David J. Williams

The reviews have been tepid, but screw ‘em. I loved it, and I love the direction the Bond reboot has taken the franchise. The old movies were classic, but let’s face it, by the late 1980s they were way past their sell-by date, with only the occasional gem (like that psycho truck chase in License to Kill) to enliven what had become a hackneyed formula that usually revolved around Bond-beats-supervillain-before-he-can-unleash-his-ultimate-weapon (usually a gigantic space-based directed energy cannon).

But Casino Royale swept all that aside, and suddenly Bond was plunged into a world that was far grittier, far more in-your-face, and much more contemporary. Perhaps it took Daniel Craig to make the tracking of terrorist finances into something sexy, but it also took a new breed of screenwriters who created byzantine plots so twisted that they made the previous Bond flicks look like lightweight candy. Those writers continue to push the envelope with Quantum of Solace, which is the first direct sequel to occur in the Bond franchise (there’s another first, but you have to wait to the end to see what it is).  The dialogue is relentlessly clever/funny, and the fight-scenes continue to be low on gadgets and high on interesting topography.  And as with Casino Royale, there’s even a bit of (gasp) character development for Bond….

In fact—and this is going to seem really fucking petty—the only problem I had with the movie were the titles used to identify locales; each location-signature was plastered obstentatiously on the center of the screen in various loud fonts, and it really got on my nerves. Give me a quick digital read-out in the lower left-hand corner and just get on with it, okay?  Thanks guys.  And thanks for kicking butt with everything else.

So this is interesting: Will Smith will be potentially be starring in The Last Pharaoh, about Taharqa, one of the Nubian rulers of the 25th dynasty. He spent most of his life fighting the Assyrian Empire, which ruled the Near East out of the Fertile Crescent (in the middle of modern-day Iraq). Of particular note here is that the screenplay’s being penned by Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart. And what happened to Mel Gibson/William Wallace is pretty much what happened to Taharqa too: the Assyrians kicked him out of Egypt and back into Nubia, though not before he’d fought and won at least one heroic battle. This could be really cool, and might even lift the curse that Oliver Stone laid on the swords and sandals epic after Alexander sold about ten tickets.

Though I may as well confess though that for me the real payoff here would be seeing the Assyrians in action on the silver screen. They were the most ruthless empire the world had seen up to that point, and they took siege warfare and propaganda to a whole new level. Their big claim to fame is turning Israel into the seventh century BC equivalent of a parking lot (which got them into the Bible), but I’ve always had a soft spot for them after seeing the incredible recreation of a corridor of the Assyrian royal palace at the British Museum. How can you beat winged lions with human heads? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

With Babylon A.D., Vin Diesel’s career careens precariously toward what we call the Rutger Hauer Event Horizon: that point of no return beyond which a star only makes straight-to-DVD guilty pleasures. There’s a lucrative career there, to be sure, and hey, it beats auditions while you hold down the day job. But Diesel has fallen a long way since his Pitch Black glory days, and that’s a real shame.

Particularly because Babylon could have amounted to a damn sight more than it did. Someone clearly sank some money into the thing, and the world it depicts has a cool dystopian feel to it (there’s some truly gorgeous scenery at times). It opens well, too: in a hellhole that looks it might be round twelve of some Chechnyan war.  And they probably should have kept the whole thing there, rather than turning the movie into the Children of Men-meets-Cyborg roadtrip that it rapidly becomes.  By the time the narrative reaches America, the plot has descended into near-total incoherence, and by the time the movie ends, the audience’s reaction was one of near-total derision.  (They were vocal about it too.)

Leaving us to wrestle with the question of Just Went Wrong.  The script feels like it was done by a committee, so that’s one thing.  And the movie ran over-budget, which seems to have gotten the studio involved perhaps earlier than it should have.  Director Mathieu Kassowitz has claimed that the studio bosses cut 20 minutes of his vision, and maybe that was the problem, but I didn’t see anything on the screen to convince me that there were uncut gems lying around in the vault.  I’m also not inclined to give the guy who unleashed Gothika upon us the benefit of the doubt.

And I have to wonder why Vin Diesel’s agent did.

The blogosphere (or, rather, specialized segments of it) is abuzz with Vin Diesel’s statements about not one, but two forthcoming Riddick movies. Apparently director David Twohy is even now writing the scripts, which he and Diesel are about to start shopping around. Intriguingly, they’re also conferring on whether they’ll end up shooting both movies separately, or together, a la Lord of the Rings. And the LOTR reference is instructive, as it underscores what I was saying last month about just how ambitious the original Riddick plans were. And apparently still are. Just one problem.

Money.

Folks, nothing’s been signed. Twohy can write all he wants and Diesel can talk to whomever he damn well pleases and fans can work themselves up into a Furyan frenzy, but the fact of the matter remains that Chronicles underperformed at the box office. Which is going to make any sequels a VERY tough sell.  I’m not saying it can’t be done. But ultimately the pitch meetings that Twohy/Diesel have with Hollywood execs may not be about Riddick anyway.

They’ll be about Babylon A.D.

