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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I keep revisiting it so often, that I just bought it.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Underrated sci-fi classic.
Aside from the cool premise of crashlanding on a planet where creepy crawlies come out during the eclipse, and the many many opportunities the movie takes to make Vin Diesel, Riddick, a badass without ever venturing into cheesy territory (humor is definitely intentional), a big reason I like this movie is the morally ambiguous characters.
The movie knows we want a good guy to root for, but nearly everyone with major screentime is flawed or portrayed negatively in some way which makes it difficult to ascertain everyone's intentions.
Fry's character opens the movie making the selfish decision to jettison all of the passengers of her ship to save her own life. It doesn't work, and we see her struggle to come to terms with the people grateful for saving their lives despite her concealed intentions not to.
As the movie goes on, Fry's eventually redeemed through her actions and the bigger question becomes which of the two characters, Riddick or John, his bounty hunter, can be most trusted since they clearly don't trust each other for good reason.
Riddick's motivations remain questionable nearly all the way into the final scene of the movie, but even then you've been given enough evidence to know what to expect from him by this point. Before this point, the questionability of his motivations as well as his relationship with John (which is valuably improved the Director's Cut) serve to create a constant tension throughout the movie even when there isn't any action on screen, and it's a real treat to see all of the "weak" characters make an effort to hang around one or the other in an attempt to curry favor from the two "powerful" characters even when their intentions aren't entirely transparent and doing so may get them killed.
Among my limited criticisms would be the noticeably weak CG which skates by largely because the most glaring effects are used in dark shots. By biggest complaint would be the bottled glow-worms.
Poor glow-worms. They didn't do anything to you, and yet you stuff a family of them into an old booze bottle and then just left them to die trapped in there. ********.
For the record, I would give the sequels, Chronicles of Riddick, a [Meh...] and Riddick a [Just... Bad].
Chronicles suffers by removing Riddick's ambiguity and... just generally having a weaker plot and themes (points for death by teacup though). Riddick suffers by being a carbon copy of Pitch Black except way way way way worse.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
REWATCH UPDATE 1/1/2023
It has been 6 years that this movie has sat on my shelf, long awaiting an overdue review, to confirm that it truly is worthy of the lustrous prestige of sitting amidst my all-time favorite movies.
I'm honestly surprised that I rated this 5 stars.
While it's still certainly my favorite Vin Diesel movie, and still the best of the Riddick trilogy, and did not sport nearly as poor of CG as I recall, this movie falls well short of an exceptional review.
Not that it does anything particularly poorly, but it really doesn't excel in any great respect. Riddick himself is equal parts amusing and enigmatic, but the rest of the cast carries personality about on par with the guest characters of a weak Stargate episode (or Farscape, for that matter). The music is serviceable, but in no way memorable, and the monster design is quite frankly boring and unappealing.
Perhaps the biggest issue comes down to how the movie is structured. The first half takes place in the day time, during which we're hyping up the threat of Riddick, teasing at the night to come, and very minimally developing Captain Lady and Fake Cop. All of the outdoor shots are also inconsistently presented with a bright yellow or blue filter and overexposed in an effort to convey how bright it is on a planet with 3 suns. That's just not appealing to look at. This isn't the deep blue and orange saturation of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's just ugly and difficult to watch.
The second half of the movie takes place at night and they basically let the cat out of the bag in the most literal sense because when you establish that the monsters are innumerable and everywhere, and then you have them randomly pick off the characters, it really just feels like a deus ex character death.
Not so with the Archaeologist(?) character, he was so unreasonably ****ing stupid that he not only left the biggest source of light, which was the best defense the cast had against the monsters, dragging it with him, destroying it, and getting himself killed while endangering the cast. Absolute big-brained genius, no wonder the monsters took a big 'ol bite out of it.
The dialog, mainly involving Riddick creepin' on Captain Lady, still has it's moments, but it's few and far between and I feel like I disproportionately overweighted these relationships the first time I watched it because, as seems to be the case with me at times, I end up drooling over inspirational concepts. If something happens in a movie that sounds like a crazy cool idea or there's a character dynamic that plays out in a way that really appeals to me, I go all in on that, but having that first impression dulled over the course of few years and revisiting with these conceits in mind, I'm left less than impressed.
This is good solid movie, there's not a lot to actually complain about, but there's relatively little to commend it for, unless I'm trying to give a rating relative to the average sci-fi/monster movie... in which case it gets high marks.
