Review: Riddick (2013)

The third film in The Chronicles of Riddick trilogy, 2013’s Riddick goes back to basics with Vin Diesel’s antihero, Richard B. Riddick, once again stranded on a desert planet, prey to dangerous endemic lifeforms, and hunted by various lawmen and harbingers of civilization that seek to do him harm. Where 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick took the series on a detour into space opera, Riddick is more similar to Pitch Black in how it plays as a classic B-movie. It shrinks back the scale and takes a more modest approach to the filmmaking, which you could argue was a correction after the box office disaster of The Chronicles of Riddick. But the film doesn’t ignore its direct predecessor, nor does it undo the vision of that film. It simply goes back to exploring the dangerous life of Riddick on a new planet within this imaginative universe.

The film starts by resolving the Necromonger plotline of The Chronicles of Riddick, with Karl Urban’s Vaako promising to deliver Riddick, who is now weary of being Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, to his home planet, Furya. However, after landing on a mysterious planet Vaako’s men claim is Furya, they betray Riddick and Riddick narrowly survives. He’s now stranded on this harsh planet with a broken leg and prey to various predators, including one monster that’s a terrifying combination of snake and scorpion.

The first 30 minutes of Riddick is a barebones survival narrative that’s as radical a shrinking of storyworld as you can get after the galactic-scale intrigue of The Chronicles of Riddick. It works marvellously, with writer and director David Twohy and cinematographer David Eggby simplifying things and taking a purely visual approach to storytelling. Survival films, whether Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000), Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), or Bryon Haskin’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), often take on a procedural approach to narrative structure. They show heroes do one thing, and then another, and then another, following a logical sequence of actions that are necessary to stay alive. Riddick does the same.

We watch Riddick work to survive and the clarity of the storytelling is refreshing, both in response to the expansive fantasy of The Chronicles of Riddick and also the exposition-heavy nature of modern blockbusters. Riddick mends his wounds, finds shelter, and adjusts to the harsh climate. He captures a pup of a hyena-like predator and raises it as his own. He kills a juvenile of the scorpion-like monsters and steals its venom to start building up immunity by injecting himself with it. The sequence is largely devoid of dialogue, aside from some sparse narration from Riddick. But it’s not empty in terms of narrative, as it shows Riddick mastering a harsh wilderness, a fact that becomes critical later in the film. The visuals are clean and emphasize the sparseness of the planet surface and the isolation of Riddick. There are several wide shots showing vistas of the planet, with Riddick a small figure against the craggy rocks and the boiling heat of the sun. The storytelling might be limited, but the visuals compensate by conveying the scale of the sunburnt, red planetary environment.

Once Riddick overcomes the monsters and reaches a settlement, the film shifts gears to a more conventional cat-and-mouse thriller. Riddick sends out a distress call and several bounty hunters (Jordi Mollà, Matthew Nable, Katee Sackhoff, Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, among others) arrive, eager to kill Riddick and cash in on his massive bounty. Riddick takes to the wilderness that he has previously conquered to defeat the bounty hunters one-by-one.

At this point, Twohy fascinatingly changes the dynamics of the film. While the perspective of the early parts of the film are tied to Riddick, once the bounty hunters arrive, the film shifts to their perspective and Riddick becomes something of a monster to the new characters. He hides in the shadows and threatens their every movement. Twohy denies us Riddick’s perspective to create suspense and his ability to see in the dark makes him another predator on the planet’s surface, much like the scorpion monsters. It’s a bold gambit to transform your protagonist into a mysterious monster midway through a film, but it pays off, as the hunt narrative is exciting and offers Twohy a few chances to play with unique visuals. One such moment has a character catching only a fleeting glimpse of Riddick disappearing with a captive in tow, dragging him off into the blackness of the night like he’s a bear or wolf attacking a campfire. It makes Riddick one with the darkness that has defined his character throughout the series.

Inevitably, the cat-and-mouse game comes to a head and like in past films, Riddick is forced to team up with his adversaries to stave off larger threats. Once again, the planetary environment seems weaponized against humans, with a massive storm causing flooding that allows the scorpion creatures, which live in water, to roam the planet at will. Riddick’s immunity to the venom and ability to see at night becomes essential to the survival of the bounty hunters, so the survivors strike a bargain with Riddick and work together with him to flee the planet.

There are some repetitions in this narrative development, which makes Riddick often seem like a diegetic reboot of Pitch Black, much in the way that The Force Awakens recreates narrative beats of A New Hope. But such is the convention for modern sequels taking place many years after their predecessors. It robs Riddick of some of the invention of The Chronicles of Riddick, but what it lacks in ingenuity, it makes up for in narrative clarity. Like Pitch Black, it’s a film that trusts the best practices of genre convention and uses the imaginative potential of its universe and its central character to reassemble familiar narrative patterns in exciting new ways.

7 out of 10

Riddick (2013, USA)

Directed by David Twohy; written by David Twohy, based on characters created by Jim and Ken Wheat; starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matthew Nable, Katee Sackhoff, Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, Raoul Trujillo, Karl Urban.

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