Which opens in the States this weekend, and is Diesel’s first SF movie since Riddick. Making it a great way for Hollywood to tell if Diesel still has box-office draw as a SF star. Which, bluntly put, means that if Babylon tanks, you can forget about seeing anything involving Riddick, ever again. And it doesn’t look like we’re off to a good start, either: the movie opened in France, and has been panned by critics so far. Sure, Babylon might just suck in its own right. Doesn’t matter to Hollywood. Hey, it’s their money. When I invest mine, I like to see proof that it’s going to get me a return too.

So I leave you with this: if you really really REALLY want to see more Riddick movies, and you DON’T go see Babylon A.D. THIS WEEKEND, then your commitment to the cause has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Convert now or fall forever.

So I admit it: I am a junkie, and I have no will of my own. I’d already seen the goddamn movie twice, but a friend dragged me to Saturday night’s IMAX show at the Museum of Natural History. She claimed that if you haven’t seen Dark Knight on IMAX you haven’t seen Dark Knight. I found the logic persuasive, and considered it my duty to put the claim to the test.

And now I can report the results. To be clear, Dark Knight is flat-out fantastic on any screen. But it’s all a matter of increment. See it in your living room on a DVD a year from now, and yeah, you’re missing something. Most of which you get by seeing it in a normal theater. But if you want a five-story tall Joker, there’s only one medium that delivers.  Not to mention that insane underground road chase….and that death-defying plunge through the Hong Kong skyline… jesus christ. Apparently only 25 minutes of the film are actually shot in IMAX, but the sheer scale of the screen makes those other two hours pretty insane as well. It’s a great way to wrap up the summer.

Next on my to-see list: Death Race. I suspect it’ll be a cold day in Lucifer’s domain the day THAT makes it to an IMAX, but in the words of someone I trust, I feel sure it will (a) suck and (b) be fucking awesome.

My Riddick post of earlier this week led to a flurry of comments, all of them weighing in about how much they loved the movie and how sad it is that we’re unlikely to see any more of them since Chronicles tanked at the box office. Strangely enough, not one person went on about how much they thought the movie sucked, and that’s a shame, because I was really hoping for some hate mail.

But I can’t stop thinking about Riddick and the vital question of Where It All Went Wrong. One commenter shared my unease with the whole Furyan legend, and I have to think this is getting to the root of the problem. There was (and correct me if I’m wrong) not even a hint of this whole mythos in Pitch Black, and one wonders how sequels would have fared had they just stuck to the Riddick-as-bad-ass without invoking the supernatural, the Underverse, and all that other potentially way-too-heavy baggage.

That said, I still think one of the biggest strengths of Chronicles is that it didn’t try to just do a Pitch Black 2. And now that I’ve done some more digging, I can’t say that I’m surprised to find out that Pitch Black 2 is precisely the direction that Hollywood was originally looking to take the movie.  Apparently Twohy initially handed the writing job to David Hayter, who proceeded to produce yet another Riddick vs. the Monsters flick.  Maybe it was great, maybe it was lame:  the only guy who’s read it and shared his thoughts online thought it was pretty much an Aliens 2 ripoff, and there’s no question that there would have been a high bar to clear to avoid that resemblance.  There’s also mention of another Riddick/Monsters script that may or may not have been a rewrite; it’s tough to judge a movie based on one lame excerpt, but the excerpt cited in this article certainly sounds it was part of a really awful script.

After the success of Pitch Black, director David Twohy was planning an epic Riddick trilogy, of which this movie would be the first. But when Chronicles tanked at the box office, the next two movies were scrapped, and Universal Studios contented itself with spinning off video games to recoup their losses: an effort that was assisted by the Chronicles DVD, which apparently sold pretty well. But the grander dreams were over. All that was left of a franchise that Twohy had hoped would dominate the SF landscape were fragments scattered here and there: two very different movies, those video games, and a couple of animated shorts.

And that’s a goddamn shame. Because I saw Chronicles again last night, and christ does it kick ass. The sweeping planetscapes (c’mon, any list of top ten SF planets would have to include Crematoria), the demented neo-gothic spaceships, the over-the-top costuming, and the nonstop action: Twohy and his team got a lot of stuff right. And Vin Diesel is a fucking star throughout:  he’s got undeniable charisma, and some really great lines too.  (“Shoulda taken the money, Toomes.”)

But I’m curious to hear what YOU guys think.  There are obviously a lot of folks out there who hated this movie, and this is your big opportunity to weigh in and tell me what you thought sucked.  Me, I think the movie’s central failing was the thing I like the most about it:  Twohy could have just made Pitch Black 2, but he elected to take things in a totally different direction, and take some chances while he was doing it.  Or maybe they should have stuck with the original Riddick origin legend—instead of him being a Furian, perhaps the original explanation of how he got his eyes fixed by a rogue surgeon on a prison planet was more in keeping with the gritty universe that Pitch Black was hinting at.  Or maybe 2004 just wasn’t ready for a big-budget, no-holds-barred, unapologetic space opera.

It’s too bad, though, because I for one would be up for a couple more.