The Chronicles of Riddick is the franchise Vin Diesel seems the most passionate about, even if it’s not as widespread as The Fast and the Furious. I think it’s fun to see Diesel in a Star War and Chronicles is definitely the most elaborate of the three so far.
The 4K UHD captures all the different planetary environments, from snow to blinding, roasting nuclear sun, to the golden Helion Prime palace. It never does space as pure black. It’s always full of astral light.
Yet Chronicles doesn’t forget that it all started with Pitch Black. Here, the darkness is more of a flickering, and those dark frames are deep 4K. Riddick often has a nice silhouette backlit by sci-fi vistas.
The creature on the planet Crematoria prison looks quite good for 20-year-old CGI.
Riddick is a surround sound joy full of spacehip flyovers, whooshes, lasers and booms. They’re really distinct in the rear left and right channels too. Often you can hear sound effects bounce back and forth between the back speakers, especially the elementals zooming around.
A 73-minute retrospective and 10 more minutes each with David Twohy, Brian Murray and Keith David represent the movie well. All the material produced in 2004 is included too so one day it might be fun to compare and see if they revealed more 20 years later. Either way, these new ones are a solid look at creativity, budgetary compromise, and satisfying studios, creators and artists all at the same time.
Only the theatrical cut is in 4K. Given how Twohy touts his director’s cut it’s surprising but that cut is still included on Blu-ray.