“It’s been a long time since I smelled beautiful.”

Justin’s rating: RIDDICK! meet KHAN!

Justin’s review: Ignoring the two six-year-olds sitting behind me asking their daddy what was going on during every scene of this PG-13/R-rated movie, I came to a realization of how stuck in a rut the science fiction genre has become over the past half-century or so. This then caused a small spark of happiness well up within me that the makers of The Chronicles of Riddick weren’t playing ball with said rut.

Ideally, science fiction should be the most wide-open, imaginative genre on the market. Instead of limiting the action to a world, we have a universe; instead of set-in-stone staples, we have a future’s worth of creative technology and discoveries. Yet mainstream sci-fi has taken but baby steps from merely window dressing traditional military or action films up with brighter, shinier new gadgets.

Star Trek and Star Wars, of course, have much to answer for, but I don’t blame them. I blame their rejected offspring that took a look at these pioneering projects and said, “Hey, that worked, let’s just do the same thing and play it safe.” Hollywood and the TV industry aren’t big on sci-fi, and the few times a year they decide to gamble on the geek crowd, they stick to what’s mostly recognizable. Replace guns with laser pistols. Take a military battleship and just directly translate that to an outer space military battleship. Artificial gravity, recognizable modern colloquialisms, and aliens with bumps on their foreheads, stat!

It doesn’t help that the people and projects that are really trying to take another pioneering step to bring sci-fi to a new, wonderful place are almost always hampered by grumpy critics and a we-caught-on-to-this-show-too-late mainstream crowd. Honestly, I’m just sick of Star Trek clones (even within the Star Trek universe) and morally perfect explorative captains — I want something new, something raw, something that sparks my imagination.

Like its predecessor Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick cannot be hailed as a masterpiece, but can be appreciated for going down the road much less traveled. Picking up five years after PB, we find Riddick is still on the run from mercenaries and his little gender-ambiguous friend is now in a jail on a planet hotter than Mercury. To make matters more interesting, a Goth-Nazi-Roman race of planetary conquerors known as the Necromongers are chomping their way through planet after planet on some sort of holy crusade. Oh no, where are we going to find a grumpy anti-hero reluctant enough to stop them? Why, in the main billing, you silly goose!

The sci-fi universe that David Twohy and company shows us is still rough-hewn and only half-pulls away from the traditional sci-fi junk that litters bad writers’ efforts. Yet what I’ve really liked about both movies is that they’re not the hand-holding type of sci-fi enterprises; they just kind of throw you into the middle of the action, explaining a bit here and there, but letting the universe exist before the films, instead of needing to personally introduce each little element before it can be digested by the audience.

The Necromongers, for example, aren’t completely explained. The carefully attentive can pick up on details as to their faith and modus operandi, or use their imagination how the weird x-ray animal-guys work, but their whole race and technology seems bigger than the film that it’s put in — and I highly appreciate that. Science fiction should always be about a small story in a world that expands far outside the boundaries of the story, and that’s the way we get it here.

Riddick, the man who loves to take his goggles off and put them back on, makes a stone-faced reappearance to diddle in the affairs of the Necromongers. Do you realize that we, as an audience, have been trained to actually admire a very unpersonable hero who is at best a complete jerk, as long as they can do some incredibly nifty moves with guns or knives? That’s really twisted, when you give it some thought. Movies have trained us well indeed.

The Chronicles of Riddick lacks some focus, as does the lead character. We’re never sure where the plot is going, exactly, or whether Riddick cares that he’s bouncing from A to B to C. Since we only get a sparse couple of Riddick’s inner narratives, his thoughts and personality are locked away from us, leaving a stranger who’s fun to watch, but a stranger nonetheless. While this lack of focus is frustrating on a more subliminal level — we are trained to pick up on the ebbs and flows of movies deep down, and the more disconnected the film is, the more unsettling it is to us inside — it certainly doesn’t mean this movie is boring or stereotypical.

