THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK OPENS FRI., JUNE 11 THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK ...

ES OF RIDDICK OPENS FRI., JUNE 11

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK might very well be shit, but the preview is so cool that it'll be worth risking a Hamilton and change. A dead desert planet, an eerie witch-woman's voiceover—reminiscent of Lynch's greatly underappreciated Dune—and giant, stone-head ruins, like the Buddhist figures in the Bamiyan valley that the Talibs blew up.

"Necromonger—it is the name that will convert or kill every last human life."

Forced conversion—every Baptist's greatest fear, worse than rearing a homosexual.

"Convert now or fall forever."

Trade in our 2000-year-old sand-zombie for your 1300-year-old sand-zombie?! Over our disemboweled bodies!

"The more you resist them, the greater the damage will be."

This last line is spoken by a taunting, hot, menacing black chick. She looks believable, contentedly zombified, confident of the metaphorical-Muslims' victory.

And then that thumbhead Vin Diesel appears and fucks the whole thing up.

Where's the drama? Of course Vin Diesel will prevail. If you're American, you delude yourself—"suspend belief" they call it—into believing that Diesel is the underdog even though he's the star, just as Americans imagine themselves as the world's underdog.

This, of course, is one of the many lies that Americans cling to. Fact is, America has never entered a military campaign it wasn't 101 percent assured of winning. So why can't we identify with who we really are? Are we really so horrible that we must imagine ourselves as our opposite in order to sympathize with ourselves?

Glossy-magazine pinheads were gloating about America's unsurpassed imperial power until right around the time those Blackwater mercenaries took a wrong turn in Albuquerque. America is a paper empire, and movies like Riddick prove it. We like underdogs, therefore we are underdogs.

Problem is, we don't realize how dangerous our underdog fetish is. The real underdogs, today, by any objective measure, are the keffiyeh-and-polyester-wrapped guerrillas in Fallujah with their RPGs and dusty Toyotas. Or they're the death-rocker Mehdi Army irregulars, all of whom face certain death against our multi-trillion-dollar-financed Death Star.

We're Lord Marshall's army, sending legions of evangelical missionaries and USAID free-market crusaders into Iraq, converting or killing all the "dead-enders" who oppose us. It's too bad Riddick won't be about how the aliens capture and vivisect Vin Diesel in the first 15 minutes, then spend the rest of the movie issuing positive press releases about the progress Earth has made since Lord Marshall "liberated" it. That would not only be funny, it might produce the therapeutic "breakthrough" this country needs if it ever wants to play empire with the big boys.