From the Sublime to the Riddick

I appreciated that Riddick re-committed to some fundamental themes of the movie series, but some "incidental" character notes threaten to derail Riddick's stature as a champion of the underclass.

As a character, Riddick works best as a force of nature. In Pitch Black, he was a physical force, feared as if he were a wild animal. In Riddick, he is portrayed as a force of natural law, confirming an undercurrent of all three films: that Riddick is a force of chaotic good. Although he is partially blind, he can see the moral path where others do not.

All the Riddick movies have touched on some fascinating issues, even though the plots are less than watertight. Let's face it, at least two of the movies could have been resolved in five minutes if Riddick had just said, "Hey, look, monsters!"

Following Pitch Black, a surprisingly thought-provoking movie that became a sleeper hit in 2000, Riddick was almost an afterthought in the big-budget sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), a space opera mash-up of the Massacre of the Innocents (a storyline propelled by the Lord Marshal character played by Colm Feore) and Macbeth (in the story featuring Karl Urban and Thandie Newton).

The usually laconic space anti-hero opens Riddick with a lengthy voice-over in which he gives his trademark self-confidence a shake, criticizing what he had become after being crowned Lord Marshal by the Necromongers.

The Hollywood Reporter's Graeme McMillan wrote that a preview motion comic called "Blindsided," which "offers potential meta-commentary on the previous direction of the Riddick franchise…. 'Somewhere along the way I lost a step,' Riddick says. 'Got sloppy, dulled my own edge -- maybe I went and did the worst crime of all: I got civilized. So now, we zero the clock. Gotta find that animal side again.'"

The quote is a perfect palate cleanser. Not only did it summarize the exact problem with the previous movie, it blatantly mentioned two elements that would be important in Riddick: a clock and an animal.

Soon after Riddick says those words in the voice over, we witness him adopting a puppy -- I kid you not! His affinity for animals was seen in Chronicles of Riddick, in which he tames a leonine creature that was used to attack prisoners. Riddick kills monsters, but soothes savage beasts.

In the new movie, Riddick has been dumped onto a hostile desert planet after being kicked out of Necromonger society (that's explained in a brief flashback: the franchise kicked itself out of the Necromonger storyline). He encounters a pack of hyaena-like animals that eventually fall victim to a dust storm. Only one pup survives. At first, Riddick uses the animal to test an antidote to the venom of a reptillian creature that stands between him and a bounty hunter outpost he spots in the distance. However, the animal becomes a kind of totem to Riddick's own toughness, and soon Riddick has a pet. At one point, Riddick and his spirit animal fight over something the pup has found in the sand. Hilariously, when they growl at each other, it's impossible to distinguish the animal from the human!

Once again, we are invited to see Riddick as a wild animal, thought to be dangerous, and hunted down because he is misunderstood. This sets up the question of who or what decides good and evil in Riddick's world.

In Pitch Black and Riddick, Riddick's outsider status allows him to see beyond the petty concerns that others are mired in. He will never have a place in this society, therefore debates about political pecking order or company rank are irrelevant to him. Literally and metaphorically, his unique vision allows him to see dangers to humanity that others can't. In Pitch Black, it's carnivourous monsters that descend from the sky. In Riddick, it's poisonous serpents that rise from the earth.

When he gives the mercenaries in Riddick a choice to follow his lead or not in the face of impending doom, he gives them a deadline. However, Riddick doesn't tell time by a human-engineered clock. Time's up "when the rain hits the station." Time is up for humanity when nature says it's up. Nature is the law here.

I'm making a pun, and the movie is, too. The concept of natural law is less about the environment's physical processes and more about how humans "naturally" behave. All three Riddick movies see prisons, government, and commerce as institutions that exist to preserve themselves, rather than to act in the interests of humanity as a whole. The jailer in The Chronicles of Riddick makes a typically Riddick-ian (Riddick-ulous?) moral statement: "Convicts have a code, inmates don't." The semantics here don't really matter (switching "convicts" with "inmates" is not inherently less sensical). What matters is the ability to distinguish between those who abide by a code of conduct and those who do not: moral people and immoral people.

