Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Summer is typically a time for sequels. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate. The sad thing is, most sequels shit the bed, and you end up with peanut butter and sardines instead of that sweet Reese’s cup you think you’re going to get. There’s nothing worse than going back for a second or third or whatever installment of a series you love and watching the whole damn thing go down in flames. As a result, people get nervous about sequels. They’re skeptical. They want to believe, but they’ve been burned so many times that they’re skittish now.
This weekend, I’m going to review three of Hollywood’s biggest-budget sequels, starting with David Twohy’s new THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. I’m seeing HARRY POTTER & THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN with a huge group of friends tonight, so I’ll write about that one next. And just in time for Monday morning, I’ll put up my review of a film that... well, let’s just say it “does whatever a sequel can.”
When I got the invitation to Wednesday night’s Century City screening of RIDDICK, I was excited and went to tell my wife to keep the evening free.
Her reply: ”We’re seeing what?”
Well, fingers crossed that more people don’t have that same reaction when the film opens next weekend. Universal’s gambling a huge chunk of their summer schedule on this mega-budget follow-up to the cult hit PITCH BLACK, and the way they’ve titled this, completely avoiding any obvious connection to the earlier film, they’re announcing their intentions to create a new franchise starting right here, right now.
The original film is a great little SF movie, written by Ken and Jim Wheat and directed with real style and energy by David Twohy. Universal reissued the DVD on Tuesday of this week, and I watched it again, both to catch my wife up and to refamiliarize myself with the world before seeing the new one.
One thing I’ve always enjoyed about that film is the way it picked its moments. It’s not a giant budget movie, but you might be fooled into thinking it was based on how well-realized the world of the movie is. I remember when we showed it at the first BNAT, that crash near the start of the film just about ripped the roof off the place. And Vin Diesel’s performance as Riddick is really where his climb to stardom began, and for good reason. He’s a wonderfully enigmatic antihero, dark and cruel and completely self-motivated until the very, very last few moments of the movie. And even when Jack asks him as they’re escaping the planet, “What do we tell any mercs we meet out there?”, his wry response of “Tell them Riddick’s dead. He died somewhere on that planet” doesn’t quite ring true. Maybe the worst part of him died, the totally selfish part, but Riddick’s still pretty scary.
And to Twohy’s credit, he got that completely right in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, as confident a SF film as I’ve seen in quite a while. This film is enormous in terms of scale and unfettered in terms of imagination. It’s like Twohy finally got the chance to set himself loose, and the result is two hours of pure pulp fun. This isn’t the kind of film you have to apologize for liking, either. Just so you know where I stand on this summer’s film that I haven’t reviewed here yet, let’s do a quick recap. This’ll help you get a bearing on what you might think of RIDDICK when you see it.
VAN HELSING. Imagine you have a seven year old kid. You have to go out for the afternoon, and you decide to leave him by himself. While you're gone, there's a triple feature on TV. The original DRACULA, the original FRANKENSTEIN, and the original WOLF MAN. And while he watches all three of those films, he eats a whole box of Count Chocula cereal and drinks a 12-pack of Mountain Dew. So when you walk through the door and ask him what he's been doing, he tackles you and bellows:
“OHMYGODTHEREWASTHISMOVIEONTV, ANDITHADTHEDRACULAANDTHEWOLFMANAND THEFRANKENSTEINWASINIT, ANDTHEREWERETHESELADIES INTHEIRNIGHTGOWNSANDTHEYTURNEDINTOMONSTERS, ANDTHENEVERYBODYKILLEDTHE FRANKENSTEINBUTHETHEWINDMILLFALLEDAPART, ANDEVERYBODYDIDN'TDIEAND ANDANDTHENTHISONEGUYHEHADTHISBOWANDARROW, ANDWHENHEWENTTOKILLDRACULA EVERYBODYTURNEDINTOTHEWOLFMAN, ANDHEWENT GRRRROOOOOOOWWWWRRRRRRRRR!!!!!"
Well, that's VAN HELSING. Were there good ideas in there? Yep. A few. Were there bad ideas in there? Yep. A whole bunch. The biggest problem I see is that with $175 million to play with, Sommers no longer has to filter between the good and the bad ideas. I can imagine that if I were eleven, this would have probably rocked my world. Then again, when I was eleven, my friends and I would laugh for three hours over someone farting.
Then there’s THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. Again, I have to use an analogy to explain how I felt about the film. It’s like the retarded guy working the fry machine at McDonald’s. Nice guy. Always friendly and in a good mood. And he makes really tasty fries. I wouldn’t let him land a plane or perform open-heart surgery on me, but as long as he’s King Of The French Fries, he does it well. Emmerich has no interest whatsoever in narrative coherence or character integrity, but he sure does like blowing stuff up real pretty, and I felt like I got my money’s worth on that level.
But I’m tired of these summer movies where we have to turn our brains off to be able to sit still for two hours. I’m tired of paying $10 a pop to get insulted, even if it looks nice while they’re doing it. And so, for that reason, I say thank god for David Twohy and this film, because this one’s guilt-free, folks. This is a big giant SF action film that has a simple but interesting story, a whole fistful of characters I liked, and that builds to an unexpected ending that floored me and left me rabid for whatever comes next.
One of the first things that jumps out at me is the way Twohy distinguishes himself from the pack as far as big-budget filmmakers are concerned right now. The guy has taste, and it is reflected in every single choice made by his collaborators on the film. Cinematographer Hugh Johnson (G.I. JANE, WHITE SQUALL) has a fantastic eye, and his work with Twohy really classes the material up. Holger Gross, the production designer behind STARGATE, has helped Twohy fully realize not one, not two, but at least four different planets, and each one has something about it that makes it interesting and worth watching. And Grame Revell, whose work as a composer is always hit and miss with me, delivers a great score here, building off his PITCH BLACK themes even as he gives epic support to the imagery.
