Richard B. Riddick is a cool dude. He wears sun shades on a regular basis — welding goggles, to be particular. By no means takes them off, even indoors or when prompted by the delicate gestures of well mannered society. He’s acquired a behavior of stabbing individuals who attempt to speak to him. Because of this, most individuals solely converse of him, in awed tones. And as performed by Vin Diesel, his personal traces like “I bow to no man” and “The wolf strikes amongst sheep” (each in reference to himself) are extra growled than spoken. The character is a portrait of the attractive self-importance that solely springs from a film star with a whole sci-fi universe of his personal, as he and director David Twohy have shepherded the Riddick franchise following its origination by screenwriters Ken and Jim Wheat. The place the latter duo’s script for 2000’s Pitch Black was a lean sci-fi thriller a couple of assassin who sees at the hours of darkness, Twohy’s follow-up was the absurd Chronicles of Riddick, which spurned the monster film origins to forged Riddick as a prophesied hero preventing an evil empire. In its new, expanded world of air elementals and a military of the lifeless, the entire “seeing at the hours of darkness” factor wasn’t particular anymore.
On this manner, Chronicles is a sequel by means of adaptation, transplanting the gruff-talking antihero to a world that wasn’t designed for him. He by no means actually appears like he belongs, already so outsized to start with. When he’s actually dropped into Crematoria’s triple-max slam, a fellow inmate lavishes upon him a theatrical, nearly musical greeting, and Riddick blows him off. “I’m simply passing by means of.” For this dissonance, however extra probably its mega-budget price ticket, The Chronicles of Riddick was a monetary disappointment, capping off an enormous transmedia experiment with a fizzle. Diesel and Twohy envisioned a grand cinematic universe, even rebranding the unique movie as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black. There was the tie-in online game Escape from Butcher Bay, the proposed tv sequence Merc Metropolis, and an animated quick Chronicles of Riddick: Darkish Fury to lend a 2006 DVD assortment the title “The Riddick Trilogy.” By all rights, the quick, directed by Peter Chung, ought to be an inexpensive cash-in, simply discarded, however it’s truly a candy and satisfying expertise that brings out the perfect of a messy franchise.
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Peter Chung Provides Riddick a Dramatic New Look With ‘Darkish Fury’
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Darkish Fury picks up on the finish of Pitch Black, with Riddick aboard a ship with the Imam (Keith David) and Jack (Rhiana Griffith). Instantly, the visuals catch the attention. Peter Chung broke out with Aeon Flux, the surreal cartoon which premiered on MTV’s Liquid Tv. Audiences in 1991 have been launched to his long-limbed character design, in addition to his penchant for nihilistic themes undercut by a winking tone. In 2003, Chung labored on The Animatrix, a direct-to-DVD tie-in for the Matrix sequels which mixed the efforts of business legends like Shinichirō Watanabe, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and Takeshi Koike. The anthology’s success impressed later anime tie-ins of accelerating puzzlement, from Halo to Marvel heroes to Dante’s Inferno (the online game). These properties didn’t have the identical anime affect as The Matrix, resulting in aesthetic clashes. Certainly, the used way forward for Riddick wouldn’t mesh with anime or Chung’s acute sensibilities.
Happily, The Chronicles of Riddick was already a conflict, marrying in unholy union the soiled gunmetal of Pitch Black to sword-and-planet extravagance. The issue was the aforementioned evil empire, the “Necromongers,” whose knight armor and spears would’ve slot in with Krull however not alongside Vin Diesel’s goggles and perpetual black tank prime. Positioned so centrally, additionally they make for a thematic downside, because the Riddick universe already had an enormous unhealthy: the mercenaries, or “mercs.” This was a world of bounty hunters and serial killers; it didn’t want magic house ghosts. Fortunately, Darkish Fury makes no point out of them. The mercs could be the villain, and so they additionally fill the Necromonger emptiness because the fantasy component. Tremendously overdesigned in and out, the merc ship that intercepts Riddick and mates is a funhouse of artwork deco and neon.
