Serenity - No Spoilers Please

[High_Jumbllama]

Best Damn Movie I've seen in a long time. Keeps you guessing. It's taking self control to not go fanboy!

[Jon P. Inghram]

I've heard the saying "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," thus...

[Wombat]

I thought it was a great movie. I'd never seen the show, but now I'm starting to watch it.

[Umfriend]

What's it about? Never heard of it.

[High_Jumbllama]

Check the trailers from the link in my sig.

[High_Jumbllama]

I went to the Taste of Baltimore for the past 6.5 hours or so and within the first couple of minutes I spied someone carrying a full size Serenity movie poster. A local radio station was giving them out.

[Gurm]

It was really really good. But it makes me sad.

[High_Jumbllama]

Gurm, be good.

[Gurm]

Gurm, be good.

I'm being good. So far.

[Dr Mordrid]

What's it about? Never heard of it.

Serenity is a movie based on a US TV series called Firefly. Unfortunately it was cancelled long before it could build an audiance (common problem) but it's as good or better than any other Sci-Fi I've seen on TV in the last few years.

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

What Doc doesn't mention is that Firefly is the single best-selling series boxed set, bar none. The fanbase managed to pull off the miraculous - a cancelled, completely shitcanned series that Fox thought was long dead and buried got: released in its entirety, as originally intended, on DVD... optioned by Universal, purchased for airing by Sci-Fi, and turned into the only real "Blockbuster" of the summer... just after the summer ended. The fans REALLY came through.

The big thing about Firefly was that it was a sci-fi western. Yeah, that's right. Horses, guns... and spaceships. It makes sense, actually, in a twisted sort of way. Earth solves its major cultural differences after a series of wars, ending up with one big polyglot culture consisting primarily of American and Chinese influences. Everyone grows up speaking both languages. Earth finally gets completely overcrowded, and we reach for the stars, terraforming planet after planet.

Now some of the terraformed planets are nice. The first few. They're high-tech, little "new earth" type planets.

But as more and more people want to reach for the frontier, things get a bit ... sloppy. A planet will get terraformed, a bunch of settlers will plunk down with nothing more than the clothes on their back, and the government doesn't have much to offer them beyond some basic materials and livestock. A wild-west frontier type mentality soon arises... and with it problems. When the inner planet Anglo-Sino Alliance wants to impose law and order, they are resisted by the freedom-loving frontiersmen (or BrownCoats). A long horrible war ensues, which of course the Alliance wins due to greater numbers and superior firepower.

Fast forward a few years... and you have the setting for Firefly.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds was on the losing side of the war. At the battle of Serenity Valley, he and his unit were pinned for months, first dying in droves and then dying slowly due to starvation while a peace settlement was hammered out. It was a massacre. Why he has chosen to name his new ship "Serenity" is an interesting question. His second-in-command during the war, Zoey, is now his first mate.

He has hired on an interesting crew. Pilot "Wash" is married to Zoey, making for an interesting conflict of interest. Wash is the best pilot around, but a bit... off. A mercenary named, improbably, Jayne, is the muscle of the crew. Ship's Engineer is a seemingly innocent yet deceptively amoral young girl named Kaylee. Rounding out the initial crew is a "companion" (think Geisha, highly respected by society yet when it boils down to it... just a whore) named Inara, who carries on a sort of love/hate thing with the captain, but gives their ship a certain "respectability" they otherwise wouldn't have.

In the course of the first episode they pick up a preacher (and, it becomes increasingly clear, former highly trained government agent) named "Shepherd Book", a doctor named Simon Tam, and Simon's psychic sister River, who has been experimented upon by the Alliance in an attempt to engineer... we don't know what.

Cue 14 episodes which, although they all carry on the story, are at times more than a little fluff-westernish and campy.

The series was groundbreaking for a number of reasons. One was their visual style - they used lots of types of shots you just DON'T DO on TV. There's no sound in space. The soundtrack sometimes overpowers everything else. A scene can go from deadly serious to sarcastic to deadly serious again in the space of 30 seconds, all of which is horribly disconcerting to many viewers, but which some of us just EAT UP.

------------------------------------------

I won't spoil the series, but I will say precious little got resolved. The 14 episodes should have aired as 2/3 of a regular season but instead only 9 ever aired, out of order, with the original pilot forming a retrospective after the series was already cancelled.

Serenity takes place a year or two AFTER the original 14 episodes of Firefly... and only SOME of the questions get answered. There is most definitely room for more, as the serious fans (who call themselves Browncoats) intend to petition for 2 more movies.

-------------------------------------------

I really liked the movie, but also disliked it at the same time. It took me a day or two to digest it, I think I'll need to go again before it leaves theaters, just to wrap my mind around all of it. In some respects it played out like a 2-hour (which would be triple-length) episode. In other ways it was DEFINITELY cinematic in scope. They had lots of fun with things that they just couldn't DO in the series - you get to see spacedocks, lots of other ships, crowded cities... stuff they assiduously avoided in the series due to their inability to render them well. On the other hand, a great deal of this felt like "more Firefly", which is exactly what the fans wanted.

Without spoiling anything, I'll say that although they didn't use the "Ballad of Serenity" in the movie per se, it WAS slipped in - at the request of the fans directly to Joss Whedon - and you'll notice it if you're paying attention.

My biggest non-spoiler gripe with it has to be the retelling of Simon & River's backstory. It's not entirely incompatible with the series, but it IS a little out of character. Simon really evolves over the course of the first 14 episodes, and while we'd have no problem picturing the end-of-series Simon in the first scene of the movie... we'd have a bit of trouble picturing pre-Episode-1 Simon in that same scene. Oh well, not a huge gripe.

[Nowhere]

So...good and/or reasonably thought-out space opera?

[Dr Mordrid]

A very good space opera.

Dr. Mordrid

[High_Jumbllama]

. . . . . .
My biggest non-spoiler gripe with it has to be the retelling of Simon & River's backstory. It's not entirely incompatible with the series, but it IS a little out of character. Simon really evolves over the course of the first 14 episodes, and while we'd have no problem picturing the end-of-series Simon in the first scene of the movie... we'd have a bit of trouble picturing pre-Episode-1 Simon in that same scene. Oh well, not a huge gripe.

He did seem stronger in character and more sure of himself but I'd like to point out how he had acted at the beginning of the two-parter actual premiere episode "Serenity" and how he acted in the series flashback scenes. He was yelling at his own father when he bailed Simon out of jail for his preliminary attempts to see his sister. He does seem to get stronger when pressed with real danger and push his fears aside..

[High_Jumbllama]

From Penny Arcade from5 or so months ago: