John Scalzi - The Ridiculousness of Riddick, or, How Not to Make a SciFi Sequel
The readers here at AMCtv.com have been awfully nice to me -- thank you -- but there's one thing I've done which has created some hurt feelings: Expressing my antipathy for The Chronicles of Riddick, the expensive, messy and largely unnecessary sequel to the cheap, smart and generally laudable Pitch Black, both starring Vin Diesel and written and directed by David Twohy. Apparently there are a lot of Riddick fans out there, because everytime I dis the flick, even as an aside, I get comments and e-mails asking what I've got against Riddick, anyway.
Well, what I have against Riddick is that the film took a cool character emerging out of a nifty cult success, and basically broke it in a misguided quest to make Riddick just another summer tentpole flick. In my opinion, all Riddick is good for is as a cautionary tale of how not make a sequel, science fiction or otherwise.
Where did Riddick go wrong? For the edification of all, including those of you who might one day be in a position to make a science fiction sequel, let us count the ways.
1. The plot is ridiculously overstuffed.
Pitch Black was a little film that knew what it was about: Cargo ship filled with a rag-tag bunch of screw-ups -- and a scary, probably amoral criminal -- crash lands on a desert planet just as monsters start pouring out of the planet's bowels, and we get to see who survives. Easy, simple, and thanks to Twohy's writing, surprisingly effective.
But then comes Riddick, in which Riddick, on the run from bounty hunters, single-handedly has to take down an army comprised of baroque goth fetishists, and tries to resolve a long-simmering personality issue with an old friend, and leads a prison break and discovers -- through the graces of a helium-infused Judy Dench -- that he's some sort of vague messiah and the last of his race. Any one of these would be enough for an entire film to deal with; Twohy tries to shoehorn it all in, and makes a mess of it.
Why? My theory: Twohy got handed $100 million and change to make his film -- i.e., about four times the budget of Pitch Black -- and freaked out a little trying to justify having that much to spend. He may have also intuited that if he screwed it up, he'd never get that much money to spend ever again. That's got to mess with your head. To be fair to Twohy, it doesn't look like anyone over at Universal said to him "Hey, you've got a lot of great ideas here -- pick one." But Riddick really would have been better if it just had one story line, not five or six or 12 or whatever.
2. The universe of Riddick is not the universe of Pitch Black.
The universe of Pitch Black
was this gritty, low-rent blue-collar universe which had about as much
mysticism in it as Riddick had irises after his "shine job." The
universe of Riddick, on the other hand, is this freakadoodle
madhouse supersaturated with myth, mysticism, prophecy, ghosts and
something called "the underverse," which is apparently like hell for
the emo set. The only real point of connection between the universe of Pitch Black and the universe of Riddick is the main character.
When the only thing two films have in common is their main character, it suggests that the main character is a late addition to that second film; in effect, Riddick has been lifted out of his gritty universe and dropped into another over-plush universe simply because he's a badass character with a good track record at the box office. Maybe this isn't what Twohy planned, but on this end of things, it's sure what it looks like. A Pitch Black sequel would have been better with more of the elements that made Pitch Black so good.
(Before you comment: Yes, I'm aware that there are two other characters from the first film in the second. One is there strictly as a plot device to give Riddick an excuse to go somewhere, and the second character is has so little to do with her incarnation from the first film that they didn't even bother to hire the same actress. Come on.)
3. Riddick stops being human.
In Pitch Black,
Riddick was a badass, but he was a badass within recognizably human
boundaries -- he used his brain and his muscles to make it off that
monster-filled rock he was on. One of the coolest moments in Pitch Black
was when, confronted by one of the hammer-headed alien monsters, he
avoided detection by sliding inside the creature's field of view, and
moving from side to side when the alien moved its head. Smart. Cool.
Contrast this with the scene in Riddick in which Riddick, confronted with feral pumas made out of rock (or whatever they were) doesn't bother to run, he just stares them down with his manly manliness, because now, you see, he's just that awesome. And the rock pumas, rather than chomping down on his head, as they've done with every other human they've ever encountered (or so we're lead to believe), suddenly start acting like love-starved tabbys. You can't blame Riddick for this, but you can blame Twohy. He forgot why his character was so cool in the first place, and instead replaced him with a character too cool to pretend to be realistic.
