Chronicles of Riddick



Chronicles of Riddick is a sequel to Pitch Black (2000), but where the previous film resembles Aliens (1986), this one plays like Frank Herbert's Dune. Riddick (Vin Diesel, the hairless Dave Atell) is living on an ice planet when bounty hunters catch up with him. He steals the bounty hunter's ship and travels to Helios to kill the man who placed the bounty on him, who happens to be one of the people Riddick saved from the alien predators in the original film. However, he only placed the bounty at the urging Aereon (Judi Dench!), an "Elemental" concerned about the advance across human space by techno-religious extremists called Necromongers. Aereon believes that a prophecy made years ago means that Riddick may be the only person in the universe who can kill the Lord Marshall, leader of the Necromongers.


After years of waiting, we finally get to see Judi Dench and Vin Diesel share the same scene.

The Necromongers arrive on Helios and conquer the entire planet in a few hours and begin converting all the surviving inhabitants into more Necromongers. Riddick escapes them, but is captured by the bounty hunters he left behind on the ice planet and dropped off in the nearby prison on Cremetoria, a planet where the sun annihilates anything organic on the surface. Riddick meets up with "Jack" from Pitch Black, now a tough as nails convict going by the name Kyra, and plots his escape.

Chronicles of Riddick is a frustrating movie. It should be good. It looks great. There are hints of a really interesting story. The actors are generally good. Occasionally the dialogue is very witty. But on the whole movie looks like it was edited with a chain saw. I don't know anything about what happened during the production of the movie (other than the brief but torrid affair between Deisel and Dench, of course) but I would have to guess that severe cuts were made to Chronicles late in post-production, partly to streamline the story and partly to get a PG-13 rating. All the indications are there. Characters appear and disappear without reason, motivations are fuzzy, there's some lame narration dropped in at a couple points, and I can't believe a movie so dependent on people getting killed with stabbing weapons was ever intended to be PG-13.


"Submit to the rule of GWAR!"

So the movie fails as a story. As a visual it's pretty incredible. At first the Necromongers sound like rip-offs of the Borg, but there more to them and I really liked the way all there technology looked like it had been carved out of metal. All the planets that show up in Chronicles are fully realized and quite interesting. There are also some really neat dog-aliens in the prison that reminded me of how far CGI has come. Other than the fact that they can move about freely it would be hard to tell that they weren't created on set somehow.

I wouldn't suggest running out to see the movie. Wait until the DVD comes out. If there's a R-rated director's cut of Chronicles of Riddick, that's the one you want to see. I'm betting it will make much more sense.

Posted: Sat - June 12, 2004 at      

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