10 years ago, I had all 4 of my wisdom teeth pulled. And I needed to preoccupy myself while dealing with the soreness and fatigue. So I decided to watch The Chronicles of Riddick. Here is what I remember:
At one point, bearded eskimo Riddick jumps into a chopper and kills the occupants
Near the end of the movie, there is a large room with lots of soldiers, or maybe they were statues?
That is literally all I remember from the movie. Was I just groggy from after the surgery, or was the movie just poorly made and unmemorable? Was it my fault or the movie’s fault?
(Better question: Why make an entire thread for this instead of just asking in the movie thread?)
For the record, it was the latter. Whereas as Pitch Black was an unorthodox sci-fi movie that took some risks and didn’t rely on many cliches and thus had those risks generally pay off, The Chronicles of Riddick was a barely related sequel that was a cliche-storm on top of having a bunch of vaguely explained bullshit while also somehow not having the moral ambiguity of Pitch Black since there are pretty clear bad-guys here. The bad guys here are also a group of (visually) overdramatic pseudo-nihilist conquerors that don’t really have much of anything interesting going for them beyond the fact that their leader has a ghetto version of Chizuru’s powers from KOF if she made out with Shang Tsung; he also manages to die in a pretty hilarious way at the end, which is one of the few memorable things about the movie. Add all of those problems on top of a supposed prophecy and dumbing down the now-grown Jack’s character, and, yeah, it was poorly made. I still feel kind of bad that Dame Judi Dench got roped into that movie somehow; less so for everyone else even though that includes otherwise good actors like Thandie Newton, Colm Feore and Keith David.
Still, I wouldn’t say it’s outright horrible, but it’s passably mediocre at best and definitely disappointing compared to Pitch Black and I wouldn’t recommend wasting one’s time watching it in its entirety.
I can’t think of one movie Vin Diesel has made that wasn’t Pitch Black or Guardians of the Galaxy that I give a shit about.
I heard he will be Black Bolt though, so there’s that. Two movies, and the most he will say is “I AM GROOT” and “NOOOOOOO”. At least No will be accompanied by a mountain exploding.
I enjoyed them all, but the last movie is forever my -ish. I like how in Pitch Black and Riddick were great as stand alone films. They didn’t necessarily need any knowledge of prior movies to enjoy them.
