The Chronicles of Riddick should be renamed "The Ridiculous Chronicles".Watched both Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick.
PB is a classic. Simple characters; an anti-hero, a pilot, a bounty hunter, and "a girl everyone else thought was a boy". There's a nice ticking clock element, leading to a heroic sacrifice as redemption for the pilot. I love scifi, and this is mostly a slow burn, which is great. 8/10
Chronicals... more complicated. Over-ambitious. Needed about ten minutes of exposition and a few scenes that were probably filmed but didn't make the edit.
There's some good stuff, nice touches, some attention to detail.
The green screen and CG effects in general still look good. There's a CG dog-cat monster thing released by some bad guys, and it hunts Riddick. They drew in an ear tag on it. Totally unnecessary, but great touch.
Tries to shoehorn in a ton of back story, not all successfully, even when it's Judi Dench dropping the exposition bombs.
The kid from the first film is shoehorned into Chronicles, to give the story an emotional core.
Instead of a realistically aged actress, they hired a sexy replacement. She was fine, but the change was big from PB. You don't see her character becoming a sexy murderbot.
There are a few "Wut?" story moments. The ending is kind of rushed. There's some forced emotional growth that doesn't seem more than contrived.
Flawed but still pretty worthwhile.
7/10
I know I'm supposed to suspend my disbelief a bit during movies, but the scenes where the sun rising causes the planet to basically catch fire where it touches completely ignored any known laws of physics. The way someon can be totally fine in a bit of shade, but literally burn to ash in seconds out in the sunlight, pushed my bullshit-o-meter to breaking point.
There is a third movie just called Riddick by the way, if you liked both of the others then it's definitely worth a watch. I rate it as better than the second, but not as good as the original.