‘The Chronicles of Riddick: Darkish Fury’ Makes the Most of Its Animation
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It’s Riddick who brings the enjoyable nevertheless, after the mercs open the hatch and out comes fire-suppression foam, taking the form of a large ball in zero gravity. Riddick hides inside, slashing and stabbing at mercs in an ingenious sci-fi set piece. “He has to breathe someday,” the merc chief Antonia (Tress MacNeille) says of Riddick, observing the spectacle from a distance. Clearly, she has but to appreciate how cool he’s. And whereas Chung respects that ego-friendly fringe of the Riddick-verse, he brings a unique cinematic language than Twohy. Each administrators have a watch for comedian book-style compositions, however Chung trades the extra deliberate tempo of Chronicles — and the Dutch angles — for a staccato rhythm, ratcheting up the stress in our fixed “hunter or hunted” paradigm.
The trick to antiheroes like Guts and the Punisher and, sure, Riddick, is to give you villains who’re even worse, and Antonia represents this universe at its darkest. The opening zero-G bloodbath is resolved when a merc holds Jack at gunpoint, and Riddick breaks together with his earlier growl that “The lady is nothing to me.” Antonia sees by means of that and takes him prisoner, main to a different attribute scene: Riddick sure however making his captors nervous. Shifting deeper into the ship, the Imam factors out that this can be a “plantation operation,” with captured bounties on one facet and contracted killers on the opposite, each in cryogenic stasis. A kind of killers occurs to be the standout character from Chronicles, Toombs (Nick Chinlund), given a devoted 2D rendition right here.
Riddick Is True to Himself in ‘Darkish Fury’
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Antonia leads Riddick to a sprawling room with curious shows: human our bodies, which she explains are killers trapped in “cryo so profound that seconds appear weeks, and to blink a watch is a day’s work.” Regardless of that the thoughts is current and little doubt deteriorating beneath such situations, Antonia considers this a destiny higher than jail. Right here, they’re appreciated, reworked into objects on par with their life’s work. She’s creating artwork. Riddick’s response? “Woman, your style sucks.” What follows is an motion set piece that makes use of Riddick’s authentic “superpower,” on the precipice of being made the following piece of Antonia’s assortment. The lights exit, and he squares off in opposition to flailing neon tentacles. “I can’t see!” the Imam shouts. “You don’t need to,” Riddick replies earlier than chopping by means of the summary, terrifying creatures.
The Riddick sequence has all the time been good with monsters, from the very starting with the “bio-raptors” of Pitch Black, designed by French artist Patrick Tatopoulos. He’d follow the sequence lengthy sufficient to populate the desert planet of 2013’s Riddick with extraterrestrial canine, birds, and “mud demons.” Whether or not the vampire hybrids of Underworld or the notorious 1998 Godzilla, a Tatopoulos monster is directly intricately stylized and acquainted, grounded in some organic fact. What Chung introduces to the Riddick bestiary in Darkish Fury is the really alien, particularly with the second monster. After Riddick escapes with the Imam and Jack, Antonia orders the activation of extra mercenaries, in addition to a large cyborg creature that appears like the massive slug from The Empire Strikes Again on two robotic legs.
In echo of Pitch Black, Riddick makes the choice to danger his personal life to save lots of his touring companions, diverting the cyborg slug’s consideration from Jack and the Imam. In fact, one may simply accuse the Riddick sequence of getting one factor on its thoughts — badass with a coronary heart of gold — however there’s a cause that’s a cliché. In the long run, Antonia will get the drop on Riddick, however she’s shot by a wide-eyed Jack. Again on the highway to Helion Prime, Riddick and the Imam talk about the lady’s first kill with real concern. Now, Riddick could also be a prophesied warrior, final of his race, strangled within the womb by the umbilical twine, however all of that left him with a ruthless, individualist outlook. Being confronted by empathetic individuals in Pitch Black was an existential disaster. Now he’s attempting to guard these individuals, and what they signify, which in flip is threatened by the prospect of Jack turning into like Riddick.
The Riddick Chronicles Will Proceed
Being that Darkish Fury is a facet undertaking, conceptualized concurrently with different items of a franchise, it couldn’t make any massive strikes — no character deaths to contradict later occasions, no untimely introduction of the Necromongers. That honor would go to Dame Judi Dench. Because of this, Darkish Fury takes place in an remoted pocket of the Riddick universe, the place a megalomaniac retains a whole bunch of individuals in varied states of cryogenic bondage. That is what the franchise ought to have been about — it’s a universe of pockets. Because the 2013 sequel would additionally show, Riddick is at his greatest when squaring up with killers and aliens, not assuming the throne like Conan the King. With a fourth feature-length installment on the best way, teased now for a decade, the Riddick character is right here to remain, and Darkish Fury is an enormous a part of why that’s thrilling.