Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Yes, I know. This film was received by critics as if it was the sequel to <I>Battlefield Earth</I> instead of the follow-up to the cult favorite, <I>Pitch Black</I>. Riddick, you may recall, was once a dangerous, sociopathic villain. Here, like a gravel-voiced Captain Kirk, he arrives just in time to save the universe from the Underverse.

And now for something entirely different. Film critics and theater audiences had a mixed reaction to this computer-animated release. So mixed, in fact, that it moved in and out of theaters last fall before it had a chance to develop any word of mouth.

Start with a look at Marine boot camp not much different than what we've seen in countless war movies. Move on to a boring look at bored Marines killing time in the desert in the buildup to the 1991 Gulf War. They're depicted as dumb, disorganized, rowdy, and undisciplined. The promotional copy for the movie, included in the cover art, says that the troops are "in a country they don't understand, against an enemy they can't see, for a cause they don't fully grasp. Believe me, the troops in the first Gulf War were fully briefed on the country they were going to, could usually see the enemy (his back, typically), and understood that they were fighting to free a country occupied by the forces of an expansionist dictator. That promotional copy was clearly written as a not-too-subtle analogy to the <I>current</I> Iraq war.