And to be fair, the Imam in this film is the only character that's acted like a halfway decent human being thus far, apart from giving away the survivors' location to the escaped homicidal madman by screaming praise at an invisible man that lives in the sky.
We left off with giant space bats attacking our team of survivors who have locked themselves in part of the crashed ship while pitch blackness happens outside. Toolbox dies because she mistook "Stay down!" for "Run around drawing attention to yourself!"
One member makes the seemingly impossible deduction that the giant space bats may just be what killed fucking everything. Even though 'everything' seems to be 'giant space elephants that survive by eating dirt, since there are the remains of exactly one form of native, not-cave-dwelling life in this particular ecosystem. They then hush each other to listen to the bats make woop woop noises. Imam Al-Genius realizes that this is how they 'see'. Just like earth bats, only embarrassingly over-simplified!
The Archeologist then has another anxiety attack while random Muslims break into and lock themselves inside of a smaller room of the ship that promises to be harder to both defend and escape from. The aliens immediately begin punching holes in the walls with their hole punch appendages while one of the survivors cuts their way deeper into the ship.
Diesel wanders off and finds an alien (which looks like a cross between a bat, a hammerhead shark, and an alien from Alien, just to establish the level of originality on display,) and is soon joined by idiot Muslim child #8. They seem to be safe as long as they remain perfectly still, so the child panics, runs off and is inhalfitated after making it almost ten feet. Diesel uses this opportunity to flee back to the others who blind him and the pursuing alien with their flashlights. They manage somehow to bring one of them down by firing wildly in every direction.
Regrouping, they begin hatching a plot to find a way to drag the remaining batteries back to the ship with enough light to not be viciously and instantly destroyed by cartoon monsters.
John and Carolyn argue at length about whether to lock themselves in or make a run for it. Y'know, the exact same conundrum that was used in Night of the Living Dead and reused in every stoner circle since.
They decide to make a break for it, with Diesel and his magic implants scouting ahead. This works exactly zero times over the course of ten feet. After killing another sharkbat, they regroup and mill around. Fucking again.
While gathering more batteries, Diesel barks orders about formation. They FINALLY make a run for it.
This movie has an uncanny ability to be frenetically paced and tediously dull at the same time. That combination should only be possible on the inside of the kitchen in a fast food restaurant.
Outside, we find the survivors running (well, creeping unhurriedly,) forward, with aliens circling just outside of the light. The Archeologist, realizing he hasn't done something suicidally dumb to endanger the entire group in almost ten minutes, stops moving to better focus on the cutting torch running out of fuel and drop one of the flares he was carrying. Murder Child tosses aside his own light to run after it, which is exactly what I would do if I'd rather film child brutality than build tension.
Shit breaks out and the Archeologist unplugs the running lights. Obvious suicide.
After making torches from the remaining booze they debate their course. We discover that Murder Child is a girl. I'm not sure what bearing this has on the plot, as Diesel's explanation was delivered in his usual unintelligible whisper, but I think she's doing that thing where women bleed from their peehole, which is attracting the monsters via their naturally evolved ability to smell non-terrestrial blood and know what it is.
Carolyn decides to turn back, playing the Democrat by never thinking beyond the immediate future and constantly changing her mind. John now wants to push on, adopting the Republican stance of ad hominem attacks and stonewalling whatever the opposing team wants to do regardless of whether it's what he wanted to do as well.
John reveals that Carolyn attempted to kill the entire ship, which might have been an interesting bit of storytelling if it hadn't happened while they were stranded on a plain with monsters closing in. As is, no one worries overmuch about this, having far bigger problems at this point.
Pressing on, John and Diesel separate themselves from the rest of the group and plot the death of Murder Child to use as bait. Eyeballs eyeballs eyeballs. Diesel decides John would make better bait. John doesn't immediately understand because he's an idiot.
John SHOULD HAVE won this fight as well, given that he breaks Diesel's arm two seconds into the scuffle, but since one of Vin's superpowers is magically having whatever exact superpower he needs at any given moment, he instantly recovers. John ends up losing the fight and being eaten by aliens.
The Imam suggests a nice prayer. Vin points out that that's a stupid idea. Nobody points out that sitting around in an open space while the light runs out is also a stupid idea.
Making it to the canyon, which is infested with aliens, they make a dash for it. Or they would if they didn't stop every three feet to look around. It's fucking aliens. Aliens are what there is to look at. Or would be if there was any light beyond the torch range. Mostly they're stopping to look at the film's run time and make sure it drags past the 90 minute mark.
One of the aliens, playing possum, trips up one of the interchangeable Muslims while Diesel, sick of these people's inability to run at any speed that isn't stop, forges ahead. He then turns back when Murder Child is attacked by an alien.
