THE CHRONICLES OF DICK
Couldn't resist a bad pun. Might have sounded better coming out of Vin Diesel's mouth, but, alas, I have no real aptitude for delivering zingers. Unless I'm insanely high.
I liked Riddick's predecessor, Pitch Black, more than it deserved to be liked. On first viewing in the theater, I came out feeling disappointed. After a couple of rental viewings, I came to enjoy the movie for its modesty and handful of visually arresting ideas. I put it in the Stargate/Supernova class of ambitious sci-fi B movies just clever enough to titillate, but never terribly original and almost always full of shit.
I'd heard lots of dribblings about the vacuity of Riddick on a number of the fan sites I frequent, but avoided reviews and relegated the breathlessness of message-board whiners to the bin of useless information.
I like David Twohy as a filmmaker. He's nailed B movies before. First with the nearly forgotten The Arrival, driven to irrelevance only because Charlie Sheen was its star. The Arrival contained a kernel of awe for sci-fi concepts that Twohy echoed back to an audience hungry for such wonder. I'll never forget Sheen's first foray through the bowels of the aliens' subterranean terraforming plant. Great stuff.
After Pitch Black, Twohy made Below, a strongly acted thriller based on a story idea by Darren Aronofsky (who was apparently too busy moving on with his career to direct his own haunted-submarine movie).
So, of the four Twohy movies I've seen, two were special, one was better than average, and then there's Riddick.
I'll give Twohy this. He loves the big-ass sandbox he's been given to play in. He realizes invading armies and planetary landscapes with a hefty dose of imagination. I'm a sucker for wide-angle shots of impossibly huge landscapes. I'm not sure I get the whole 700 degrees during the day, 400 degrees below at night on the planet, um, Crematoria, nor do I buy the idea that humanoids could withstand the stellar heat and wind these folks endure around sunrise, but it sure looked damn good, the sun carving a scorched wasteland across the horizon degree by degree. And some of the invasion shots, particularly those that aren't edited to death, look nifty.
What cracks me up about this movie is how derivative it is. Rather, how unapologetic it is in its derivations. Pitch Black was unquestionably an Alien ripoff, not only giving us a colony of xeno-bug bats, but relying lazily on the woefully tiresome ten-little-indians (and then there were none!) plot line. Riddick, on the other hand, is like a big fucking deli sandwich with layers and layers of stuff that tasted better in other meals.
You have references to Dune the novel and David Lynch's Dune. You have Patrick Totopoulous' lusty production design -- attractive -- but which looks like cool stuff from Stargate, which T. also designed. You have Tolkienesque power struggles. You have Thandie Newton giving her awful best as Lady Macbeth to Karl Urban's featureless, nuanceless Captain of the Guard role, or whatever he was supposed to be. Duncan Idaho, maybe? Or Gurney Halleck? Oooops, wrong movie.
You have planet piercing spears right out of the Shadow War in Babylon 5. Ya got your badass kung-fu prison chick with blades but no depth or breadth. Speaking of prisons, you've got a not so subtle ripoff of Fiorina 161, the prison planet in Alien 3, which was nicknamed Fury, Fury being the race Riddick belongs to. He's a Furyan, get it? And let's not forget Judi Dench as Galadriel with Saruman's wig.
The worst thing about this movie is its visual inconsistency and oppressive incoherence. I blame Michael Bay. Twohy isn't an action director, he doesn't seem to understand the importance of perspective, place, and rhythm in a protracted combat sequence. The opening invasion, once the beautiful skyborne views are behind us, boils down to a lot of stormtroopers marching over the bodies of hemp-clad natives, blasting their outsized pulse rifles at anything that looked like it would explode real nice. Hand to hand conflicts draw directly from the MTV handbook of crystal-meth cuts. Insty-flash closeups of gigantic gun barrels don't work because the guns are actually cool looking...when the fucking camera holds still long enough for you to soak them in. Chitinous mad dogs in the bowels of a prison hurl themselves into bars, walls, inmates, snarling and snapping just in time for a quick cut to steam or running water or a sweaty bicep. Spare me. Just slow down for a minute. Didn't Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorcese, and, more apropos of Riddick, Quentin Tarantino school us on the joy of relishing an ugly moment instead of being buffeted senseless by it? Apparently not. You want a coherent, suspenseful fight scene? Watch the swordfight between Tim Roth and Liam Neeson in the otherwise unremarkable Rob Roy. Watch some old Tsui Hark. Or anything Yuen Wo Ping choreographs.
