Great Movie

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2003)

The movie starts with a bang, the crash of the space ship. The scene is about 7 minutes long and it is totally amazing. You see the crew wake up confused and not knowing what had happened. Then, when they open the window-cover, instead of the anticipated dark space they find out that they are surrounded by flames and that they are on a crash course with some planet. When they finally land, there is confusion everywhere. It is kind of realistic (as far as you can say that about a science fiction movie).
The planet is scorched by three suns. The cinematography is quite impressive, the colors are totally bleached so you get a good impression on the intensity of the light. Also the points of view of the aliens and of Riddick are really wonderful.
I find it fascinating how the group of survivors is composed. You don't very often see Moslems or Arabs in movies who are not portrayed as evil but just as normal people. Also I like the changes the characters undergo during the movie. Or maybe they don't change but only our perception of the characters changes. So at first you think "well, these are the good guys, and that is the bad guy", whereas after a while you start to reconsider your opinion.

The main character is of course Riddick, played very convincingly by Vin Diesel. In the beginning of the movie he is really scary, for example when he and Fry (Radha Mitchell) are together in the emergency ship they find on the planet, talking about Johns. They are alone in the ship, no Johns can come to help her, because they are undergoing some hull integrity check and the door has to remain closed during that test, and you find yourself thinking "what will he do to her?" You never get to know what Riddick is thinking because you can't read his eyes due to the "shine job" and due to the goggles he is wearing. So you don't know why he is helping the other survivors to get to the emergency ship. Is it out of pure necessity to get there somehow, or is it because he actually cares for the others? I like it that in the end of the movie he is still willing to let the others die on the planet just to save his own life. Only Fry's willingness to risk her life to save the others impresses him enough to go back with her. But does that really mean that he has changed?
I also like the relationship between Johns (Cole Hauser) and Fry as to who is the leader of the group. In the beginning, it is Johns who they go to, but during the course of the film, Fry is more and more accepted as the leader. Of course that leads to some nice conflicts between the two characters.
I like the ending of the movie.
The acting is really good, better than you would expect of such a movie. Everybody plays his/her character totally believable and although some of the characters remain bland and are only in the film to get eaten by the aliens, the characters are well developed.
The aliens are quite impressive too. You never see much of them which makes them all the more scarier. Unfortunately they are not as scary as for example the one in "Alien" but as the film is more a character based movie than a horror film, it doesn't really matter that much.
There are of course some big holes in the plot, for example that they happen to crash land on the planet exactly when the next eclipse is due, that such a planetary system as depicted in the model cannot exist, and that they land within walking distance to an abandoned geologist's camp, but hell, nobody is perfect. You just have to ignore those things, and actually, they really don't matter. Great movie.