Twohy Fast, Twohy Furious

I don’t know that I like The Chronicles of Riddick, exactly. But it fascinates me.

I love Pitch Black, don’t get me wrong. David Twohy’s 2001 sleeper took a simple concept – spaceship crashes on world of hostile monsters, forcing the survivors to put their personal and professional issues aside to survive – and played it out perfectly, juggling sci-fi, horror and action elements to produce a remarkably satisfying B-movie experience.

That’s always been Twohy’s strength, from early works like the emotionally complex, narratively ingenious time-travel thriller The Grand Tour (aka Timescape) to shiftier projects like Below and A Perfect Getaway; his movies let you take pleasure in the storytelling and the performances. They’re what Corey Atad is calling five-star three-star movies over at his newsletter, though Twohy rarely directs at the scale of movies like Twister or The Siege. (He’s written a few of ’em, though.)

The Chronicles of Riddick is the one time Twohy’s made a blockbuster of his own. When Pitch Black became a surprise hit, Universal asked Diesel and Twohy to turn it into a sci-fi franchise to rival Fox’ Star Wars and Warner’s The Matrix. And after deciding there was no point in repeating the plot of Pitch Black, they chose to go cosmic, dropping the prickly brawler into an interplanetary war between galactic empires.

The Chronicles of Riddick would be Twohy’s Dune – or at least what Dune would have been had a growling guy in goggles and an undershirt arrived in the middle of the Harkonnen court to start knocking over the food stations. An annoyance, sure. But a monster? Next to this guy?

The weird thing about all three of the Riddick movies is the way they keep insisting (along with the man himself) that he’s an irredeemable psychopath: A beast in human form, rotten to his core, mean to children and puppies. But he never actually does anything truly awful to anyone who doesn’t deserve it. He’s not a villain, and he’s barely an antihero; the guy just wants to be left alone to read comic books or eat jam straight from the jar or whatever it is he does when he’s not fighting monsters or laying waste to hordes of undead warriors.

And even though Pitch Black gave Riddick a Deep Dark Secret monologue that painted him as much more morally clouded than the maniac Cole Hauser’s bounty hunter told Radha Mitchell’s pilot to fear, by the time Chronicles opens that’s been conveniently forgotten; the whole universe simply accepts that Richard B. Riddick is the sort of “evil” you’d want on your side a genocidal menace like the Necromongers.

(Side salad: It amuses me to no end that Riddick’s first name is Richard; the contemporary monicker always reminds me that Twohy had no idea he’d be placing the guy in a Frank Herbert milieu. One wonders how many Steves and Bills are running around this particular verse, too.)

But Diesel’s defiant snarl and, uh, limited affect at least offers an interesting contrast with the overqualified co-stars: Colm Feore goes hard on the Shakespearean grandiosity of the Necromongers’ Lord Marshal (“he’s a Roman general, my guy,” he offers cheerfully in one of the archival supplements), with Karl Urban, Linus Roache and Thandiwe Newton as his various necro-crew.

And of course there’s Judi Dench as a mysterious “Elemental” called Aereon who pops up to offer mysterious advice like a Force Ghost … or a Bene Gesserit, I suppose. She’s having a good time.

The setup is all very serious, as a Dune riff would have to be, but Twohy is also a pulp artist, so he peppers little side adventures into the story to keep the pace zippy, with Riddick being grabbed and regrabbed by cranky bounty hunters and racing around the universe in search of the one person he actually likes: Kyra, the kid from Pitch Black, now grown up and played by Alexa Davalos. But a confrontation with the Necromongers always looms, and when it finally arrives – steeped in court intrigue and the machinations of characters who are not Richard B. Riddick and therefore much less important to the movie Diesel and Twohy have constructed – it’s not all that exciting.

The Chronicles of Riddick may have whiffed it, but Diesel’s other megafranchise did well enough that he eventually got Universal to greenlight a third one, Riddick, that took the story back to a more basic hunters-and-hunted narrative in 2013. And that was pretty much that.

Until now, anyway. Everything comes around eventually. And having released an excellent 4K disc of Pitch Black for its 20^th anniversary, Arrow Video now follows up with a new three-disc limited edition release of Chronicles … and folks, you cannot get any more comprehensive than this.

Each of the three platters offers a different presentation of the film, with its own selection of special features. Organization is simple: All the new extras accompany the theatrical cut on Disc One.

Chief among the special features is “Ambition on Another Scale”, a 75-minute retrospective documentary directed and edited by Naomi Holwill. Built on new interviews with Twohy, co-stars David and Roache, concept artist Matt Codd, digital matte artist Dylan Cole, miniature effects artist Ian Hunter and storyboard artist Brian Murray, it’s an exhaustively detailed look at a production that wasn’t quite as massive as it could have been – even with a budget of $105 million,  Twohy ran a tight ship – but was still ridiculous. (At one point, Twohy mentions the power demands at the Vancouver soundstages made the production “the sixth-largest city in Canada.”)

Other new extras include additional interviews with Twohy, Murray and Roache – basically just collections of anecdotes and digressions that didn’t fit in the doc, but all very engaging. (David discusses the Riddick films in the larger context of his career, for example.) The theatrical teaser and trailer round out the section.

Universal’s original supplements – audio commentaries, featurettes, EPK interviews and spinoff stuff like a short film featuring Nick Chinlund’s bounty hunter Toombs – are with the director’s cut on Disc Two. Disc Three, which is exclusive to this limited edition, is for the true Riddick-heads, with an unmatted 1.78:1 presentation of the theatrical cut along with the Escape from Butcher Bay animated short – assembled from cutscenes from the Riddick videogame – and the promotional TV special “The Lowdown”, which I will charitably describe as Very 2004.

All three versions of the feature are offered in HDR and Dolby Vision in the 4K edition, with Dolby Atmos on both presentations of the theatrical cut and DTS-HD Master Audio on the director’s cut. The discs were mastered from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative, with 2K sources for the director’s cut material. It all looks terrific, with just enough filmic texture to remind us that big dumb sci-fi epics can look downright classy when their creators actually care about them.

Like I said, I’m a Pitch Black originalist myself. But revisiting The Chronicles of Riddick wasn’t as cringey as I’d feared, and as a longtime Twohy fan I was delighted to see his knack for finding weird nooks and crannies of even the dopiest genre concept is very much alive in this one. He didn’t sell out; he took the money and had a blast. Good for him.

The Chronicles of Riddick is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray limited editions from Arrow Video. (In Canada, they’re currently on sale at Unobstructed View!) I'm even looking forward to the inevitable UHD release of Riddick.

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