It's got good parts, and if like action and you fast forwarded and only watched the best 45 or 60 minutes, you'd be okay.  Unfortunately, the movie is nearly 2 hours long, it feels longer, and very few movie theaters come equipped with remote controls.  My categorized rating:

The Chronicles of Riddick
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 3
Must See on the Big Screen: 4
Overall: 3.5

Basically it's a gorgeous movie with some good set pieces and a cool character as the hero, dreadful dialogue, lots of boring and unimportant minor characters, an unraveling shoestring of a plot, and utterly-impossible, repeatedly-unsatisfying action sequences. It could have been good; they had the budget and special effects and ideas and decent actors. The script let them down though. It needed massive work, I'm talking multiple rewrites, and I just don't think the director was up to it. The movie doesn't tell any sort of coherent story, it doesn't build in action or intensity, and after a pretty good first half hour, it steadily falls apart.

(I'll be calling the film CoR for short in this review, to avoid confusion with references to its eponymous main character, and will avoid any spoilers until the concluding comments, where I list a few minor ones, and give a warning in bold.)

Script/Story: 3
There's not much to say here. They had a few novel concepts, Riddick is cool, the bad guys have some dimension to them (not just mindlessly bad, as the trailer makes them seem) but the way it all comes together is just not acceptable. I was bored during most of the last hour, until the very ending, which has an acceptable twist, setting us up for CoR 2. Which may or may not happen, but I hope if it does the director/creator brings in some more writing talent. The whole thing sort of reminded me of Star Wars Episode 1 and 2. Great look, good ideas here and there, but just not competently put together, and the demise of SW is due entirely to Lucas refusing to let anyone else touch his baby.

Acting/Casting: 5
I'd never seen Vin Diesel in anything. Not even Pitch Black, the prequel to CoR. After seeing CoR, I wouldn't buy a ticket just to see him, but I wouldn't stay away from a movie with him in it either. I thought he was fine doing what the roll demanded of him (being a bad ass and nothing more), and the character of Riddick was tough and pretty cool. No one else in the movie was anything other than acceptable though, and I didn't like the main bad guy much. He never brought anything more than a strong jawline, and his supposedly more than human powers were virtually nothing more than super foot speed.  The girl Riddick is trying to save (for no clear reason) was mediocre, the scheming 2nd in command of the Necromongers was useless, his Cleopatra-style wife was annoying, Judy Dench did nothing of any interest, and the assorted other soldiers, prisoners, mercs, etc, were all instantly forgettable.

I was also disappointed in an outer space scifi movie that had zero non-human characters. Judy Dench's character is an "elemental" which seems to mean that she's partially transparent at times.  Other than that, everyone was just a human, mostly Caucasians with olive skin.  There are two spiky-panther type creatures, but other than that there are no aliens of any kind. SW and other movies often overdo it with an excess of bug-eyed freaks who it's difficult to feel any empathy or connection to, but Riddick got boring with nothing but humans.

Action: 6
Here's where you'd like to think the movie would excel, and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. The direction of most of the fight scenes was shit; all style and close ups and rapid cuts. Very souped-up Bruckheimer style, and while that can work to make a fight seem faster and more intense, here it mostly just seemed like none of the actors actually knew how to fight, and the close shots and cuts and shaking camera tricks were employed to conceal that fact.

Eye Candy: 8
This is by far the best thing about the film. The sets are gorgeous, the worlds are well-conceived and have a great look, the costumes are good, the space ships and weapons are nice, etc. There are original sets and looks everywhere, the whole movie has a gorgeous (to me, at least) bronze and cobalt color scheme, and the special effects are top notch.  Riddick's glowing white pupils are cool, and really make the character. Without those he's just another shaved, oiled, muscle boy in a black wifebeater. The coolest thing about the space ships, especially the Necromancer vessels, is that they seem to breath this black vaporous gas. It swirls around their propulsion mechanisms, being sucked and and floating out as they fly and rippling and dissipating in the air. I loved the look of it.  The other ships have a nice look too, their jets leaving glowing ion trails as they fly and contrails streams at the tips of their wings, like smoke packs on jets at an air show.  Unrealistic, but damn pretty.

The architecture wasn't necessarily good, I mean I wouldn't want huge sculptures of angry male faces all over my walls, but it looked awesome in the movie and helped set the tone and mood nicely. Any portion of Riddick I sit through in the future will be largely due to how good most of the movie looked.

Fun Factor: 4
Sadly disappointing here, with way too much pointless scheming and ponderous dialogue and delays before the ass-kicking began. The gaggle of giggling 13 y/o boys sitting behind us actually got so bored that they left about 2/3 of the way through the film, if that gives you any idea.  I was quite glad they did though, since as the movie dragged on and they got bored they started giggling and talking and dropping things at a greater frequency.

Replayability: 3
For the whole movie: 1. I can't see anyone liking this enough to watch the whole thing again, unless they were very, very bored. For selected scenes, mostly the large exteriors with the special effect ships and troops and such: 9. But 10 or 15 quality minutes out of a 2 hour film is not a real strong average.

Must See on the Big Screen: 4
The eye candy would be improved, and the music was great with lots of drums and bass and should be heard in surround, but other than that, there's no reason to see it in the theater. There are many reasons to see it at home, the largest of which is that you could fast forward liberally. I might pick this one up from the library in a year just to skim over it and enjoy the eye candy, but other than that I can't imagine ever watching it again.

Overall: 3.5
I wanted to like it, and found myself enjoying it on and off through the first 30 to 45 minutes. After that it was sporadically enjoyable, at best. I'm also marking this one down since it just wasn't well made. The plot and story were as bad as the special effects were good, and I think that a capable director and editor could rework this film, cut 20-30 minutes of dead time, and greatly improve it.