He then, somehow, despite repeatedly losing fights that involved sneak attacks against a dopesick heroin junkie, kills the alien single-handedly.
Most worstly delivered, wooden line thus far in the movie: "Did not know who he was fuckin' with."
FINALLY they start moving again. For about five feet. Again. This time the wounded Muslim has to be carried by the Imam while it starts raining. Just like on Earth! Water in the desert! Praise Allah!
The wounded Muslim is killed and the remaining survivors crawl into a cave. Diesel remains outside to drag the 300 pounds of batteries through the mud to the ship alone.
Back in the cave the last torch slowly burns out while aliens gather outside in the only scene in the entire movie that could possibly be considered tense. This doesn't last long as they happen to be in a cave with glow-in-the-dark slugs, which become new torch fuel.
Carolyn takes the first bug torch and follows Diesel while Murder Child and Imam gather enough slugs to make another torch.
Carolyn makes it to the ship just before Diesel takes off and demands they return for the others. Diesel throws her some lights and tells her to make up her mind.
They scrabble around in the mud for a bit before returning for the others. The Imam gives the credit to his God, not Carolyn or Diesel, who were the ones who did all the work.
They dash back towards the ship armed only with the bug torches and not the lights from the ship that Diesel very pointedly threw to Carolyn, for some reason, and we're treated to the one line that is required by the US Army to be in every action movie from 1998 on: "Move move move!"
Diesel gets separated and decides to hide in the creatures blind spot directly in front of it, since knowing that the creatures had a blind spot and where it is wouldn't be an impossibly lucky guess. This works well until another creature happens along. He eventually makes it to the ship with the help of Carolyn's talents as a meat shield. Carolyn dies.
Onboard, Diesel kills the engine and lights and waits for the swarm of aliens to cover the ship for easy vaporization when they take off, reducing their numbers from infinity to infinity minus a couple.
Fin.
Oh, except for the fact that now they're now lost in space 22 weeks from where they were originally going with no food or water for the journey and no evident means of sending a distress signal or making contact with other humans. But still, small victories.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this movie could have been worse. The acting was mostly competent, except for Diesel's goddamn muttering, which resulted in having to turn the volume up whenever he spoke, then immediately back down when something boomed as soon as he finished.
The main problem I had was that, like Ghosts of Mars, this movie seemed to have no idea what kind of movie it was supposed to be. Of course, it was made in that terrible window of the late 90s/early 00s when any new intellectual property was required to span several genres to increase demographics.
As an action movie it didn't really work, since nothing really seemed to be a threat to Riddick, as he seemed to be treated like Superman when it came to superpowers, only without Superman's weakness to kryptonite and magic. In order for sci-fi/action movies to work the good guys really need to be hopelessly underpowered. Take Predator, where we had an invisible alien armed with 400 different space weapons and could jump over trees fighting a commando armed with mud, spears and crude booby traps. Or Aliens, where the good guys were placed in a claustrophobic maze surrounded by hordes of stronger, faster, and stealthier enemies that were well-camouflaged and had a knack for ambushing the humans in ways that humans aren't equipped to plan for. Not to mention that even killing one meant death by acid.
It failed as a horror movie because the entire premise was barely explored. Which is a shame, since darkness is such an easy fear to play to. I mean every store in America sells nightlights because of it. Strange noises in the night, wondering if that shadow just moved, creeping forward and freezing, knowing that something awful is right behind you. If the filmmakers had abandoned the action movie bullshit and focused more on atmosphere and tension than child murder and cheap boo moments it probably would have been a much better film.
The pacing was atrocious. I can't remember any movie that managed to be this busy and still have almost nothing happen. It's like someone started out with six plot points, filmed those, and then filmed another hour of footage around those. Then took that hour, cut it into 15 second long bites and rearranged them until it looked like a 100 minute long film trailer. For a perfect example: revealing halfway into the film that John wasn't a police officer, but a heroin addict bounty hunter. That entire subplot could have been cut and it would have had absolutely no effect on the rest of the film.
The message of the film seems to be 'shit happens.' Or more accurately, 'sometimes shit will go way out of its way to happen to you specifically.' Other than Carolyn's heavy-handed sacrifice to save Riddick to atone for attempting to kill the entire ship, and Riddick turning back to help Murder Child despite being a stereotypically ruthless and self-serving criminal, there was no real exploration of theme or morals or beliefs. Which seems weird, since they went out of their way to mix a group of very religious people in with a group of very secular people, and very religious children, at that. And if there's anything religion is good for, it's invoking emotions and teaching lessons via the interplay of light and darkness and childlike innocence. The Imam would occasionally make a wise-sounding comment, but those never had any bearing on anything else and wound up just making the Imam look dense.
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