In the same movie, the Purifier says, "We all began as something else." Riddick was a prisoner who became a saviour in the first movie. He was a fugitive who became a world leader in the sequel. In the new movie, he's a deposed leader who invites bounty hunters to get him -- thus making himself a fugitive -- and he finally allows someone else to be the saviour. He had every opportunity to assume that Boss Johns, the bounty hunter whose unethical son, William Johns, had captured Riddick in Pitch Black, was out for vengeance. However, Riddick did not act on opportunities to kill Johns, who was a bastion of professional rectitude compared to the first set of skeevy bounty hunters who answered Riddick's call. After a brief time during which it seemed Johns had betrayed Riddick, Johns proved that Riddick's instinct -- that Johns was a man of integrity -- was correct.

While Riddick returned to themes that endeared audiences to the character in the first place, it surprisingly hits a sour note in its representation of gender.

The first two movies feature a variety of female characters, each of whom have a unique role in the story. Pitch Black had the reluctant captain Carolyn, the jill-of-all-trades Sharon, and Jack, a girl who was passing herself off as a boy. In The Chronicles of Riddick, Jack reappears as an adult woman who goes by the name Kyra. Other memorable characters included the Lady Macbeth-like Dame Vaako, the Elemental ambassador Aeron (played by A-list star Dame Judy Dench); Lajjun and Ziza (the Imam's wife and daughter), and Eve, one of the bounty hunters.

In Riddick, there are only two women: a prisoner who is dispatched early, and a bounty hunter, Dahl, who is the target of a constant stream of sexist and rapey comments -- including, uncharacteristically, from Riddick. Riddick was very fussy about distinguishing himself from unscrupulous mercs and privileged assholes. Why this harassment of Dahl? Riddick was more respectful of Eve (fangirl squee: Eve was played by Christina Cox, who starred in the short-lived TV show Blood Ties, based on Tanya Huff's vampire detective books). Dahl, played by uber-badass Katee Sackoff, is a lipstick lesbian (this is the only science fiction film I can think of where a main character's make-up compact is crucial to a scene), and the only gay character in the series. Despite his disdain for petty human concerns, Riddick has some homophobic tendencies.

It's as if the movies are going backwards in terms of gender representation, a far cry from Pitch Black, which was much more interesting in terms of gender roles, not just with the cross-dressing Jack, but with Riddick's complex, non-sexualized relationship with Carolyn (Radha Mitchell), and Carolyn's issues with being placed in a position of authority. In The Chronicles of Riddick, Jack was shown to have grown up to be much more traditionally feminine, changing her name to Kyra, and ended up in a damsel-in-distress role.

Writer Kyoko M. liked Riddick much less than I did, but I can't argue with her post about the sexist developments in the franchise. Or, as Hollywood.com's Michael Arbeiter indelicately puts it: "A movie that is so frought [sic] with gender-political issues that we're beginning to wonder if the people populating the 'Vin Diesel Slams Gay Rumors' comment section actually had a hand in writing the script."

Harsh, but Riddick is a great character, upsetting expectations of what a hero should be. However, he's an even greater character when he's not compromised by Hollywood expectations of what a macho hero ought to be.

Despite the fact that Pitch Black has one of my all time favorite moments of bad astrophysics, it's one of my favorite SF and horror movies because of its well-paced and suspenseful storytelling and because of the attention paid to exploring who these characters were and what made them tick.

Given the way that Chronicles of Riddick painted itself into a corner both by being a pretty bad movie (Crematoria -- the stupid, it burns!) and also by being a very different movie (a vast space epic), I was curious about the next steps Riddick would take and I avoided as many spoilers about the movie as possible. I walked into the theatre wondering if Riddick would be about our erstwhile protagonist owning his place at the head of a vast empire, facing challenges that nothing in his life had prepared him for. Or, would the movie find a way to rip Riddick away from his golden cage at the first opportunity?