I don't have an entry for "logic" but if I did, this movie would get about a 1.5, at best. There are many, many scenes where you can't help but think, "Oh that could so never happen." A few examples, most of which are somewhat spoilery:

• Mercs try to capture Riddick by firing impractical spiky nets at him, rather than just some sort of tranquilizer dart.
• People outrun the rotational speed of a planet to keep ahead of the rising sun, repeatedly.
• People running across the impossibly inhospitable and rough terrain of a planet are able to go faster than other people moving through a flat, straight tunnel below the surface, over a distance of 29.6 kilometers. Not to mention the way the ones on the surface just happen to run right up to and past various small manhole type observational tunnels just when the people in the tunnels are near them.
• People survive on the surface of a planet where the nighttime temperature is 300 below zero, and the daytime is 700 above. Besides the fact that no breathable air could last a second on this atmosphere-less rock, the sunrise comes with a huge incinerating cloud of death (what's there to burn when this happens every day?), and people can survive just fine as long as they're in the shade. Even though the temperature five feet away is supposed to be 700 degrees.
• Guards go down into the lower levels of a prison when there's no reason on earth for them to do so, other than let the condemned to death inmates attack them.
• Most of the space ships don't any living spaces, means of recreation, or even have any chairs, and appear to be about the size of a minivan. They all have artificial gravity though, and can easily house four or five people for weeks at a time though, when none of them have room to do more than turn around.
• And while this is true of most movies, no one in all of CoR is ever seen eating, drinking, bathing, changing clothing, sleeping, or needing to pee. They might as well be androids for all we see of their physical needs, and they aren't much more human emotionally either, never showing grief or fear or sorrow or even anger. They just sort of fight and die because the plot demands it of them; no one seems to do anything for any real human motivation.

I could go on and on, since basically every segment in the movie is full of utterly illogical and ridiculous stuff. That's true of most action movies and all scifi movies, but CoR spends a lot more time trying to be cool and pretty than intelligent. That technique works for actors, but not so well for the movie they're acting in.

Overall, it's just not a well-made film. Unprofessional and uneven. It reminded me of Episode 1 and 2 in a way, since it had great eye candy (I liked that aspect of CoRfar more than the Skittles-colored world of SW.) but the dialogue was death, the characters had no real motivation to do anything, and the films were all dragged down by boring subplots about galactic supremacy, war strategy, treaties, and more. CoR could have been good, and I suppose a sequel could be better-written and improve upon things, but since the ending of CoR set us up for much more of the boring political stuff, and removed Riddick's status as a hunted outsider, I doubt CoR2, if there is such a thing, will be any better.

June 16, 2004

While I'm on the topic of weird and wacky movie reviews, you have to check out the CAP Alerts guy's commentary on The Chronicles of Riddick. Little did I know (I certainly didn't mention it in my review.) that the entire movie was a cleverly-calculated mockery of Christianity. Down to the name of Vin Diesel's production company.

As is true of most opinion pieces, this one says far more about the writer than the topic being discussed. Since the CAP Alerts guy spends all of his time obsessing about and feeling defensive because of his Christianity, he sees the depiction of the conquering Necromonger army as anti-Christian. The Necromongers use a form of brain washing to "convert" people to their cause. It's obviously a sort of mind control/brain washing, with the machine stabbing two points into the sides of the neck in the process. Why not the brain/skull? Good question. In any event, the neck stabbing leaves a scar, and the CAP Alerts guy sagely concludes that the scars on the sides of all of the Necromonger's necks are obviously a reference to the "mark of the beast."  So if they didn't have a scar would that be a sign of their divine power to heal?  You can turn anything into anything if you try hard enough.

Mr. CAP Alerts goes on to conclude that the depiction of a destroying army of brainwashed monsters is an unfair reference to the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages.  He then digresses and starts quoting some laughable figures about how Christians have been persecuted and murdered through time, and even today.

So there are almost 160k Christians being killed every year, simply for their religion? You'd think that would make the news a bit more often.

His review continues making no sense, before it takes a substantial detour into discussing why people shouldn't have a "fear of god" unless, of course, they should have a fear of god. It's pretty convoluted. Here's the beginning and ending paragraphs of his mini-sermon.

It might go without saying, but I didn't see anything at all in the movie, on any level, that related to this. The Necromongers had no religion or higher beliefs, other than that they could someday reach the "Underverse" which sounded something like a promised land; not that the CAP Alerts guy mentions that, when he could have made (sort of) a point about it. The Lord High Marshall had been to the Underverse and had come back "half alive and half something else." However, like most other cool things in the movie, this concept was barely addressed. He did a cool "rip the soul out of a guy" trick early on, and tried it later on Riddick, but other than that his only special power was moving super fast in bursts, like the charge attack of a Diablo II Paladin. You'd think that being half-dead from the Underverse would bring a few more interesting changes, but apparently not.

Riddick had some good elements, and it reminded me a bit of Underworld. That movie wasn't any good either, but it had some nice design and some potentially interesting characters; it just didn't have a story that was 1/10th as good as it could have been, given the various elements of the movie. Underworld was closer to living up to its potential, mostly since it didn't have anything as silly as Riddick outrunning the sunrise for 29.6k across an impossibly rugged planet surface, but both movies could have been far, far better in the hands of more talented writers, editors, and directors.

As for CAP Alerts guy, I think his conclusions are laughable; Riddick isn't The Matrix, with obvious Christian parallels. It's cheesy scifi, one of hundreds of movies/books/TV shows where an invading army comes to brainwash and conquer. Only someone with a perpetual case of Jesus on the brain would choose to take it as a big Christian metaphor.