None of this would matter too much if we weren’t interested in what was happening onscreen, and here’s where Twohy really distinguishes himself. Yes, there are a lot of badass dialogue exchanges and tough guy one-liners, but they all feel justified and never stop the show. Hell, you could have called this series RIDDICK’S UNIVERSE OF BADASSERY, and it would have been perfectly justified. But Twohy isn’t just interested in having Riddick say funny things and kill people. He’s actually building characters here, and there’s a pretty deep roster of people that he’s writing for. Keith David returns as Imam, the holy man who Riddick saved at the end of PITCH BLACK. He’s settled on his home world, the new Mecca, and he’s started a family. When that life is threatened again, he is the one who starts the events in motion that eventually pluck Riddick from his self-imposed exile and drop him right into the middle of a horrific, dark crusade that only he might be able to stop. There was one other survivor in PITCH BLACK, the girl disguised as a boy who called herself Jack, and the character does indeed return in this film, but time’s been rough on her, and she isn’t the same person, or the same actor. Alexa Davalos picks up as the now-renamed Kyra, and she has a very difficult role to play. She’s stunningly beautiful, but she has to portray someone just as deadly as Riddick, just as hardened by life. To her credit, she pulls it off, and she actually makes you care about the character in a whole different way.
There are a lot of new characters introduced, too, and a ton of mythology that Twohy sets up that could easily become confusing in less expert hands. When you try to throw too much information at an audience in this type of film, you risk causing them to disconnect emotionally. Twohy manages to give you the exposition in bits and pieces, letting you digest each piece before offering up the next one. It’s a pretty remarkable balancing act, and he’s helped enormously by the performances from Colm Feore (32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLEN GOULD) as The Lord Marshal, the leader of the Necromonger Army, Karl Urban (Eomer from LORD OF THE RINGS) as Vaako, a commander who serves directly under Lord Marshal, Thandie Newton (M:I2, BELOVED) as Lady Vaako, one of the film’s real bad guys, and Linus Roache (PRIEST) as The Purifier, a Necromonger with secrets of his own. All of them are strikingly played bad guys, charismatic enough to win your sympathies, but evil enough to deserve your scorn.
There are more characters filling out the corners of this universe, too, like Toombs, a mercenary who is hunting Riddick when the film begins. Nick Chinlund was in Twohy’s last film, BELOW, and he’s got a real Tom Waits thing going on. He’s this great, freaky, gravel-voiced guy who plays scummy with enormous charm. Any time he and Riddick are onscreen together, the movie’s got a whole different pulse, and Twohy’s smart enough to leave Toombs in a terrible place without ever showing us what his fate is. If there are further sequels, I’m hoping Toombs manages to escape with just a few scars, because he and Riddick should definitely meet again. And, yes, Judi Dench appears here in her first SF appearance as Aereon, an Elemental who is mostly made of air. She’s a provocateur, not aligned to either side in the war that is destroying whole systems at once, simply offering up wisdom and prophecy to whoever will listen. She’s the one who knows what role Riddick is destined to play in the events that are unfolding, and his first encounter with her spurs him to examine what place he does hold in the larger world around him.
The set pieces in this film... and there are many... are all really well staged and well shot. My biggest complaint with any action filmmaker is when they fail to establish a sense of geography or they forget that action is simply an extension of emotion. Just having people fight for no reason is dull, especially if you don’t know where they are in relation to one another. Twohy makes sure that the stakes are clear in every single action scene, and he is downright masterful at showing how a scene is set up. Simon West... Stephen Sommers... Paul “Weak Sauce” Anderson... you guys should pay attention. This is the real deal. He makes it look deceptively easy, too. I’m sure his editors Martin Hunter (FULL METAL JACKET) and Dennis Virkler (THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, THE FUGITIVE) helped a lot. When you work with really strong collaborators and you know what you’re doing, the results can be this exciting. I especially like the hand-to-hand combat here. Twohy’s definitely riding that line between the PG-13 and the R, and I think by not showing a lot of blood, he gets away with an overall brutality that is surprisingly concussive. These fights look like they hurt, and even Riddick takes his fair share of abuse over the course of the film.
The real miracle of this film is that I like Vin Diesel again. A lot. Vin’s one of those guys who really needs to work with the right writers and directors, people who understand his particular charisma, and Twohy has crafted him a showcase here that lets him do all the things that he does well. There’s a lot more made of his eyes in this film, and you could probably make a drinking game out of how many times he puts on or takes off his special goggles, but it’s a minor affectation. What Vin does really well in this film is he seems to believe in all of this. It’s outlandish... it’s impossibly big... but because he takes it seriously and inhabits these worlds as if they are real, the film works. And, like I said, the ending is particularly special. Be careful to avoid spoilers before you see it. All I’ll say is that it was the last thing I expected, and when it happened, it changed the way I thought of this series. There is potential here for Twohy to take us to worlds we’ve never seen in a story that we’ve never heard before, something that seems increasingly rare in this genre. I think the key is that Twohy really loves science-fiction. He respects the audience because he respects the genre. This is the kind of film that I always hope for when studios make giant SF films, but we so rarely actually get what we’re looking for.
Mark my words... RIDDICK is special. It’s the whole package, and if there really is extra character material to put back into the film on an eventual DVD release, all it can do is enhance the film. As it stands, it’s already complete, a wicked ride that never sacrifices integrity for fun. It eats its cake and has it, too, and the real winners here are us, the SF fans who finally have a franchise worth cheering about.
I’ll be back with my take on AZKABAN tomorrow at about this time, and then I’ll see if I can... ahem... swing that last review in time for Monday morning. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
