Could Work

Rating: 6/10 (5 August 2005)

I liked this film. You knew most of the people were gonna die, so you went with it wanting to find out how. It was your typical strangers encounter strange planet and find out that they've arrived at exactly at the celestial time that the planet's insane night time creatures come to attack for a spell. How predictable. Riddick is only helpful to the storyline, as he can see in the dark, as the creatures can. The most amusing point is finding out the boy was really a girl based on her menstrual cycle as a target.
The acting was really good, but you were faced with the typical range of interstellar crew mates. The indecisive, yet resilient captain. The religious dude. The cop who's carrying a psycho, but doesn't do a good job as said psycho becomes loosed. The idiot who thinks everywhere in Paris in the springtime. Etc, etc. The same inane characters exist within all films of this genre. Pitch Black emerges in a different sense because it utilizes a murdering ex-convict as it's antihero and savior of the film. He has loyalties to no one and would like to help the creatures if he could, but manages to yell a monotone "Keep up" as his way of helping. Naturally, he doesn't help at all, but offers some strange sense of comfort for leading the way.
The creatures weren't all that scary. They even bled blue blood. How's that going really raise hair on our arms? It was like watching Nickolodeon's Double Dare with all the blue goo from dead creatures, not a serious "I gotta get the heck off this planet cuz these things will kill me" feel. The movie's saving grace is Riddick, because you want everyone to die anyway, as you're thoroughly annoyed with them in the first 1/2 hour of the film. He feels the same way you do and isn't afraid to show it. His questioning of God is warranted, but the holy man is merely a plot device for Riddick to tell God that he's not altogether pleased with him in truck driver language. It's watchable because Riddick is watchable. The movie fails in itself without hm and that's why he got a sequel. Maybe that's why they killed off the other characters in "Chronicles". We just want Riddick and more of him.