As Ming the Merciless is my witness, I will never tire of watching revered, accomplished actors misapply their dramatic skills in cheesy science fiction space operas. As a basis of comparison, think of Albert Einstein going for a pink pie wedge in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Same difference.

Judi Dench, the reigning grand dame of British cinema (‘‘Iris,’’ ‘‘Shakespeare in Love’’), goes for her own pink pie in David Twohy's ‘‘The Chronicles of Riddick,’’ playing a sage alien priestess who can atomize and re-materialize her body like a swarm of well-trained bees.

The politically correct thing to say here is that Dench lends ‘‘a touch of class’’ to the proceedings, but that's not really the case. If anything, she propels the camp quotient in ‘‘Riddick’’ to even lovelier extremes.

Starring Vin Diesel in the role he originated in ‘‘Pitch Black’’ (2000), it's an over-acted, over-costumed gothic monstrosity in the spirit of ‘‘Dune’’ and ‘‘Flash Gordon’’ — spectacular to behold, baffling to ponder.

Diesel (‘‘XXX’’) returns as the indomitable intergalactic fugitive Riddick, now on the lam for five years, still leery of open spaces, owing to a procedure that made him painfully sensitive to light. As always, Riddick is a wanted man — sought, in this case, by Aereon (Dench), a mysterious fortune teller who believes the bald brawler represents humankind’s only hope against the Necromongers, a neo-fascist intergalactic death cult that’s rampaging across the galaxy, destroying whole planets after indoctrinating the inhabitants.

Led by a sour-tempered martinet named the Lord Marshal (Colm Feore of “The Red Violin”), the Necromongers want to lead mankind on a crusade into the “underverse,” a vaguely explained dark paradise where the conquerors can indulge their most sinister, megalomaniacal fantasies.

With its themes of messianic prophesy, political intrigue and futuristic tyranny, “Riddick” seems to have cribbed much of its playbook from “Dune,” the widely admired Frank Herbert novel that David Lynch turned into a widely reviled sci-fi opus in 1983.

Production designer Holger Gross also appears to have used Lynch’s movie as an inspiration: “Riddick” is filled with massive, cathedral-like space ships and agonized, contorted human statuary, like something Albert Speer might have whipped up on a peyote trip.

Ever the surly loner (he flippantly describes the universe as “circling the drain”), Riddick initially has no interest in stopping the Necromongers, but the Lord Marshal — warned by Aereon that one of Riddick’s extinct race, the Furyans, will ultimately kill him — presses the issue by picking a fight.

Diesel gives his shrewdest, most compelling performance yet in “Riddick” — muscle-bound and guttural, he also drops a withering one-liner with the best of them.

Twohy’s florid imagination blossoms nicely in “Riddick,” transporting our hero to all kinds of exotic alien worlds, including a prison planet called Crematoria that's half-bathed in searing 800-degree sunlight, half in frozen darkness. Pictorially, it's a striking accomplishment — as dazzling and colorful as the hand-drawn paperback book covers you see in the fantasy section in Barnes and Noble.

‘‘Pitch Black,’’ also written and directed by Twohy, succeeded because of its tight, economic premise (“Lifeboat” meets “Aliens,” essentially) and ingenius low-budget effects. ‘‘Riddick’’ is a different beast altogether. The scope is enormous and there's nothing remotely economic about its convoluted plot and declamatory, absurdly scriptural dialogue.

The lovely and talented Thandie Newton (“Beloved”) inherits the lion’s share of Twohy’s turgid wordplay, playing a plotting, power-mad Necromonger duchess who goads her husband (“Lord of the Rings” player Karl Urban) into deposing the Lord Marshal.

Bless her, Newton plays the role with all the conviction and froth that she might conjure for a Royal Shakespeare performance of Lady MacBeth — a guilty pleasure for us, a trivial pursuit for her.