After years of outrunning ruthless bounty hunters, escaped convict Riddick suddenly finds himself caught between opposing forces in a fight for the future of the human race. Now, waging incredible battles on fantastic and deadly worlds, this lone, reluctant hero will emerge as humanity's champion - and the last hope for a universe on the edge of annihilation.
03 Aug The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Three Women
I go to opera now and then. Some people — I suppose — think that because much classical music is complex, so is opera. But there is a world of difference between a complex experience and a rich one. Opera is rich, and usually street-simple regarding complexity. each has their own kind of sophistication and reward.
So shoot me, I liked this. And I’m hard to please. But then, I thought the middle part of “Alien Resurrection” (with the architectural water) was a major advance in the cinematic vocabulary. And though I disliked both Spidermen because the camera didn’t swoop, I did like “Daredevil” because the eye of the camera was open for tinkering.
Yes, this is stupid in many ways. The mythology is cobbled together from all sorts of genres, but the improbability of those combinations is a little breathtaking: vampires meets prison films meets the fight against world domination led by an ordained saviour.
But here’s what I liked: the editing of the action scenes is precise, precisely timed to be a tiny bit beyond what we can perceive. I’m speaking here of the longer cut.
The production design which really did have some variety as they moved from place to place. Unlike the “Matrix” things, these places had identity.
But the key thing I liked was the solution the writer took. What do you do when your characters, the main ones, are deliberately non-characters? Well, you build a story around secondary characters that are set apart in some way. In this case, its the women. The main story has three threads, each anchored by a woman. We have the Lady MacBeth who incidentally really would have been better played by someone else. We have the boy-now- girl who was good then bad and human then necro; and we have the Ripley character, the tough, sexy broad from the mercs.
We can expect two of these to appear in the next chapter, plus another who has been introduced here just so she can appear later, the little girl. This is clever writing folks. When you have a mess of backstory and cosmology, weave it around sexy nodes.
(the substitute I have in mind for Thandie is Phina Oruche. I saw her (as Miranda!) in person. She was in a little vampire film, “Forsaken,” set in the desert, a nice self- referential movie about movies that had her I think as a film editor who worked in Conrad Hall’s company the real location was used.)
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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