da tuff, 'ard-'eaded Deathskull Orks! Waaargh Grisknakh! It's not just stringing words together from a dictionary. You have to pay attention to the MOOD and ATMOSPHERE and feeling you're generating.

Mixed with this nonsensical 'A' plot is a perfectly presentable 'B' plot about Riddick breaking his nominal love interest (actually, if you watch Pitch Black, he just has this slight soft-heartedness towards children, so there is a perfectly acceptable sentinemal reason without involving romantic love) out of a triple-max security prison and out-smarting bounty hunter mercs to do it. They have to race across the burning surface planet of Crematoria which gets unbelievably hot in the daytime and chars everything to cinders, and terribly cold at night. Just conceivably if you do it just before the sun hits, the contrast between night and day might make it survivable temperature - but it makes for an interesting chase/dash action sequence anyhow.

I wished the movie focused on this plot instead of the ridiculous fantasy elements. It might have been saved from shooting itself in the foot so often.