On Riddick

I want to talk about Riddick; not the new movie, Riddick, or not only, but the character, and more to the point the characters around him.

Pitch Black was an indie SF movie, in which Richard B Riddick (Vin Diesel) first appeared, but despite its later re-branding as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black, he wasn't the main character. That was Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell), a young commercial pilot who struggles to keep the survivors of a crash alive against the elements and the attention of psychopath Riddick, in order to atone for her own weakness in a moment of crisis.

Carolyn Fry was something rare in science fiction, in movies of any kind; a genuinely strong female character. She was deeply flawed, uncertain yet determined; she fought to the bitter end and, in giving her own life, managed to make a genuine impact on Riddick, who was implied to be changed forever by his encounter with this incredible, extraordinary ordinary woman.

The film also featured a tough - if ultimately doomed - prospector, played by Claudia Black, an imam whose faith - which remained strong, despite the deaths of his family - was a counterpoint to Riddick's nihilism, and Jack, a young girl in disguise as a boy, who idolised the killer, all of them strong, interesting characters quite distinct from the run of the mill.

But then he got big; he forgot the little people, as it were, and so did director David Twohy. The Chronicles of Riddick took Pitch Black's antihero and cast him into a a grandiose space opera as an interplanetary Conan the Barbarian, battling the planet-ravaging Necromongers (straight up, yeah; Necromongers) to reclaim his heritage as the last of the Furians and the champion prophecied by kung-fu elemental Judi Dench. In the course of this fight, the imam from Pitch Black is gunned down by Necromonger stormtroopers and Jack, now Kira, a sultry wannabe Riddick, also buys the farm.

Kung-fu elemental Judi Dench is pretty much the pick of the characters replacing them, although Lady Vaarko (Thandie Newton), although largely a one-note Lady Macbeth character, has some chops to her. The whole Necromonger thing is a bit silly, however, and the whole thing doesn't stand up as well with Riddick in the midst of epic conflict.

Which brings us to Riddick, a back to basics film which basically does Pitch Black with a bigger budget and fewer likable characters. In particular, Riddick's big emotional relationship this time is with a CGI dog, and the female characters in play... Oh, dear me.

The first one is a female prisoner, implied to have been repeatedly raped, and then murdered after about five lines of dialogue as a means of proving that the really bad guys are worse than any of the other psychopaths in the film. She is never even given a name, but dies within five feet of Riddick as if she is supposed to have an emotional impact equivalent to that of Carolyn Fry.

The second is Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), who is tough. And that's about it. She gets to punch the rapist guy a few times to prove it, and shoot Riddick with tranquilisers. At worst, she's a lesbian who turns straight for Riddick; at best, she's an asexual loon who is turned on by extreme psychopathy. I tend towards the latter interpretation, but it's still not very good.

And it makes me wonder... How did this happen? How did the same core team make Pitch Black, a film with some of the best female characters in movie SF, and Riddick, an outright offence to feminism?