Riddick (2013)

Riddick arrives with the weary confidence of a franchise that long ago stopped apologizing for itself. The cast is a varied collection of faces, and the film never feels the need to announce this fact. That absence of commentary is, by the standards of our current cultural accounting, a kind of silence. The mercenary crews simply are what they are. Dahl, played by Katee Sackhoff, is a hard-edged sniper who swats away Santana's advances and takes command of his men without ceremony. She reads as a lesbian, and the film treats this as unremarkable furniture. Then it hands her a gratuitous nude scene and surrounds her with a sexual slave kept in a cage. Any coherent statement about gender collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

The film has no interest in the planet as an environmental cautionary tale. Storms arrive, Mud Demons wake, and nobody delivers a monologue about the fragility of ecosystems. Bounty hunters chase money, which is as close as the screenplay comes to an economic thesis, and it never develops one. The bodies on display are the usual action-hero bodies, oiled and objectified. Nobody wrestles with self-acceptance. Nobody is coded as neurodivergent. History, being entirely fictional and set in deep space, offers nothing to revise.

We are left with a lean, R-rated survival picture that would sooner gut a man than lecture him. The sermon count is effectively zero, which in 2013 read as refreshing and now reads as almost quaint. This is a machine for delivering violence and Vin Diesel's low-frequency growl, and it performs that task with workmanlike indifference to the cultural conversation swirling around it. It is a specimen of modest social awareness, notable mostly for how little it wishes to teach us. A curious vintage. Thin, tannic, and uninterested in our approval.