Headscratchers / The Chronicles of Riddick

aka: The Chronicles Of Riddick 2004

• If Riddick's eyes are so sensitive that he is blinded by a flashlight (as seen in Pitch Black), then why the raging hell does he lift his goggles to watch the sunrise on Crematoria, an event that would probably sear his retinas?
  • Mostly because it's hard to do a subdued Oh, Crap! expression with your eyes covered, one would assume. It's either have him take off the goggles so he can emote (resulting in complaints of "Why does he take off the goggles?!"), have him overact to still convey expression without his eyes ("Why is he doing so much Narm?!"), or have him not be able to emote much in those moments ("Why is Vin Diesel Keanu Reeves?!"). Basically this movie has him acting a bit more "human" and less of a relentless combat machine, so Diesel needed to be able to show his eyes more.
  • If you want an in-character explanation, he may have been training himself to ignore the pain of facing bright light so it won't impede his capabilities again.
  • Or he had his eyes upgraded
• How was the prison guard able to "smell" Riddick and the other inmates following them on the surface while they traveled in an underground passage, despite separated by at least thirty feet of solid rock?
  • Describing it as his "nose for trouble" doesn't necessarily mean he smells them. It's more of a preternatural sense of danger.
  • Given some of the abilities shown in-universe, it's possible he has some kind of latent sensory ability, that gives him the ability to sense trouble, not full blown psychic, but just a "feeling"
• This is more of a meta-headscratcher, but I don't get where the concept that Riddick is an insane serial killer who happens to have a soft spot for kids comes from. I've seen it on other sites, and even his trope page portrays him in that light. He's never portrayed as really getting a rush from killing in the movies, or really ever killing without an express purpose. His reputation as a murderer came after he murdered a corrupt prison guard in order to escape a triplemax that he'd been shoved into because he was going to present evidence of forced labour against a corporation he was working for as a merc. (Source there being the novelisation of Pitch Black).
  • It is generally agreed that the Riddick 'Verse is a pretty crappy place to live, and most tie in stuff for it, clarifies that Riddick has killed a lot of people, most of his "Serial Killer" rep comes from him killing people to get out of prisons, usually people who tried to stop him, or capture him, his bounty comes from the incident mentioned above, but it increased as he killed to stay out or get out of prison, so his bounty is based more on his actual danger than his body count.
  • It's not so much that he gets a rush from killing as he does it easily and without remorse in the vast majority of situations. He doesn't necessarily enjoy it but it also doesn't affect him or bother him at all unless it's someone he's developed a personal soft spot for, which is still not a normal way to view it. "Insane serial killer" is probably accurate to an extent in that he's probably not sane by a strict clinical definition, and he's definitely a serial murderer. It's more that the term "insane serial killer" brings to mind someone like the Joker who's gleefully slaughtering because of pure psychosis, rather than thinking of lower-key versions of it.
  • In the novel adaptation of the first film, it gives a bit of a backstory that shows that Riddick isn't a serial killer as he's made out to be. That he was framed for a murder by a mega-corp when he was about to blow the whistle on their crimes he's witnessed (basically being a guard at a mining colony, which he realized that the miners were slaves and that the security team he was with were the slavers keeping them there). It also goes on to explain that he went on the run, and every bounty hunter that came after him, which he killed in self-defense, were added to his list of "serial killings." He was brutal because he had to become that in order to survive. The only part of him that's still human is his inability to allow a kid to come to harm (which Johns exploited during the encounter that lead to Johns capturing Riddick by holding a kid hostage at gunpoint, which then lead them both to be on the Hunter-Grazner in Pitch Black). Whether the novelization is canon or not is the real question, but has provided some of the background to Riddick that wasn't present in the films (much like the video game Escape from Butcher Bay showing him getting his eyes shined and explaining the prison as mentioned in the film).
  • There seems to be some miscommunication, I don't mean how he's viewed in universe, but out-of-universe.