Final Verdict: [Good]
Pitch Black
Sci-Fi / English / 2000
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I keep revisiting it so often, that I just bought it.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Underrated sci-fi classic.
Aside from the cool premise of crashlanding on a planet where creepy crawlies come out during the eclipse, and the many many opportunities the movie takes to make Vin Diesel, Riddick, a badass without ever venturing into cheesy territory (humor is definitely intentional), a big reason I like this movie is the morally ambiguous characters.
The movie knows we want a good guy to root for, but nearly everyone with major screentime is flawed or portrayed negatively in some way which makes it difficult to ascertain everyone's intentions.
Fry's character opens the movie making the selfish decision to jettison all of the passengers of her ship to save her own life. It doesn't work, and we see her struggle to come to terms with the people grateful for saving their lives despite her concealed intentions not to.
As the movie goes on, Fry's eventually redeemed through her actions and the bigger question becomes which of the two characters, Riddick or John, his bounty hunter, can be most trusted since they clearly don't trust each other for good reason.
Riddick's motivations remain questionable nearly all the way into the final scene of the movie, but even then you've been given enough evidence to know what to expect from him by this point. Before this point, the questionability of his motivations as well as his relationship with John (which is valuably improved the Director's Cut) serve to create a constant tension throughout the movie even when there isn't any action on screen, and it's a real treat to see all of the "weak" characters make an effort to hang around one or the other in an attempt to curry favor from the two "powerful" characters even when their intentions aren't entirely transparent and doing so may get them killed.
Among my limited criticisms would be the noticeably weak CG which skates by largely because the most glaring effects are used in dark shots. By biggest complaint would be the bottled glow-worms.
Poor glow-worms. They didn't do anything to you, and yet you stuff a family of them into an old booze bottle and then just left them to die trapped in there. ********.
For the record, I would give the sequels, Chronicles of Riddick, a [Meh...] and Riddick a [Just... Bad].
Chronicles suffers by removing Riddick's ambiguity and... just generally having a weaker plot and themes (points for death by teacup though). Riddick suffers by being a carbon copy of Pitch Black except way way way way worse.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
REWATCH UPDATE 1/1/2023
It has been 6 years that this movie has sat on my shelf, long awaiting an overdue review, to confirm that it truly is worthy of the lustrous prestige of sitting amidst my all-time favorite movies.
I'm honestly surprised that I rated this 5 stars.
While it's still certainly my favorite Vin Diesel movie, and still the best of the Riddick trilogy, and did not sport nearly as poor of CG as I recall, this movie falls well short of an exceptional review.
Not that it does anything particularly poorly, but it really doesn't excel in any great respect. Riddick himself is equal parts amusing and enigmatic, but the rest of the cast carries personality about on par with the guest characters of a weak Stargate episode (or Farscape, for that matter). The music is serviceable, but in no way memorable, and the monster design is quite frankly boring and unappealing.
Perhaps the biggest issue comes down to how the movie is structured. The first half takes place in the day time, during which we're hyping up the threat of Riddick, teasing at the night to come, and very minimally developing Captain Lady and Fake Cop. All of the outdoor shots are also inconsistently presented with a bright yellow or blue filter and overexposed in an effort to convey how bright it is on a planet with 3 suns. That's just not appealing to look at. This isn't the deep blue and orange saturation of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's just ugly and difficult to watch.
The second half of the movie takes place at night and they basically let the cat out of the bag in the most literal sense because when you establish that the monsters are innumerable and everywhere, and then you have them randomly pick off the characters, it really just feels like a deus ex character death.
Not so with the Archaeologist(?) character, he was so unreasonably ****ing stupid that he not only left the biggest source of light, which was the best defense the cast had against the monsters, dragging it with him, destroying it, and getting himself killed while endangering the cast. Absolute big-brained genius, no wonder the monsters took a big 'ol bite out of it.
The dialog, mainly involving Riddick creepin' on Captain Lady, still has it's moments, but it's few and far between and I feel like I disproportionately overweighted these relationships the first time I watched it because, as seems to be the case with me at times, I end up drooling over inspirational concepts. If something happens in a movie that sounds like a crazy cool idea or there's a character dynamic that plays out in a way that really appeals to me, I go all in on that, but having that first impression dulled over the course of few years and revisiting with these conceits in mind, I'm left less than impressed.
This is good solid movie, there's not a lot to actually complain about, but there's relatively little to commend it for, unless I'm trying to give a rating relative to the average sci-fi/monster movie... in which case it gets high marks.
Final Verdict: [Good]