On the contrary, I completely enjoyed COR. Unlike Pitch Black, COR takes us off one mere world and gives us multiple worlds with space ships, a planetary invasion or two, a deadly jail and the expected jailbreak, and Danish Judi Dench phasing in and out of reality. The technology and sci-fi is cool, which ranges from the predictable to the oddly bizarre (such as a mind-reading machines that seem to utilize upside-down souls and a body magnetizing system — MST3K: The Movie fans should have a quote going right now). There’s even a cheeky twist on the whole premise of Pitch Black; while in PB, the survivors were afraid of the nightfall on the planet, in COR, the good guys fear daybreak that will bring fireballs’ worth of weather patterns.

There’s also a wicked streak of black humor that runs through the film, supposedly giving us a good enough reason to connect with Riddick. Hey, when this man says he’s going to kill you with his tea cup, you better believe it, buster.

Pitch Black was a love-or-vaguely-dislike venture to many, and I fear that Chronicles of Riddick will be the same. It’s a pity; the sci-fi here is the best we’ll probably get all year, and I’d even venture to stretch that on over to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

PoolMan’s rating: Here’s my 20 menthol Kools! Shine me!

PoolMan’s review: I can’t believe this. Five years spent successfully avoiding Vin Diesel movies, and here I am, finding myself a big fan. How embarrassing.

You can’t really blame me. When Diesel hit the scene, he was basically just one more oiled-up action “star”, seeming for all the world to be just as disposable as so many others. I quickly wrote him off, pretty much on appearance and choice of roles alone. The guy got famous doing The Fast and the Furious (a movie which I still have no interest in, but that’s more to do with my distaste for the street racing community) and Aliens-ripoff flick Pitch Black. Little did I know that Pitch Black was going to be so damned fun, and that its main character, one Richard B. Riddick, was going to be so damned interesting.

Now I’m in full Riddick fan mode. I saw Pitch Black for the first time just a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m off buying the excellent PC game (Escape From Butcher Bay) and renting The Chronicles of Riddick, the first Pitch Black sequel. God help me, I even wonder where I might get a set of goggles like that! (a quick peek at eBay says I can have a set of “distressed on Crematoria” goggles, with no lens or strap, for a mere $565. Wow.)

Like the Italian Werewolf suggests above, CoR, like Pitch Black before it, is not a wonderment of modern cinema. It is not the end all and be all of science fiction or action movies. What it IS is a heaping helping of cool settings and great character touches. Watching Riddick take a guard down with his teacup is good; watching the other guards back off when he then produces a tiny pin as his next weapon is awesome. Here’s the perfect hero for those who not only prefer Han shooting first, but then going on to tear Greedo’s antennae off for being disrespectful.

While I also appreciate the much larger playground David Twohy and Vin Diesel give the character to play in, the whole “race of unstoppable beings prophesized to be destroyed by a lone man” gets to be a little overbearing. While it makes sense that Riddick is a large character in this universe, it gets to feeling like maybe it’s all a little too contrived. There’s a healthy helping of deus ex machina at not just the end, but several points during the movie. Riddick survives more than one encounter simply because it’s written that way, not because it makes sense, and his predestined encounter with the Lord Marshall takes on religious and unbelievable aspects.

Still, seeing how the writers subverted some of the old standards is a lot of fun. The first movie really only had one ship that saw any flight time, and it was a grungy old freighter with emergency air flaps and (sorry Clare) levers. Here we see all kinds of half-understood technology, with ships that have giant faces on them, psychics and water buckets used for communications, and little scuba-faced dudes with Xbox controllers on their back for seeing the unseeable. It’s all laid out with an evident amount of care. In fact, it almost takes on a tone of fantasy amidst its sci-fi trappings.

Apparently the scripts for two more sequels are already written and ready to go. I for one hope they get a chance to see daylight; the way this flick ends, you just know they had more in mind with the story. The Chronicles of Riddick may not be a perfect movie (I think Pitch Black ended up being more fun), but it’s one with a lot of heart and great touches, and I’d love to see what they can do with the story and character from here.