So, what have we learned? When it comes time for you to make your sequel, remember: Keep it simple. Keep it consistent with what's come before. And keep your main character human. If David Twohy could have remembered this, he'd probably be busy premiering the third installment of the Riddick trilogy right now. He's not. His loss -- and ours.
Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John Scalzi is the author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies as well as the novels Old Man's War and the upcoming Zoe's Tale. His column appears every Thursday.
I'll note that these same three flaws also sunk Alien 3 and (especially) Alien 4.
I'll also not that "Helium-infused Judi Dench" would be an excellent name for a prog-emo band.
No real point, here, most likely because the pain killers are kicking in nicely.
So, basically, we could take the Ask A Ninja review of Pirates of the Caribbean II, and just dub in appropriate character and actor names...
What is it about the movie sequel that makes producers go stupid? Do they say to themselves: "Well, we can't just tell another cool story in this universe with this character. It needs more plots/stunts/effects/sidekicks."
I have to wonder, though. Has anyone ever said to a studio "Well, I've got a story for the sequel that totally rocks, but $100M is too much. Anything more that $40M won't work."
Now that I think about it, the Matrix sequels pretty much hit the same failure points as well.
I'm totally with you, here. This movie defines the words "bloated" and "unnecessary."
I liked "Chronicles" a wee bit better than you did, but at the same time, I can't disagree with anything you've said here. I could have cried at the waste -- that whole Underverse thing, which could have been really cool, all gone to waste in a movie for which it was all wrong.
Interested to know what you think about Terminator 2, which is one sequel that really did work for me.
Come on, Scalzi, don't be ridiculous. We are talking some major manly manliness here, enough to stare down a whole room full of stone cat creature thingees. I had no idea what was going on in this flick, but after reading your plot overview now it all makes sense, dammit, it just plain makes sense!
Amy Sisson:
"Interested to know what you think about Terminator 2, which is one sequel that really did work for me."
Indeed, if I write about how to make a good sequel, that will be one of the examples.
Excellent break down of where this movie went wrong!
On the character they brought back from the first movie w/ a different actress: not only did they cast someone else, they didn't even call the character by the same name. It felt very much like they needed to give Riddick a built in connection to this brand new character, so they slapped on the background of the first movie in a very shoddy and unbelievable fashion. All, of course, so she could die in the end and give Riddick the reason he needed to "accept his destiny" or whatever.
Also, gotta love the very Conan-esque ending, w/Riddick a reluctant King sitting on his throne. I always felt that was a very deliberate parallel, as though they were hoping to cash in on the same cult status as the barbarian.
I don't think you would need a separate write-up for T2. Its list is just "didn't do the Riddick list". It had the same central characters as the first one (with plausible changes for the passage of time), set in recognizably the same world as the first, with a very tight focus on a very tight goal.
And it had consequences of what happened in the first movie. I like consequences.
Manny:
"I don't think you would need a separate write-up for T2."
Yeah, but then I wouldn't get paid.
Riddick to me was a fun movie. It was full, lush, vibrant. Also vaguely annoying.
Not a good movie.
But I watched it. I'm not crying for my 2 hours back. It wasn't good, but I've watched alot worse.
This is not to say that I don't agree with all the points you've made John. I think you're spot on.
You got it right. Studios seem to feel they have to ramp up everything in a sequel. But throwing money at it isn't the answer. Story, a good one, comes first, in all genres, We don't need more of the same thing.
Terminator 2 and Aliens got it right, Further sequels in both series didn't.
Brilliant. Pitch Black had one of my favorite examples of redemption in a film, and CoR seemingly ignored ALL OF THAT. What a spectacular mess.
(Listening to the director's commentary, one gets the feeling that Serenity could have gone off the rails, too, but the studio had Joss pare that tome down to one storyline that was almost too trim for my taste, but it certainly knew what it was about, and hit all the marks. Maybe Twohy isn't up to being the same sort of 'outline nazi' that Joss admits he is.)
suprspi:
Oh, sure. Once I realized that that Riddick wasn't going to be good, I scaled back and enjoyed it for its goofiness. But I would have liked to have liked it for being good.
You forgot about another film that fell under the same curse.
