Riddick (2013)
Directed by David Twohy
Betrayed by his own kind and left for dead on a desolate planet, Riddick fights for survival against alien predators and becomes more powerful and dangerous than ever before. Soon bounty hunters from throughout the galaxy descend on Riddick only to find themselves pawns in his greater scheme for revenge. With his enemies right where he wants them, Riddick unleashes a vicious attack of vengeance before returning to his home planet of Furya to save it from destruction.
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Many of the land-dwelling critters evoke the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise, which is unsurprising given that Pitch Black started life as writer-director David Twohy's script submission for Alien 3 at a time when Sigourney Weaver was refusing to reprise her role as Ripley.
There is an early scene in which he leaps into a pool in order to hide from flesh-hungry beasts and must maintain frozen posture while submerged in order to not aggravate the piranha-like eels that are slithering around him, inspiring a moment of tension that harkens us back to some of the best nail-biting moments of the “Alien” pictures.
An efficient, if decidedly derivative, space-set monster movie in the "Alien" vein, 2000's "Pitch Black" proved a small sleeper success, just about doubling its no-frills $21-million budget and creating a star out of Vin Diesel (who would go on to make " The Fast and the Furious " the following year).
Alas, here comes “Riddick” to follow 2000’s dull “Alien” rip-off and 2004’s dull sci-fi/action epic that makes less sense as it goes.
The first hour of the film is spent with Riddick in full survivalist mode as he tries to figure out a way past a poisonous hydra monster that looks like it was ripped straight out of Alien.
Swap a solar eclipse and Alien clones for a rainstorm and giant water scorpions, and the films bear more than a passing resemblance.
If the plot’s somewhat reminiscent of the original film and its influences, not least James Cameron’s Aliens, it is at least a flick that makes good use of its precious resources.
The technique was perfected by James Cameron in “Aliens” and has become the standard of science fiction character teams since (even used again later in the director’s own “Avatar”), and here director David Twohy makes full use of it right down to the token asshole (Santana) who is short-sighted and too smug to know that he will probably be laughed off screen by a hateful audience well before the final act.
Johns' motley crew of space thugs includes a bulked-up sniper named Dahl (Katee Sackhoff, channeling Jenette Goldstein's butt-kicking Vasquez in Aliens).
The movie hints early on at what's coming, but saves the all-out creature-feature festivities for the action-packed climax, turning the tables once again on the audience to give us a final taste of sci-fi horror with a back-to-the-basics nod to Pitch Black and Aliens .
Eventually, Diesel re-enters the fray, and Riddick becomes a shameless rip-off of Aliens, as well as a preposterous cartoon that makes The Amazing Spider-Man seem like an Errol Morris documentary.
One of the most memorable non-monster moments in Aliens is a brief, iconic exchange between two tough-as-tungsten-carbide space marines played by Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein.
Many of the land-dwelling critters evoke the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise, which is unsurprising given that Pitch Black started life as writer-director David Twohy's script submission for Alien 3 at a time when Sigourney Weaver was refusing to reprise her role as Ripley.
And for most of the fairly terrific 30 minutes that follow, “Riddick” resembles nothing so much as an outer-space remake of the 1966 Cornel Wilde adventure “The Naked Prey,” with Diesel on the run from all manner of carnivorous creatures, including “alien jackals” that look like the offspring of a zebra and a pit bull.
This man-versus-nature opening segment plays like a laughable, tension-free sci-fi variation of The Naked Prey .
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Most intriguing is when the dark-feeding creatures force three distinct groups to fight as one…the uneasy alliances and suspense reminded me of another sci-fi/horrow ride, 1982’s “The Thing”.
Oddly, Riddick starts well enough – think A Boy and His Dog meets Conan the Barbarian – in a back-to-basics survivalist mode that reminds us of the comparative pleasures of two-Riddick-movies-ago, Pitch Black.
The bloated opening act of the 119-minute “Riddick” is its weakest chapter and many won’t be able to get past this extended riff on “A Boy and His Dog” as Riddick (Vin Diesel) is forced to deal with life alone on an inhospitable planet after being stranded there.
Aside from a flashback and some typically noir-ish narration, this opening stretch of the film is wordless; visually and tonally, it brings to mind Paul W.S. Anderson’s underrated Kurt Russell space Western Soldier .
I really like the idea of “a guy and his dog” that’s reminiscent, believe it or not, of “Dances With Wolves.”
There is virtually no dialogue, but Diesel’s sizable screen presence and our previous experiences with the character are more than enough to sustain both tension and momentum (the digital effects used to create the planet’s vistas are a bit hokey-looking at times, as is a CGI dog creature that Riddick ultimately befriends Dances With Wolves-style, but it’s all part of the movie’s self-aware lowbrow charm).
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After the failed attempt on his life, Riddick struggles to survive on an unfamiliar, barely habitable planet filled with wild alien dogs, impressively terrifying amphibious scorpion-like monsters and equally unimpressive-looking pterodactyl-like vultures, all on a desert CGI landscape that's a cross between Georges Méliès' 1902 silent classic "A Trip to the Moon" and the 1980 cheese fest "Flash Gordon."
After the failed attempt on his life, Riddick struggles to survive on an unfamiliar, barely habitable planet filled with wild alien dogs, impressively terrifying amphibious scorpion-like monsters and equally unimpressive-looking pterodactyl-like vultures, all on a desert CGI landscape that's a cross between Georges Méliès' 1902 silent classic "A Trip to the Moon" and the 1980 cheese fest "Flash Gordon."