Sunday 5 September, 2004
Chronicles of Riddick
After a nice and extremely hot day we decided to go an cool ourselves in the air-conditioned local cinema. The film I've wanted to see for a while was David Twohy's Chronicles of Riddick. I quite liked the previous film, Pitch Black, and from everything I'd heard about the Chronicles was that it was a solid three star movie - so I was expecting to be entertained, but not to a degree that would work my brain too much.
I always hate it when I'm expecting a good movie and get something else. When the movie started I felt like I was in a wrong cinema altogether - I was expecting a sci-fi action film, and got some weird fantasy flick where the main character only spoke with one-liners and plot made little sense. I was getting really frustrated - but then we got to the good part, the sci-fi movie that I wanted. We have a cool jail break and really, after that things were cool and the rest of the movie was pretty entertaining.
So... yes, I liked it. However, I very much feel like there were two movies trapped in a body of just one. There was the sci-fi action thriller with a really cool hostile planet with a penitentiary and man looking for a woman and a jail break. More than enough material for one movie. Then we had the fantasy movie with Necromongers and Elementals and Furies and plotting, and we have the apocalypse and everything is very dark and gothic and depressing. Combine these two and you have something weird. Entertaining, yes, but weird.
I've never seen Vin Diesel better than when he's playing Riddick - this is obviously the character he feels most comfortable with, and he's even co-produced this movie. Especially in the beginning I think he overdoes the coolness a bit, but settles in when Riddick starts interacting with other characters instead of just running around. I also really liked Karl Urban - last time seen as the fair-headed Eomer, now as a black-haired gothic necromonger warlord - still, he got to do his brooding bit that he does very well. In fact, most of the actors did a really nice job, special effects were cool, soundtrack fitting and action with the pro-wrestling style choreography was pretty sweet.
It's not going to be a classic, but it entertains you for the price of the cinema tickets, and that's exactly what you sometimes need.
Posted by kolibri at 5 September 21:15, 2004Yeah, Riddick is already a guilty pleasure classic, channeling everything from Dune, LOTR, Star Trek, Star Wars, even the story of Conan the Barbarian (the end "twist"). Your entry pretty much says it all - in my case, though, I would have been happy to see more of the fantasy elements - the man escaping from high security prison bit has been done to death. Also, the film seems to use FX budget very early, on the arrival of Necromongers and never again achieves that kind of gothic grandeur. I for one would like to see the planned sequels - where they go to Underverse and planet Furia.
# 2 - Kolibri (on September 6, 2004 08:04 AM):
Dragon will probably agree with you on the fantasy elements and that there should have been more of them - but his genre is fantasy and mine is sci-fi... hence security prison was more my thing :)
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