Highlander and the horrible sequels made from that.
Highlander was a great movie, IMO. I drooled at the concept of the sequel and left the theatre disgusted that they were aliens sent to the planet, etc.
Spot on. Loved Pitch Black, when I just only expected a cheap horror flick. Was bored and disappointed by Riddick, because it lacked everything that made the first one good. It's sad when the plot of the prequel video game is far superior to the $100m movie
@M&D: What are you talking about? There never was a sequel to Highlander. There can, after all, only one... Ok, sorry, couldn't resist
I've always referred to it as the "Rambo Effect." The first Rambo movie was pretty good, with an interesting main character and an actual plot. It wasn't Shakespeare by any means, but it wasn't bad. Every follow-on Rambo movie was just explosions, big knives and body counts. Movie makers so rarely seem to realize the good stuff about the first film that really deserves to be extended into the sequel.
Instead of the mess of "Chronicles," they should have made a prequel using the plot from the "Escape from Butcher Bay" video game. While the game wasn't perfect, it hit most of the notes that our esteemed columnist points out were missed in "Chronicles:" 1) The plot, for all its twists, is fundamentally, "Badass criminal escapes from brutal penal colony overrun with alien monsters." This is a nice, clean, straightforward plot, much like "Pitch Black." 2) The penal colony is gritty, nasty, dirty, and mean, so perfectly in keeping with the "Pitch Black" universe. 3) Riddick needs to be a badass to escape, but he doesn't need to spontaneously deify to get the job done.
They ended up covering some of the same ground as "Escape from Butcher Bay" during the penal colony sequence in "Chronicles," but it was rushed and loose and part of a big mess of plot. Focussing on just the prison colony escape, and making that escape the one that more or less defines Riddick's character, would have made for a much better movie.
M@D:
I didn't forget it, I just prefer never to utter those words.
When I reviewed the Highlander sequel when it came out, I said it looked like it was written by people who watched the original with sound off, on a seven-inch black-and-white TV, while hallucinating, and then wrote the sequel based on that.
Arne:
Yeah, Butcher Bay is a fine game.
Just watched the Back to the Future trilogy over again after some years, and darnit if they don't make the same movie three times over but in different time periods, and yet it works anyway.
I agree with all of your points, especially about the effects-laden universe of the sequel as opposed to the gritty realism of the first one. It's kind of the same argument you'd get for comparing Star Wars IV with Star Wars II--Twice the eyecandy, half the realism.
Good column, as always.
Has anyone mentioned yet that Twohy cowrote the screenplay for Waterworld? Seems relevant.
Hey Scalzi, is that review up anywhere? I'd like to see it.
Because, you know, as far as horrible ideas for sequels go--sequelling a movie that explicitly states *THE STORY IS OVER. THERE IS NOW ONLY ONE.* is pretty much at the top of my asshat list.
CoR may also have been overblown because it was supposed to be the first part of A Very Grand Epic. It also appears that Vin Diesel played a large part in character/storyline development, which probably didn't help, either.
Diesel gave interviews on how CoR was going to be a trilogy and that it was building the mythology. He would generally describe it that Pitch Black was The Hobbit and the Chronicles of Riddick was going to be Lord of the Rings.
The entire time I was watching Riddick, I agreed that they had certainly built a mythology all right. But, I was also wondering if there would be anything left over for the second and third movies. Or, if I even wanted to see a second, much less a third movie...
I enjoyed Chronicles for what it was, and can't argue most of what you've laid out. However, here's a thought on differences in the setting of Pitch Black vs. that of Chronicles that I think should be addressed. On our own world there are vastly different environments, socially, technologically, etc. A farmer from the American Mid-West and a socialite from Paris, France are in completely different universes, and would probably be as shocked as the audience was at the change in environment should they switch places (and probably make for its own bad flick now that I think about it). I didn't mind the fact that the movies were so disparate in that sense, because I view our world as having that kind of varied setting, and really, the bizarreness of having a race of underground, ravenous and seemingly mindless aliens come above ground during a regular solar eclipse to feed and fit with one another and whoever else was about fits in with the bizarreness of the idea of the Underverse, shiny eyes and helium-infused Dames. Was there way too much happening in the story, certainly. Did Riddick loose his coolness by being nothing but cool, yup. Was it two completely different universes, no, I don’t think so. I think they did a poor job of unifying them.
