D&D movie entering pre-production

The new Dungeons and Dragons film is moving forwards after a lengthy span spent in legal battles. A couple of months ago Warner Brothers announced that Goosebumps director Rob Letterman would be directing the film and now they are deep in the casting process.

To be clear, Vin Diesel has not been cast in the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. But he probably should be.

Ansel Elgort, who played the lead in The Fault in Our Stars, is in advanced talks to star in the D&D movie. Warner Brothers are also looking for "a Vin Diesel" type of actor for another role, which run through the Universal Marketing Translator, means they want Vin Diesel to do it but not necessarily for his usual high fee. Given The Diesel's well-known love of D&D (he got a cake in the shape of the rulebooks for his birthday), he might be open to negotiation. Let him split a beholder in half whilst screaming "CRITICAL HIT!" and he'll probably be on board.


The new Dungeons and Dragons film will be set in the Forgotten Realms world and will involve the Yawning Portal Inn and the city of Waterdeep. However, slightly curiously, it will be an original story rather than drawing on the hundreds of best-selling novels, gaming supplements or video games. Hasbro and Warner Brothers are looking for a slightly less serious tone for the movie, something more like Guardians of the Galaxy rather than Game of Thrones, and are also hoping it will be successful enough for them to launch a shared movie universe. Normally this would elicit groans, but given the vast diversity and richness of the dozens of D&D worlds, this franchise is actually uniquely suited for such treatment.

It looks like the movie will enter production proper later this year for release in 2018 or 2019.

Meanwhile, producer Tom DeSanto is developing new film and TV properties based on the work of the late D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. D&D itself will not be involved, as Warner Brothers and Hasbro control the screen rights to it, so this will draw on Gygax's other games, novels and materials.

Third RIDDICK movie on the way

Universal have signed a deal with star Vin Diesel and director David Twohy to release a third movie based on the character of Riddick, following on from the excellent Pitch Black and the promising-but-overblown Chronicles of Riddick. The third film, with the working title of just Riddick, will apparently retreat from the (expensive) complexities of the second movie see a return to the smaller-scale action of the first movie.

This could be promising. I didn't hate Chronicles of Riddick and found it somewhat enjoyable, if a much less successful film than the original. However, Pitch Black and the two spin-off computer games from the series, Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena (all made with Twohy and Diesel's involvement), are all superb, so colour me cautiously optimistic that this could be an interesting flick.

The Chronicles of Riddick

Pitch Black was an excellent low-budget movie with great characters and a tense, dramatic storyline built on an interesting SF premise. The director and the studio obviously thought it was missing a few things, such as big men in eyeliner, vast reams of CGI and a scenery-chewing English bad guy (seriously, what is up with that?), and decided to more than make up for it in the sequel.


The Chronicles of Riddick is a bit of a mess. A gloriously insane and entertaining-in-its-dementia mess, true, but it's still a movie that feels like what happens when you chuck every single idea you have into a melting pot and randomly shake it around rather than think about things seriously for a few minutes.

The movie opens with the director telling you the editing is a bit rubbish in places, which I must admit was very good of him, especially as I'd never have noticed without him bringing it up. Cheers for that. Then we're on a desolate ice planet with a bunch of mercenaries tracking down antihero Riddick. The mercs are armed with miniguns, nets and a faster-than-light spaceship. Riddick is armed with an unconvincing beard. Obviously my money was on Riddick here. Riddick travels to the planet Helion Prime to find out who's put a bounty on his head and is reunited with the Imam from the first movie. However, the planet is invaded by the 'Necromongers', a bunch of iron plate-wearing American football players who feel like they belong in a totally different film (and that film being David Lynch's Dune). Riddick humiliates the chief Necromonger bad guy (the aforementioned scenery-chewing Colm Feore) and escapes, only to be picked up by the mercs from earlier and taken to the prison planet Crematoria.

But! It's all part of Riddick's cunning plan to break out Jack (the other survivor of the first movie) from the same prison, which is located on a planet where the dayside is so blisteringly hot the air catches fire. This leads to a truly bemusing sequence which reverses the events of Pitch Black as the characters have to stay ahead of the daylight and keep in the shadows (clever writing or lazy recycling of past ideas? You decide). At the same time, a Necromonger attack force under Vaako (Karl Urban) is hot on his tail. Events culminate in a showdown between Riddick and the Necromongers (bet you didn't see that coming, eh?) and a quite unexpected ending.

