Serenity
Ah, neighbours. It’s fun living in an apartment building. I’ve been spoiled for so long by not having to deal with anyone in our building that I was karmically due to have a bunch of students move in down the hall. There was a party last night and they were pretty obnoxious, but I’m hoping they feel bad enough about it that this isn’t going to be a regular thing.
Dria and I went to see Serenity yesterday. I left work early so we could get into a late afternoon show, figuring it’d be kind of busy and hard to get into. Not so! The theatre was practically empty. By the time the credits started rolling there were maybe 30 people seated. This is in contrast to what I’ve been hearing about the long lines in bigger centers in the ‘states. My gut is that this movie is doing fairly well on its opening weekend.
And it should!
With a supposed budget of $45 million hollywood bucks, Joss Whedon has put together an entertaining, snappy and fun sci-fi western on a relative shoe-string. Fans of the show Firefly will immediately feel comfortable watching this, while, I suspect neophytes will take a minute or two to grow accustomed to the mish-mash of old-west vs. Chinese junk dialect that they use to converse in… the ‘verse. The action is plentiful, and while some of it suffers a bit from a lack of direction and weak fight choreography, overall, it works and looks pretty good. The later action sequences are, in fact, pretty impressive and I’m looking forward to seeing them again.
To be critical, there’s not really a great depth of plot here. The main conflict of the crew of Serenity versus The Alliance is the main one in this story. The Alliance is what passes for government in this story and they were the victors of a large civil war against the Independents – the side the captain of Serenity and his first mate were fighting for. In the first episode of the tv series, the ship picks up a traveling doctor and his crazy sister (who was in a shipping crate at the time) who turn out to be fugitives from an Alliance research facility. Chasing and running ensue, and is picked up in the movie version. An alliance assassin is dispatched to take out the girl who may know things they don’t want her to know. And maybe she does…
The other main adversaries are the crazy, barbaric Reavers – cannibal humans who “cut on their own faces” and like to rape their food. They fly around the galaxy in modded spaceships without the proper shielding on their reactor cores. Pretty scary, if technically unbelievable. I’d like to think that at least some modicum of ability would be required to pilot a spaceship even in a wild-west version of it, and the Reavers all seem pretty sub-human.
That said, it’s refreshing to see a science fiction show with no aliens, no temporal anomalies and a bad-assed captain who aims to misbehave. Ultimately the movie isn’t about realism or science, it’s about the crew of a patched and jury-rigged spaceship ironically-named Serenity. Joss Whedon imbues great personalities into his characters and settings and they more than make up for any technical deficiencies in this movie.
****/*****
boolean is listening to: Very Loud from the album “Howl Howl Gaff Gaff” by Shout Out Louds
2 Comments
I have been a huge fan of Firefly.
I’m not sure when Serenity will be shown here in the Netherlands but I can’t wait to see it.. (I even had that Serenity countdown widget).
And you lucky bastard have already seen it..
Btw, I really like how Joss Whedon used the Chinese language in the series
Posted by Savvy on 17 October 2005 @ 6pm
I’m not sure when they’re releasing it on your side of the ocean either, but have patience. It’ll get there. I’m looking forward to the DVD and whatever comes after it, whether it’s more movies or more television. Whedon’s said that he prefers television, and I can kind of see that. With the attention he likes giving to each character, it’s hard to fit all that into a 2 hour movie.
I also liked the Mandarin dialogue snippets, but always wondered how badly-mangled it was. It was a nice touch, but I would have expected to see more chinese people in the show to warrant such a melding of languages.
Anyway, it’s great stuff. Try to avoid reading too much about the movie as some of the reviews are starting to bleed spoilers.
Posted by boolean on 17 October 2005 @ 7pm