I was pretty excited to see Riddick.
I like Pitch Black and Vin Diesel. Ditto Katee Sackhoff. So the two of them kicking ass in a movie together? Sign me up!
But then. But then. I saw the movie.
First, a brief synopsis: Riddick (Vin Diesel) has found himself stranded on an inhospitable planet that's about to get downright murderous when a swarm of underground scorpion-worm-things attack. The only way he can escape is to sic a group of bounty hunters on himself and then steal one of their ships when they come to off him. Get it? Got it? Good. No problems there.
Of the dozen or so characters in the movie, two of them are female. One, an unnamed prisoner of one of the groups of bounty hunters, is killed by lead bounter hunter Santana (Jordi Mollà) as a way to establish early on that he's an evil rapist. The other character, played by Sackhoff, is a member of the other bounty hunter group. Her name is Dahl. Get it? Because it sounds like doll. So when Dahl's boss Johns Sr. tells her "Dahl, you get up the sniper rifle," it sounds like Dahl's in a 50s sitcom being ordered to get her husband a sandwich. It's so funny.
From the get-go Santana and Dahl don't get along, but she hits the douchebag in the head a few times and everything looks to be going pretty well.
Until he rapes her.
Yep. Riddick has one female character, and she gets raped. It's never explicitly stated that that's what happened, but we see Santana, who's threatened Dahl before, hold her down and say he's going to rape her. In a later scene another character asks what's up with all the blood in the room, and an uncomfortable Dahl says she was forced to beat up Santana, who's off smirking in a corner.
At this point my feelings towards this movie could be expressed by these Gordon Ramsay gifs:
At this point my feelings towards this movie could be expressed by these Gordon Ramsay gifs:
But I quickly switched gears to these Gordon Ramsay gifs:
The reason?
The rape was never mentioned again. It just happens and then no one acknowledges it.
Dahl doesn't even get to kill him. It's like the writers had her get raped for the hell of it and don't even bother to pretend that it's relevant to anything else that happens in the whole damn rest of the movie.
And don't even tell me that the rape happened to establish how much of an evil SOB Santana is, because the death of that other female character already did that. Ditto the scene where he kills Riddick's dog. That bit was absolutely ridiculous, but I'm OK with Riddick being ridiculous. I wouldn't expect otherwise. I just didn't want it to be actively offensive.
And not just that—it's also bad storytelling. I am honestly at a loss to even begin to figure out what narrative purpose that rape served. They could have easily left that scene on the cutting room floor—or, hey, never written it in the first place!—and it would have changed absolutely nothing about the story.
But wait! There's more!
Throughout the film Dahl is also subjected to flirtation and a bit of non-consensual voyeurism from Riddick himself, who never seemed like he'd consider sexually assaulting someone in the first movie, but I guess that's character development for ya. By the end of the movie, Dahl's expressed interest in hooking up with him.
Why is that bad, you say? I mean, sure, it's a little uncomfortable, but....
Oh wait.
Dahl's a lesbian.
One of the first things her character said is "I don't fuck guys." And then, by the end of the movie, after being subjected to creepy come-ons, she wants all up on Riddick.
Remember, kids! If you're a lesbian, it only takes the right man to come along and make you like penis!
I expect this sort of shit from Sherlock, where Irene liked ladies until Sherlock and his big brain came along. Steven Moffat's kind of a sexist, homophobic douchecanoe, and I don't like it, but it doesn't surprise me anymore. But e tu, Riddick? E tu?
To add a shit cherry on top of the shit sundae that was this movie's portrayal of its female character, Dahl didn't even have a lot of ass-kicking to do! She's Johns' second in command, meaning she holds down the fort and makes sure their rivals don't try anything while he goes and leads the dangerous missions. The practical effect of that, however, is that the dudes get to actually engage in the action while Dahl stays behind and occasionally fires a sniper rifle.
God dammit, movie. You have Katee Sackhoff, and you don't even utilize her in most of your fight scenes?
The rest of the movie didn't do much for me: Some of the fights scenes were OK, but the way it called back to Pitch Black (his antagonist there is the son of a guy who's hunting him down in this movie... whatever, it was stupid) was pretty heavy-handed and unnecessary. I don't need character arcs. I don't need themes. I just needed Vin Diesel and Katee Sackhoff kicking some alien butt.
I sure as shit didn't need the sort of blatant sexism that I got in this movie. Maybe it didn't bug most of the dudebros who saw it. I don't know. Rape in movies can be a weird subject to talk about, because I genuinely believe there's a difference in the way male and female viewers experience seeing it. For me, what Riddick did with Dahl made it impossible for me to enjoy the rest of the movie. For other people... I don't know.
But I do know I won't be giving a fourth Riddick movie, if there is one, a shot. I want to forget this one ever happened.
All due respect, but I honestly didn't read that scene as Dahl being raped. She seems more than a match for him physically, and he seems more wary of her that scene than she does of him: I honestly read it as he tried to, and she fought him off. He's bleeding again afterwards, the source of the blood. She's not. Are you implying it's her blood from the rape?
ReplyDeleteI'm hairtrigger explody about 'oh it's a woman WE MUST HAVE RAPE' that's so prevalent in movies these days, so it's not like I'm blind to the idea (I foamed at the mouth of the egregious double-rape-ridiculousness that infested Dredd) and while I could possibly see your interpretation of that scene as rape, I don't think it is ABSOLUTELY the only way to read it. I don't see a Riddick movie expecting progressive gender politics, but I just...honestly didn't, in the film, see that as rape. I saw it as a continuation of the 'Santana creeps on and gets put in his place' motif.
It's entirely possible that I misinterpreted—something about Dahl's behavior after the attempt made me think Santana was successful, but I could absolutely be wrong. Even if it's just an attempted rape, though, I still think it doesn't need to be there. It doesn't add anything new, and using the threat of rape for its own sake is super squicky, IMHO.
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