Riddick & Achilles

On Saturday, I went to the movies - twice. First I went to see "The Chronicles of Riddick", which is the sequel to "Pitch Black". As a big fan of the first one, I was very happy to see a new movie exploring the character of Riddick further. It was very interesting in that we get a much wider view of the universe in which Riddick lives, including that there are different species of human-like creatures and that Riddick is from one of the powerful but rare due to persecution species. I'm not giving away much of anything with that statement, as they make it clear pretty fast. There's also an interesting parallel drawn between the biblical story of Herod having all the Hebrew boys killed because of a prophesy and that of the Lord Marshall of the Necromunga doing the same thing with the Furions for the same reason.

Later in the day, I went to see "Troy". This is a movie that will have to join the collection of modern epics that have been made, including "Gladiator", "Braveheart", "The Patriot", and the "Lord of the Rings" movies. I particularly liked the way they took a story that could have included a lot of supernatural elements and presented it as an entirely human story. The characters were, of course, all mythological heroes and villians with ancestry among the gods in the original story, but this telling sidesteps that, and the resulting focus on the characters and their emotional interaction without Greek gods dominating the stage results in what I think is a better movie than it would have been otherwise.

The reason behind the title to this post, though, is because it occurred to me a couple days later that the character of Riddick and the character of Achilles were cut from almost precisely the same mold. They are both incredibly strong outsiders, although Riddick is a criminal where Achilles is not. Achilles fights for Agammemnon, not because he cares whether the king wins or loses, but because he'll be remembered for the battles he wins. When it doesn't suit his purposes, he's ready to leave or sit out the battle. This is a direct parallel to Riddick's statement, "This is not my fight."

Both of them are also rather gloomy about the fact that we all die (at least for now - see my prior post on Kurzweil.) When faced with other people trying to get them to act because more people will die if they don't, they point to the inevitability of death as a counterargument as to why they should bother. I think it would be particularly interesting to take the scripts of the two movies, pull out the lines for Riddick and the lines for Achilles, and do some comparisons. If they don't have a least a couple lines that are almost verbatim the same, I'd be very surprised. Perhaps a quiz giving lines with an "Is it Riddick or Achilles speaking?" question lined up with each would be entertaining?

Not directly related to this topic, I'll also add that the race against time and a hostile planet that was the central activity of "Pitch Black" has its parallel in "Chronicles of Riddick" as Riddick leads an ever-dwindling group across the face of Crematoria, a planet with such extremes of temperature between night side and day side that humans can only survive in the narrow band between them, and if outside better run like hell. It's also kind of fun that in the Riddick universe, no matter how violent and dangerous a planet is, no matter how odd the environment, humans can breathe the air just fine.

I think both of these movies are well worth the price of admission, and when they come out on DVD, they will be added to my collection as movies I expect to watch quite a few times.