Riddick does the latter and devotes the first 15 minutes or so to detailing the epically bad day that leaves Riddick marooned on yet another deserted desert back-end-of-nowhere planet. A planet so hostile that, after he's ended up at the bottom of a cliff with an open fracture of his lower leg, he's got to beat off giant hyenawolves with a handy femur bone, immerse himself in a scalding hot spring to hide from them, and as soon as he climbs out, he and sets his fracture (because he's a manly man who's manly, and don't you forget it). And then, when he finds cool fresh water, it's got some nasty lizard-scorpions hiding in the mud at the bottom of the pond. And then, after he's done escaping from them (and the hyenawolves), he crawls off and sleeps in a sarcophagus left behind by some long-lost civilization.

By this point, I had the giggles something fierce. I was completely expecting the next scene to be a cut to Riddick going uphill both ways, barefoot, through the snow.

Instead, the next act of the movie showed how Riddick rescued and bonded with an orphaned hyenawolf. Together they escaped the lizard-scorpions and got to the lands on the other side of the mountain, which, while not exactly lush, were greener and less harsh. As cheezy as it sounds, the "boy and his dog" part of the story was a lot of fun and well executed.

The dichotomy between these two parts of the story sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Riddick is like the little girl with the curl. When she's good, she's very very good, but when she's bad, she's horrid. Riddick also manages at several points to pull off the trick of being both in the same scene.

On a more serious note, the franchise, even The Chronicles of Riddick, has never failed to provide meta and food for thought. I find it very interesting that in all three movies, Riddick is linked with predatory animals and understands and / or connects to them in ways that "civilized" people do not. I'm interested in the choice, by Vin Diesel himself, to make this such an overt aspect of the character given the ways in which "animalistic" "savage" and "primitive" have been used in very problematic ways where non-white characters are concerned. It's refreshingly subversive to see Diesel so boldly go there -- to see these tropes owned and then explored to show that this other is us, that what makes the big bad dark man so dangerous isn't that he's big and dark, but that he's a man, and a more powerful one than you.

At the same time, these larger than life traits that set Riddick apart from the average man make him akin to a force of nature. Unlike Suzette, I don't see Riddick as being chaotic good, but neutral. Nature is neither good nor evil. While Riddick's journey has a moral arc -- he arguably starts Pitch Black as neutral evil and learns some pointed lessons in selflessness and compassion (in large part because he finally sees somebody in authority stick to their stated code of ethics) -- I wouldn't yet call him good, because he's hardly benevolent, altruistic, or actively looking to make the world a better place. He just is.

As soon as Riddick hits an outpost of civilization, a base camp set up by bounty hunters, the plot kicks into action-adventure-scary monsters mode. While in the base camp, Riddick sets off the emergency beacon and waits for a ship to arrive.

From this point forward, huge parts of the movie come straight from Pitch Black, including a dark and stormy night full of monsters. On the one hand, I can and do enjoy parallelism and deliberate touch backs to previous installments in a series; on the other hand, since I knew how the plot would unfold, this robbed large chunks of the movie of any suspense. Unfortunately this was also handled as straight up a re-tread, and not as parallelism and touch backs for the sake of making a meta commentary, robbing large chunks of the movie of interest.

That said, one of the overarching themes of the Riddick'verse is codes of morality and ethics. Because it is important that a person stands for something, the worst kind of person in the Riddic'verse is a hypocrite. In Pitch Black, William Johns outwardly stands for law and order but would murder a child to save himself. The Purifier from The Chronicles of Riddick was also a hypocrite, acting outwardly as a Necromonger at the cost of denying his Furyan heart. He redeems himself in the end, but at the cost of his life.

Interestingly, it is not necessary that a person's code make them good; what matters is integrity. Does a person or organization walk the walk? Neither Riddick nor the Necromongers have particularly benevolent codes, but the fact that they stand by them and do not change lightly is shown as a trait worthy of respect, even though what they stand for might be evil.