If I had never run across Pitch Black, CoR would've been adequate popcorn fare. But Pitch Black hit many more marks. The creatures in PB had a logic behind them, which Riddick was able to exploit.
CoR suffers from playing a la carte with "cool" things from other movies. Conan being king by his own hand? Check. The stone critters? Think Crocodile Dundee. I winced when I saw that scene.
Still, I love watching Vin Diesel chew up scenery.
Dr. Phil
The ONLY point to "Riddick" was pure, unadulterated lust for people who are into men in any capacity. This is why I saw it twice. I'm not sure that's what they were going for, but that's what they achieved. The voice? The posturing? The frakking water bottle that saves him from heat that can melt metal with the steam rising from his taut tanned flesh? (As he sloooooooooly...stands...up?) The bondage bits with the hanging from the ceiling and spinning muscular legs around like a gymnast from every delicious angle? The VOICE???
PLEASE. And thank you. (I have a buddy who dragged his bf out of the theater at the midway point -- they didn't make it out of the parking lot.)
Mrow.
@Hobbyns, at the risk of being Mr. Obvious, might I suggest that time travel movies are the perfect vehicles for sequels, with a liberal dash of "this has all happened before and it it will happen again" to up the self-referential ante. Of course, time travel is just an SF version of the cycle of existence/hand of fate tropes that've powered any number of good (and rather more bad) stories. E.g: Oedipus Rex vs Back to the Future.
As for Riddick, it gave me a good laugh, which was worth the cost of rental, and I promptly re-watched Pitch Black.
There was one good part in CoR: Death by teacup.
In addition to the points you raised, Scalzi, I think there was something else missing from the sequel that dominated the first film: moral dilemnas which initiated redemption.
In Pitch Black, the pilot (can't remember her name) felt responsible for a whole crew of people she had initially tried to kill. And Riddick, of course, being a killer who ended up with a new lease on life.
The first one was incredibly smart, the second one incredibly convoluted. They definitely should've stayed gritty with the sequel -- something along the lines of the Butcher Bay game.
I read somewhere that Twohy's getting a low-budget sequel in the works that may harken back to Pitch Black. So maybe that's a good thing. I'll still probably check it out, as I liked the first one so much.
@meteorplum: I couldn't agree more. It was mostly just a comment that they got it right with the remaining sequels, unlike CoR.
Agreed.
A prison-movie prequel without all the faerie and space goths would be very nice. Show him getting them friggin eyes.
I loved the Movie didn't feel bloated to me. It felt gritty and dirty and It expanded the Universe of Riddick greatly. I hope they do another film. I really liked the short anime film that bridges Pitch Black and Chronicles. If I knew before I watched the movie how much they spent, I might of been shocked and more critical. I went expecting another Pitch Black a movie I liked but didn't love and left seeing so much more.
It's just greed. Oldest sin in the world. When someone is bankable, they go for the cash, and sometimes forget why they liked to tell the story. Music, books, movies, no difference. It's like the more you make, the less they edit you, and sometimes the buttkissers should lay off and someone should whisper some sense into an artist's ear. I didn't find CoR a ripoff, but Pitch Black was sooo much more than I expected for my buck and that happens less often these days.
Dave
You know what's odd? I agree with Mr. Scalzi's views of both CoR and T2... but if I had them both ready to dump into the DVD player right now, I'd watch CoR. T2 was a better film - better crafted - but I don't like it nearly as much. It's just not as much fun.
Since someone mentioned Conan The Barbarian, how about its sequel as a counter example? Or, rather, an example of how to fail in the opposite way. A cheaper, simpler movie than the original that, to be blunt, sucked it long and sucked it hard.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn is another example in that category, Sarcastro.
The Ragi
Show him getting them friggin eyes.
Wool nergassing;
He was born with the eyes!
*nerdgassing
IMO, Chronicles isn't really a sequel to Pitch Black; it's a movie with the same actor playing a similar character with the same name, but it's really it's own thing. It's really a science-fantasy movie, with a bit of Warhammer 40,000 flavor.
I suspect Diesel & Twohy came up with the idea, and thought it would be really kewl, so they went with it.