Club409

I finally saw the movie so now I see what you're saying. Like many other things he explains it very clearly in the book whereas the movie just gives unclear hints. China got involved because they were the only other program with a rocket ready to launch with the capability to get to Mars. They don't have much of a manned space program so they saw it as an opportunity to trade for a seat on one of the later Mars missions. They never say this in the movie but they do hint at it: during the end credits they show the Chinese officials in mission control and a Chinese astronaut sitting next to Beck as they get ready to launch on the next Mars mission.

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A couple weekends ago barb wanted to watch Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick with me and I hadn't seen them. She had watched them years ago and remembered they were good. I would give Pitch Black a 3.5 out of 5 souvenir hair locks since it was a decent self-contained movie. It had this weird late 90's atmosphere and dialog style, but that was kind of fun. The characters have their lanes and stay in them and it works fine. A couple things don't make sense, but it didn't really bother me too much. Just decent enough movie all around kind of occupying a 75/25 sci-fi/horror ratio. Now Chronicles of Riddick I've got some issues with. 2.5 out of 5 weird CGI budget decisions. Most of the movie feels like a movie set it never really takes you away. They introduce a bunch of different types of humans or whatever, but there was no mention of that in PB so it's like out of left field. The middle of it seems side tracked from the main story. But here's the main thing they really messed up on IMO: they missed the theme. [SPOILERS from here on] PB pretty much has it right in the title: darkness is scary, but for Riddick it's not, so what does that say about him? In CoR Riddick is mostly getting things accomplished by being this great fighter, which OK sure. But if you go back and think about PB, Riddick was handled well enough by just a decently equipped/trained bounty hunter. It didn't take like a whole army. He had some quirks but was still pretty much just a dude. But what was his main perk? Seeing in the dark. Now the bad guys in CoR are this super zealot proselytize by force/mind control religious bad guy group. At the end, Riddick has this face off against the leader and it's one on one hand to hand until it climaxes when Riddick's little protege surprise stabs the bad guy after she had pretended to be converted. Then Riddick can win the fight hooray. Here's how it should have went down. The whole time bad guy group has sayings like "bringing the light" to their new subjects. They could have even said stuff like "The light be with you" to each other just to really get the imagery going. And all their domains and stuff are like super lit up with extravagant lights. The movie goes on like normal and Riddick is fighting his way to the main bad guy. It gets harder and harder until he has pretty much lost. He's in this well-lit room with the bad guy and all these flunkies and his animal fight instinct is like at 11 but they've got him down and surrounded. They're about to finish him off, but then protege...turns off the lights. The room is pitch black and Riddick just does what he's gonna do. The END.

tl;dr they pretty much dropped the darkness theme from PB to CoR but missed a great story opportunity doing so.

PB is one of my favorites, had that Abyss feel where most of the tension came from pacing and 2.5 dimensional characters, but cgi used sparingly and to great effect.  It just did its thang, and I respect any movie, unicorn birthday parties or whatever, that choose their thang and do it well.  Never saw CoR, just based on trailers there seemed to be no reason to use the same character at all.  Just have "Vin Diesel is Rock Hardstuff in Chronicles of Rocky" or whatever.  Glad I never saw it, like I never saw the matrix or boondock saints sequels. 

I actually enjoyed it.  Well even if you don't love the story the ending is pretty, well, ohshit. 

Cinesift aggregates movie ratings from rotten tomatoes, imdb, etc, and you can select availability options for amazon prime or netflix. Looks pretty useful.