Another upcoming sf movie

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Sorry for so many entries in rapid succession. One last thing for tonight:

Another of the previews I saw before Return of the King (which, btw, I quite liked, but more on that another time) was for The Chronicles of Riddick. As someone noted the other night, the preview wavered on the edge between "could be excellent" and "could be terrible." But then I figured out who the movie is about and what it's connected to, and now I'm pretty firmly in the "could be excellent" camp.

Specifically, Chronicles is a sequel to the 2000 horror/sf movie Pitch Black (see my review from a couple years ago), and although he never appears in closeup in the preview, Chronicles stars Vin Diesel. (If you know he's in it, it's pretty obvious that a certain shadowy figure in the preview is him.) Also, Judi Dench and Thandie Newton are in it, though I have no idea how big their parts are.

Chronicles is directed by David Twohy, who directed Pitch Black. It's also written by him, which may or may not be a good thing; he co-wrote the very solid Pitch Black screenplay and the excellent screenplay for The Fugitive, but he also co-wrote G.I. Jane and Waterworld.

So anyway, I'm tentatively looking forward to this one.

7 Responses to “Another upcoming sf movie”

  1. Zak

    David Twohy has actually done a fair bit of really solid genre work. The Arrival was quite sharp, and the recent Below was an unjustly buried and very neat little movie. Part WWII submarine story, part ghost story and part examination of what ghost stories mean about the people that believe them.

    Waterworld was two very fun movies grafted together to make one very lousy one. 🙂

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  2. Karen

    Cool! I didn’t know a sequel was in the works. I thought Pitch Black was quite fine, and visually a knockout. Twohy’s work has been kind of hit or miss, but there’s a certain SF enthusiasm that permeates it all which makes me want to see what he’ll do next. This should be fun.

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  3. David Moles

    I thought Pitch Black was pretty good, but you know, The Chronicles of Riddick is one seriously lame-ass title.

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  4. Jed

    Thanks, Zak—I hadn’t heard anything about Arrival or Below. I’ll keep an eye out for ’em.

    Credit where due: I didn’t really make clear in that old review of Pitch Black that, iIrc, I wouldn’t have watched it if it hadn’t been for Karen’s recommendation. Thanks again, Karen! Agreed about sf enthusiasm.

    David: Agreed about the title. The people I was talking with the other night hadn’t seen Pitch Black and thus had no idea who Riddick was; they figured from the title that the movie was some kind of sequel, but they had no idea to what.

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  5. Zak

    Yeah, Chronicles of Riddick isn’t exactly a great title. What I read a couple of years ago was that the plan was to to bank on Vin Diesel’s popularity and the fact that the Lord of the Rings movies were doing very well to make an R rated science fiction trilogy. I have no idea if they managed to pull that off, but it’s something I’d like to see.

    Even though when I saw the preview to it I was still hard in the grips of, “why would I want to see a movie that was not Return of the King now that I’ve seen Return of the King“, I thought it was really refreshing to see an original science fiction universe that looked interesting. I basically trust Twohy to at least make a movie worth seeing if not one worth getting really excited over.

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  6. Gwenda B.

    My only fear is that the preview looked like they’d run screaming from everything that made Pitch Black good in the first place. Kind of went in for really expensive effects and–at a glance–a more traditional story.

    But I hope I’m wrong.

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  7. Hannah

    I realized it was him before I realized what the preview was for — guessed from the shadowy figure and then the voice clinched it. Interesting way they handled the whole thing, though. I don’t think they broadcasted who was in it.

    I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Thought the preview looked good and then thought it looked not so good. But Pitch Black was fabulous. Here’s hoping.

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