saltlakemusic
Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick · Jun 11, 03:44 PM
Pitch Black (Directed by David N. Twohy)
I grew up reading Dark Horse comics and listening to Arrested Development, by the time I was 16 every sci fi genre had been tapped and sucked dry, or so I’d thought. I had the pleasure of reading the original script for Pitch Black by Ken Wheat after I’d first seen the film, which I liked, and I gotta tell you, the script sucked big time. All the greatest episodes of Radar Men from the Moon were payed homage in this delightfully formulaic sci fi action flick. What came to mind when I first read the script, among other analogies was Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “The Night” in which the psychological terror of darkness is the central theme. How this movie turned into the cheap decapitation and thematic removal of key cast members via computer generated monsters makes sense given the playbill of so and so, so and so, and VIN DIESEL! wow.
After about the third person gets eaten I’ve lost all those earlier goosebumps from when the stereotypical naive blonde character opts to satisfy her curiosity at the risk of being eaten when obviously she should just pick up the gun and get the hell out of there. By the time the fifth or sixth person dies I’m all about the Aliens. I buy the big styrofoam thumb and some popcorn and start chanting “GO ALIENS!” I can’t wait to see Vin Diesel’s ripped biceps get eaten like a chicken wing by these flying plagarisms. Cheap thrills and manufactured predicaments makes Pitch Black a must see for ages 13 and up, plus I highly recommend the director’s cut which has even cheaper and bloodier cgi decpitations and disembowlments. Still no titties though.
A group of marooned space travelers struggle for survival on a seemingly lifeless sun-scorched world. Vin Diesel is cast as a convicted killer who has to win the trust of his fellow castaways and ultimately leads the group against the planet’s alien inhabitants.
Our adventure into scary outer space begins as a the spaceship holding all our dynamic personalities gets hit by a nasty meteor shower, which kills the Captain, but even worse: wakes up our second in command from crio-sleep, a raunchy anorexic blonde woman named Fry (Radha Mitchell) who plunges the remains of the ship into a desert planet.
Excerpt from the script (Written by Ken and Jim Wheat)
“The survivors straggle outside. CAMERA SURVEYS new faces:
ZEKE and SHAZZA. Male-female team of bushwhackers, partners in life. Shazza has a tough sexiness. Zeke’s face shows aboriginal blood. (30s.)
PARIS. Overfed, overgroomed. A puff pastry of a man. (40s or 50s.)
Four male “Chrislams”: The pillar-steady IMAM (50ish), and THREE PILGRIMS, young and excitable (late-teens). (NOTE: The Chrislams represent a union between Christianity and Islam. They have the iconography of Christians yet the physical look of Arab Muslims.)”
You heard it right, among the list of scatter brained castaways are the above and other classics such as: the obligatory rebellious tomboy, the formulaic space bounty hunter and his deadly but invaluable prisoner, the unsalvagably hemerged co-pilot (and his several last words), and the scrappy but sensitive and always incompetantly indecisive bitch of a skipper. There’s no telling what might happen when this zany bunch of scallywags get marooned together with nothing but wine and whiskey to keep them alive. What a totally original premise!
With a surplus of token characters on such an empty, boring planet, it’s only a matter of how to best kill them all as dazzlingly as possible in about an hour. It’s no doubt invaluable for our director to plot our cast into a hopelessly perilous conundrum, in which lots of our less likable characters can get humorously cut in half or their face eaten off, or whatever. In a sortof congruent pattern with the movie title the cast is situated on their planet at the dawn of a huge, indefinite solar eclipse. When the sun goes down scary badguys come out and eat our little religious pilgrims, which saddens the remaining castaways.
When the anorexic ho captain finally reaches out to Riddick for the sake of their group’s ultimate survival, chemistry happens, and for once in the movie, you start to think you might see some titties. But you never will see any, because Riddick is such a pimp he doesn’t even care about getting some of that ass, he just wants to punch these aliens in the face so he can go back to his life as a sexy muscle-dude. This saddens Fry a little bit because she’s a naive little biotch and scared of aliens.
One thing’s for certain, almost all these people are going to die before this movie ends. These are some very hungry aliens after our scatter brained and stranded crew, but every antagonist needs an achilles heel. We want carnivorous aliens to get beat up by a big muscle-dude weilding a knife for some reason and knows how to kick their ass regardless of plot limits.
Our aliens can only be killed with sunlight and big guns, and incidentally Riddick can see in the dark and happens to have big muscles, so the idiot crew picks the leader with the biggest deltoids and thus somewhat puts their lives in the hands of a walking, talking, stabbing cliche.
In a last ditch attempt to escape the planet they can go the distance fighting off the aliens with glowsticks, using Riddick like rudolph the rednosed reindeer to guide them through the perilous semi-climax.
