The Chronicles of Riddick [2004]

David Twoky's Pitch Black [2000] grafted the plot mechanics of the jungle plane crash picture Five Came Back [1939; remade as Back From Eternity, 1956] with the science fiction world-building of Isaac Asimov's classic short story 'Nightfall' [about a multi-sunned planet where night comes only during rare solar eclipses]. It also found room for the sort of cool criminal anti-hero usually found in the films of John Carpenter [cf: Darwin Joston's Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13, 1976, Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken in Escape From New York, 1981] and cast the then-barely-known Vin Diesel as Richard B. Riddick, a hardman career crook with goggles to cover light-sensitive eyes and a self-absorbed ruthlessness that inevitably gives way to altruism as he hauls survivors out of peril and shows himself to be a man of more integrity than the apparent authority figures on the team, all of whom die. Between that ingenious, smart little sleeper and this big, dumb summer blockbuster, Diesel has pumped up into something like a star - though his best work, in Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious [2001] casts him as a flamboyant secondary character while someone more grounded takes the lead, and actual heroic star efforts like xXx [2002] have found him in less convincing mode.

Though the sorry example of Carpenter and Russell's Escape From L.A. [1996] must have hovered, Twohy and Diesel reteam for this much-bigger-budgeted Riddick spin-off, with a cartoon mini-feature [Escape From Butcher Bay] and a video game [The Dark Fury] to justify the pluralisation, and Pitch Black re-issued on DVD with the title changed to The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black to reaffirm its prequel status. Whereas Escape From L.A. fell into the trap of being a remake that offered nothing new, this takes the riskier strategy of transplanting its antihero into a whole new storyline; indeed, watching both Riddick films back to back, it's hard not to feel they take place in different universes. Both work in elements of the style of vintage pulp s-f once specialised in by Hal Clement [Mission of Gravity] by coming up with extreme planetary environments and working hard to show what sort of landscape or life might evolve under an unlikely set of circumstances. However, Pitch Black seemed to be set in a universe where mankind has moved away from the Earth and established offworld colonies but there is still a continuity from our present history - as in the Alien films or Starship Troopers. Chronicles, however - in which Riddick has lost his Earth-sounding first name and initial - is the sort of space opera that suggests a far future [Dune] or distant past [Star Wars] where galaxy-spanning civilisations consist of mostly-humanoid but non Earthling races and powerful armies stand around as their commanders fight personal duels or invade worlds using spaceships and serrated swords.

Twohy's earlier films play claustrophobic suspense games, but this aspires to the epic even as it is constantly being brought down by trite plot developments and muddle-headed invented mythology. There are arresting bits of monumental art direction, like the huge bronze-look faces that decorate Necromonger spaceships or the cast-iron screws and shields that cap the escape-proof prison pits of Crematoria, but the silliness of the names signals the weakness of the script. Following the tipped-in Othello of The Punisher, Twohy indulges in the oddest action movie trend of 2004 by cutting and pasting Shakespearean tragedy sub-plots - though a glowering Karl Urban and a slinky Thandie Newton barely work up any charge as outer space versions of the Macbeths, Linus Roache and Judi Dench compete in the portentous enigmaticism stakes and Colm Feore is a remote, unthreatening villain. The smaller-scale characters of Pitch Black worked better with Diesel's Riddick than this crew of funny-hat conspirators, but even the grittier inhabitants of the prison section of the film fail to make an impression. Even more crucial is the fact that Diesel is lost amid all the business, inexpressive rather than hard-boiled, and iconic only at the last, in a shot modeled on many a Conan cover as the petty thief slouches on a throne while serried ranks bow to him. More Chronicles are promised, but hardly seem necessary.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound October 2004

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com