Yorick Van Wageningen

The Chronicles of Riddick takes the B-movie mythology of Pitch Black and attempts to magnify it with dozens of new characters, planet hopping, and political intrigue on the level Frank Herbert's Dune--with hints William Shakespeare's Macbeth--but it ends up a little more like a backwater galaxy somewhere in the Star Trek universe. Like Star Trek, there are sweeping images of hundreds of space ships, hordes of computer-generated extras that attempt to broaden the political and social scope of the story, but the gap between the backdrop and the foreground is at bit on the wide side.