Chronicles of Riddick is a massive, epic story compared to the first movie, although it shares some of the same driving forces. Laudably, the movie is strong on characterisation and Karl Urban's Vaako (coping manfully with a dodgy haircut and even dodgier make-up) is given some genuine moral dilemmas to chew over as his own ambition clashes with his personal loyalty to his leader, with his wife (played with relish by Thandie Newton) egging him on to do things against his conscience, Lady MacBeth-style. Riddick remains a strong character, although the things he does to save Jack does push him out of the 'ambiguous antihero' role and more towards a straight-up good guy, although he retains enough ambiguity to make the film's ending not as 'happy' as it may first appear. There's also no faulting the impressive set or prop design, which channels Lynch's Dune adaption rather than blander or more antiseptic views of the future.
All of that said, the movie comes across as being fairly ridiculous and over the top, although that could be considered part of its charm. The re-using of familiar elements from the first movie (particularly the inverting of the day/night threat on the planet) is also disappointing. The character of Jack is also not served well, not helped by a change in actress (the hero-worshipping and awkward tomboy of the first movie being replaced by an ass-kicking babe). Judi Dench also has a pretty surreal cameo as an ethereal 'elemental' alien, or something. I wasn't too clear on what was going on there. Oh yeah, and some of Riddick's backstory is explained in the cheesiest manner possible.

The Chronicles of Riddick (***) is an insane movie, but it is also curiously compelling to watch. The action is serviceable and its ambition is admirable, but this is a movie that collapses under the weight of its own ideas. That said, there is still scope for another good movie featuring these characters, and the forthcoming third movie (which will have apparently a smaller budget) should still be quite interesting.

The movie is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

Pitch Black

Originally released in 2000, Pitch Black is a low-budget SF/horror movie that became something of a hit, and helped propel lead actor Vin Diesel to action superstar status. A sequel (which I will be reviewing presently), The Chronicles of Riddick, followed four years later and a third movie is currently in pre-production.


Pitch Black opens with a spacecraft passing through the tail of a comet and suffering serious damage. Thrown off-course, it enters the atmosphere of a habitable moon. The pilot, Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell), almost jettisons the passenger compartment to help save the rest of the ship, but her co-pilot manages to stop her (although he dies in the crash). Of the forty passengers and three crew, there are only ten survivors. A major problem is that one of the survivors is bounty-hunter William J. Johns (Cole Hauser) and his prisoner, an exceedingly dangerous man named Richard B. Riddick (Diesel), who introduces himself as "Riddick, escaped convict, murderer." After initially escaping in the aftermath of the crash, Riddick realises he needs the help of the other survivors to escape from the moon and agrees to join forces with them. A great deal of tension in the movie is mined from the unpredictable behaviour of Riddick and the fact that Johns has his own demons and has allowed his obsession with capturing to Riddick to override his humanity. Carolyn also has issues of guilt over nearly killing the other survivors of the crash.

The character study part of the movie is very interesting, although the English survivor Paris (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) is a walking caricature and we don't get to know Australian prospector Shazza very well, despite her being played by well-known genre actress Claudia Black (formerly of Farscape and later StarGate SG-1). The other key characters are Abu al-Walid (Keith David), an Imam on a pilgrimage to New Mecca, and a youngster named Jack (Rhiana Griffith). Al-Walid finds his faith tested as the experience on the planet continues, whilst the impressionable Jack seems to find Riddick 'cool', despite the concerns of Carolyn and Johns.

The focus on the characters is extremely well-done. It's unusual for an action/horror movie to have such well-rounded and believable characters, and the actors all bring their best talents to the job. Diesel is extremely impressive as the anti-hero Riddick, whilst Mitchell makes a rather dislikable character interesting and her gradual move towards redemption believable. As the movie moves into its second half the SF backdrop to the movie becomes clearer: the moon, which is normally permanently exposed to the light of the three suns in the system, is about to pass into the shadow of its gas giant parent planet, at which point a race of vociferous flying creatures who are harmed by light will be released. The horror elements kick in as the characters have to find some way of generating enough light to keep the creatures at bay whilst they make their way across the wasteland to salvation.

These sequences are very tense and handled well. The movie may be low budget, but it makes the most of its resources very well, with the CGI creatures still holding up convincingly a decade later. Even in the middle of these action sequences the director keeps the mutual mistrust and paranoia between the survivors going quite nicely.

Pitch Black (****½) is a genuinely excellent movie, with a well-explored premise and an unusually sophisticated level of characterisation. It also features a highly positive portrayal of Islam, and pretty much all of the actors bring their A-game to the project. The only minor niggles are some stylistic flourishes of the director that are artistically interesting but a bit weird when taken literally (Riddick casually showing up unnoticed in the background of shots as the other characters anxiously search for him at the start of the movie), and the rather one-note writing of the token British character. Otherwise, this is an enjoyable and highly underrated movie.

The film is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The sequel is...different.