Vin Diesel is a void. It pains me to say that if they'd digitally replaced Vin with Dolph Lundgren, the movie wouldn't have noticed.
I liked Riddick's predecessor, Pitch Black, more than it deserved to be liked. On first viewing in the theater, I came out feeling disappointed. After a couple of rental viewings, I came to enjoy the movie for its modesty and handful of visually arresting ideas. I put it in the Stargate/Supernova class of ambitious sci-fi B movies just clever enough to titillate, but never terribly original and almost always full of shit.
I'd heard lots of dribblings about the vacuity of Riddick on a number of the fan sites I frequent, but avoided reviews and relegated the breathlessness of message-board whiners to the bin of useless information.
I like David Twohy as a filmmaker. He's nailed B movies before. First with the nearly forgotten The Arrival, driven to irrelevance only because Charlie Sheen was its star. The Arrival contained a kernel of awe for sci-fi concepts that Twohy echoed back to an audience hungry for such wonder. I'll never forget Sheen's first foray through the bowels of the aliens' subterranean terraforming plant. Great stuff.
After Pitch Black, Twohy made Below, a strongly acted thriller based on a story idea by Darren Aronofsky (who was apparently too busy moving on with his career to direct his own haunted-submarine movie).
So, of the four Twohy movies I've seen, two were special, one was better than average, and then there's Riddick.
I'll give Twohy this. He loves the big-ass sandbox he's been given to play in. He realizes invading armies and planetary landscapes with a hefty dose of imagination. I'm a sucker for wide-angle shots of impossibly huge landscapes. I'm not sure I get the whole 700 degrees during the day, 400 degrees below at night on the planet, um, Crematoria, nor do I buy the idea that humanoids could withstand the stellar heat and wind these folks endure around sunrise, but it sure looked damn good, the sun carving a scorched wasteland across the horizon degree by degree. And some of the invasion shots, particularly those that aren't edited to death, look nifty.
What cracks me up about this movie is how derivative it is. Rather, how unapologetic it is in its derivations. Pitch Black was unquestionably an Alien ripoff, not only giving us a colony of xeno-bug bats, but relying lazily on the woefully tiresome ten-little-indians (and then there were none!) plot line. Riddick, on the other hand, is like a big fucking deli sandwich with layers and layers of stuff that tasted better in other meals.
You have references to Dune the novel and David Lynch's Dune. You have Patrick Totopoulous' lusty production design -- attractive -- but which looks like cool stuff from Stargate, which T. also designed. You have Tolkienesque power struggles. You have Thandie Newton giving her awful best as Lady Macbeth to Karl Urban's featureless, nuanceless Captain of the Guard role, or whatever he was supposed to be. Duncan Idaho, maybe? Or Gurney Halleck? Oooops, wrong movie.
You have planet piercing spears right out of the Shadow War in Babylon 5. Ya got your badass kung-fu prison chick with blades but no depth or breadth. Speaking of prisons, you've got a not so subtle ripoff of Fiorina 161, the prison planet in Alien 3, which was nicknamed Fury, Fury being the race Riddick belongs to. He's a Furyan, get it? And let's not forget Judi Dench as Galadriel with Saruman's wig.
The worst thing about this movie is its visual inconsistency and oppressive incoherence. I blame Michael Bay. Twohy isn't an action director, he doesn't seem to understand the importance of perspective, place, and rhythm in a protracted combat sequence. The opening invasion, once the beautiful skyborne views are behind us, boils down to a lot of stormtroopers marching over the bodies of hemp-clad natives, blasting their outsized pulse rifles at anything that looked like it would explode real nice. Hand to hand conflicts draw directly from the MTV handbook of crystal-meth cuts. Insty-flash closeups of gigantic gun barrels don't work because the guns are actually cool looking...when the fucking camera holds still long enough for you to soak them in. Chitinous mad dogs in the bowels of a prison hurl themselves into bars, walls, inmates, snarling and snapping just in time for a quick cut to steam or running water or a sweaty bicep. Spare me. Just slow down for a minute. Didn't Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorcese, and, more apropos of Riddick, Quentin Tarantino school us on the joy of relishing an ugly moment instead of being buffeted senseless by it? Apparently not. You want a coherent, suspenseful fight scene? Watch the swordfight between Tim Roth and Liam Neeson in the otherwise unremarkable Rob Roy. Watch some old Tsui Hark. Or anything Yuen Wo Ping choreographs.
Vin Diesel is a void. It pains me to say that if they'd digitally replaced Vin with Dolph Lundgren, the movie wouldn't have noticed.
posted by Andrew @ 11:39 PM
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