Pitch Black’s Mistakes Broken Down In Honor Of Riddick
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Cue the dramatic piano stabs. CinemaSins is back with another addition to their amusing video series where they take popular movies and point out all their faults, tongues planted firmly in cheeks. They’ve released a pretty timely rip on David Twohy’s 2000 sci-fi thriller Pitch Black, seeing as how Riddick comes out tomorrow. It looks like a fun and brainless CGI action romp, with Vin Diesel reveling in glow-eyed madness, just like he was in the first film. It’s too bad the gravelly voiceover is still there. Anyway, that’s enough half-complaints about a film I haven’t seen. Time to hop on the CinemaSins train and rail against one that I have.
This is the perfect movie to pick apart humorously, as it takes itself way too seriously, and it’s crammed with moments that should have been eradicated along the way. The best example of that is the cave-blocking boulder that magically changes shape when Riddick needs it to. I’ll admit this video probably shouldn’t have been seven minutes long, but there are a few moments that beg to be considered at length. The spaceship’s non-lethal crash landing, the inability of the winged monsters to fly close to the ground, and Johns’ plan are about as confounding as cinema details get.
I can’t remember when I started, but I take mental notes of scenes whenever a character walks in on another character currently involved in whatever the first character wanted to talk about, such as when Johns’ got the needle in his eye. For whatever reason, if Johns would have just finished or had not yet begun when Carolyn went to see him, it would have felt like an even cornier moment. I picture screenwriters having chronic headaches from having to choose which of these situations to go with.
Even if seven minutes of this was pure garbage, it would still have been redeemed by references to both The Princess Bride and The Iron Giant, the latter of which is near the very end of the runtime, after the adverts.
I guess I’m going to need to rewatch the entire movie before I catch Riddick. Hopefully CinemaSins will do Chronicles of Riddick by the weekend. The trailer below will work in the meantime.
And since we didn’t get to it, for a very good reason, here’s “Everything Wrong With Justin Bieber’s ‘Never Say Never.'” You can thank us in the morning.