Two competing bands of bounty hunters respond to the beacon. One is a motley crew, looking and acting as if they walked out of a biker bar. The other is clean, orderly, and efficient, looking as if they came from a large corporate security firm. By movie's end, one of these bounty hunter squads has lost every single one of its members, except for one lone survivor. This survivor had all the other outward traits of his compatriots, but unlike them, he had a code which he upheld. Another character also faces questions of morals and ethics, and a lot of the action turns on can this character handle adversity and some incredibly unpleasant truths, or is it all a sham? Will this person crack and be revealed as a hypocrite?

I enjoy the questions and dilemmas that the Riddick franchise raises by eschewing black and white moral and ethical codes and avoiding characters who are marble models of conduct.

However, I loathed the sexism in Riddick. This movie is steeped in rapey-ness. For starters, it's clear that a female prisoner of one of the bounty hunter squads was repeatedly brought out of hypersleep and raped, and not only was that uncalled for and incredibly offputting, but the misogyny in the movie is counter to several things about Riddick that Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick went out of their way to establish. Riddick himself engages in behavior that is both sexist and homophobic, adding insult to injury.

Riddick introduces Dahl, a woman who's second in command of one of the bounty hunter squads. She looks a lot like Carolyn Fry from Pitch Black. Dahl is also an eminently fappable lipstick lesbian, as opposed to the much less fappable bull-dagger. She is the subject of relentless homophobic jokes, all of which revolve around the revolting notion that what lesbians need is a good fucking from the right guy. Given that being "raped straight" is a legitimate threat for millions of women worldwide? This is so not funny. I could consider it characterization if a man made this remark once and after Dahl put him down, this behavior ceased, but Dahl has to deal with this problem multiple times.

The worst thing is, Riddick makes one of those remarks when he talks about the day she will willingly straddle him as he thrusts. It would be one thing if it were said in a sarcastic manner used to mock homophobic behavior, or as the result of a back-and-forth, give-and-take exchange of innuendo between Dahl and Riddick. But it's not delivered that way. It's delivered in a crude way in front of everybody, and it's intended to demean.

Pitch Black contained scenes of Riddick stalking Carolyn Fry, and in one particularly intense and charged scene, he confronts her in the escape shuttle. That scene made it clear that Riddick had no interest in raping Fry. He stalked her to study her, and he challenged her alone in the shuttle to test her mettle. When she did not back down from him, he immediately backed off and his voice and demeanor changed to one of respect. His advances towards Dame Vaako in The Chronicles of Riddick are likewise revealed to be a feint.

Riddick contains a scene of Riddick stalking Dahl, invading her privacy while she showers, and the hubba-hubba (as opposed to clinical) way it was shot comes off as a prelude to rape. Coupled with his later crude remarks, it's incredibly disconcerting because it is so out of character for Riddick. These are not feints, they are legitimately sexually threatening, and they link Riddick with the behavior of the bounty hunters who raped their captive. They make Riddick sleazy.

Finally, in the previous Riddick'verse movies, characters of both sexes had equal opportunities to earn Riddick's respect and admiration, and his relationship with women he likes is not sexual. Dahl never gets that same opportunity. In her last scene with Riddick, access to her body is a reward for him. Granted, Dahl gave permission for him to grab her ass, but outside of any mutuality between them, it doesn't come off as playful, but as something Riddick earned. Dahl is not defined outside of the role of lipsick lesbian tough chick plated up for the enjoyment of straight men, and that's a damn shame.

The treatment of women in Riddick is disgusting and a real blight on a franchise that offered up some cliché-busting women characters. The Chronicles of Riddick is in almost every way a worse movie than Riddick, but Riddick makes me immensely angry.

I still think there's hope for the franchise, though, because, as flawed as it is, it's set in an interesting world and it explores the stories not of the great and powerful, but more often of the mundane and the damned. It's not about changing the world, but trying to survive it. It reminds me of Firefly in that regard, only darker.

Erin Elizabeth Fraser
Staff Writer

Riddick — Official Movie Website