I loved The Chronicles of Riddick! It’s bombastic space opera, of which we have much too little that isn’t Star Wars tripe, and Vin Diesel is perfect in this role.
Pitch Black is a solid (if very 2000s) horror movie. Riddick is a bit more camp than it thinks it is and makes some eyebrow-raising dialog choices. Still fun, though. At worst it’s a good bad movie.
I guess if people expected it to be like Pitch Black they were disappointed. I didn’t see Pitch Black until later (and didn’t find it very memorable), but they are very different movies.
I think the thing I like so much about Chronicles is that it’s unabashedly fantastical and epic. It reminds me of Warhammer 40k and Conan the Barbarian, really fine cheese.
Cheese is definitely the right word. The scope is great - the plot is fine - the cast is stacked - but I don’t think Twohy is the right director for his own scripts. If you start poking around Wikipedia, wondering why the energy’s askew sometimes, there’s nobody else to pin it on. The writer/director also wrote The Fugitive. One of the editors was Oscar-nominated. Some of the head-scratching scenes involve Judi fucking Dench.
It’s nearly a Joel Schumacher situation, where the production needed one more person, to occasionally go “I dunno, Dave. Is it supposed to be that silly?” Either answer is fine, but if people have to wonder, you missed.
![[Meme] Which movie was this for you?(files.catbox.moe)](https://files.catbox.moe/ellqpi.jpeg){kind=link}