If he had successfully died for the crew, I would have felt it was more conventional.
Right, it would have been a lot more conventional. And that's part of what made the actual moment so effective for me; it wasn't just the thing itself, but the contrast between what happened and what I had been expecting.
The Chronicles of Riddick frustrated me because half of it was a perfectly appropriate sequel: Riddick goes to spring Jack (I refuse to call her Kyra) out of jail, on a prison planet where you have to stay out of the light, because otherwise you'll burn to a crisp in an instant. Whether or not that could have been as well-executed as the original, we'll never know. The problem is that they grafted that inversion of the previous movie onto something that belonged more to Warhammer 40K, with some kind of decadent alien empire and a dumb-ass backstory to explain why Riddick was found in a dumpster (which is a thing they never should have tried to explain), and it just completely did not fit with the world and mood of the first film.
Re:
Right, it would have been a lot more conventional. And that's part of what made the actual moment so effective for me; it wasn't just the thing itself, but the contrast between what happened and what I had been expecting.
The Chronicles of Riddick frustrated me because half of it was a perfectly appropriate sequel: Riddick goes to spring Jack (I refuse to call her Kyra) out of jail, on a prison planet where you have to stay out of the light, because otherwise you'll burn to a crisp in an instant. Whether or not that could have been as well-executed as the original, we'll never know. The problem is that they grafted that inversion of the previous movie onto something that belonged more to Warhammer 40K, with some kind of decadent alien empire and a dumb-ass backstory to explain why Riddick was found in a dumpster (which is a thing they never should have tried to explain), and it just completely did not fit with the world and mood of the first film.