spoiler—Nothing can prepare you for what happens next. I won’t give it away, but I can tell you, aliens eat the blonde bitch and riddick flexes his muscles in mourning. I guess I sortof did ruin it, oh well.—end spoiler
Commentary
“I could believe the aliens who live in the dark, and the planet with three suns, and the probability of an eclipse on the same day they landed, all this stuff I could believe. But a religion which incorporates both Islam and Christianity? Well, okay I can believe that too. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m in the middle of dinner and were having sandwiches with the bread where the meat goes and meat where the bread goes. Keith David (who played Mary’s father in There’s Something About Mary)totally rocked as the Chrislum priest, I found his character almost as authentic as his arabic accent. -Joe”
“Vin Diesel’s rage on screen isn’t from good acting, it’s from good steroids which he apparently injects into his nose. -Josey”
Chronicles of Riddick (Direct by David N. Twohy)
“Vin Diesel told Sci Fi Wire that he’s co-writing the “Pitch Black” sequel with director David Twohy. “We should have a script in the next few weeks or month,” Diesel said in an interview. “It will be called The Chronicles of Riddick.” He confirmed that the sequel would not deal with the same aliens as the original film. “It will not be another Pitch Black situation,” Diesel said. “We’re going to follow Riddick through this universe, more like a futuristic Conan, coupled with a Harrison-Ford attitude and Star Wars. It’s going to be dope. -Sci Fi Wire”
Whatever genre Twohy wasn’t able (or perhaps willing) to exploit with his first collaboration with VIN DIESEL had to be crammed into the sequel: Chronicles of Riddick. Though the story expands to new partially-tapped levels of recycled cinema, the core mitivation of the film remains true to it’s predecessor: Riddick’s don’t-give-a-shit attitude, which sortof mirrors my don’t-give-a-shit attitude towards Riddick. How could a movie go wrong when the writer AND star is VIN DIESEL?!
Riddick’s character once was a pirate who didn’t give a shit about shit. But once I got to know him in this sequel and saw how much he really cared, I finally realized how important it is for big muscle dudes to keep their mouth shut and look cool, occasionally stabbing someone. That’s the real art behind the conept of a character like Riddick you know: the stab. He’s so pimp ass that he doesn’t even need to use a gun, he just dodges, stabs and game over badguys. Vin Diesel is roided up and ready to stab in Chronicles of Riddick, the perfect generic reintroduction of visual themes from such classic science fiction movies as Dune and Star Wars with the underlying plot thicker than a 30 minute cartoon, but not by much.
The further adventures of Riddick (Vin Diesel) continue five years later, as the escaped convict with the ability to see in the dark finds himself caught in the middle of a galactic war between two opposing forces, with the key figure being the Lord Marshal (Colm Feore), the leader of a sect called the Necromongers waging the “10th Crusade” in the 26th century. Helping Riddick is Aereon (Judi Dench), the Ambassador of the “Elemental” race, who helps Riddick unearth the secrets of his origin and Kyra (Alexa Davalos), who has grown up since Riddick knew her as a preteen girl in the first movie. Attempting to free himself and Kyra from a subterranean prison, Riddick ends up on board the Necromonger flagship, where he gets his chance to face off against the Lord Marshal in a battle over the future of all beings in the galaxy, both living… and dead.
When we meet up again with Riddick he wastes no time in quickly killing some badguys, stealing their spaceship and then flying off to some planet to punch the person who hired these space thugs in the face. He quickly finds out that the culprit this hag (Judy Dench from the 007 movies and various british sitcoms) who supposedly heard this prophesy one time about how Vin Diesel would fall from the sky and save the universe from these anti-chrislams: The Necromongers.
These necromongers mean business. They brainwash every survivor among the planets they conquer, and it just so happens that Riddick recently landed on the same planet that these religious freaks intend to invade and convert. Colm Feore plays this leader of the necromongers, Lord Marshall who’s supposedly been to this place called “Underverse” and returned with the sweet powers like ripping people’s souls from their bodies. Nobody messes with this dude because he supposedly can’t be killed.
When it’s Riddick’s turn to get converted to necromancy the brainwashing machine breaks down because he’s so pimp he can’t even be brainwashed. So he runs away, stabs some more people, then get’s captured by the same dude that was chasing him at the beginning of the film, so-and-so the bounty hunter and his rag tag bunch of bounty hunter buddies, who fly away on their spaceship to planet dumbname, a prison planet where he meets up with the now matured (and quite sexy) Frank (Alexa Duvalos) who knows one or two martial arts moves but more importantly chilled with Riddick for a while in Pitch Black (remember the iconic tomboy?) so these two have some history, and chemistry! But don’t be fooled, there’s no titties in this movie either.
The blind lead the blind to victory once again as Riddick runs, punches and stabs his way across the volcanic planet leaving behind him a trodden path of corpses for his idiot buddies to walk accross to predictably inevitable peril. Vaako (Karl Urban from Lord of the Rings) second in command to the the Lord Marshall, has something rude to say to Riddick and steals the very sexy female love interest as booty.
Blah, blah. The story goes on in this manner, I forget who kills who, oh wait, yeah Vin Diesel kills everyone, everyone except Judy Dench that is. Now that we’ve got these important details out of the way, let’s look at a few of the film’s strong points. For starters, Riddick stabs people, and from what we know about Riddick’s character so far, he enjoys this activity very much. So when Riddick is happy, it shows, the more he cuts up the bad guys the better he feels, and the audience can relate. Several times during this movie I had the uncontrollable urge to hide behind stuff and then jump out and stab somebody.
The film’s major weakest feature has to be it’s shallow, super nintendo story. The plotline being swiss cheese, the characters pop in and get killed quicker than you can say pinjata, behaving according to their according hollywood stereotype for their little glimmer between stunts and CGI graphics like tigers-like aliens that change color or spaceships that stab into the ground to act as towering citadels. Worst part of this film is it’s complete disregard for frugal decapitations and bloodletting graphics, in fact it’s rated Pg-13, so you should know right away there’s no titties.
Commentary
“Bad movies stick to Judy Dench like flies on shit. -Joe”
“Riddick action figures don’t just sell themselves y’know. -Josey”
* * *