Serenity

[dalekboy]

This is going to be a short post as the top half of my head is trying to detach itself. I just rewatched Serenity with Sharon. It was a little bit of geek together time.

It's not a good movie.

I'm far enough removed from Firefly at the moment that my auto-movie-watcher mindset kicked in. By 'not a good movie' what I'm saying is, it doesn't stand on its own. You need to have watched Firefly to appreciate the characters, and without that foreknowledge, the film fails to engage. None of the major characters get enough fleshing out to mean anything to anyone who doesn't know the series.

Case in point is Shepard Book. Lots of films have had the same idea - heroes seek sanctuary with an old friend, old friend gives some advice, gets killed, usually gets to utter a few last words to the hero that strengthen his resolve. It's an old formula that is used because it often works. It doesn't work in Serenity. Book is just some old dude who croaks. I felt more emotion for the woman on the vid report explaining what happened on Miranda.

Wash gets almost nothing to do for the film, and then dies. To a general audience member it's just 'oh, the funny pilot is dead.' You haven't been given the time or the chance to get to know him, to care about him.

Those are the two biggest examples, there are many more. And I know that I telling some of you something you already know. I mainly had to get it out of my head or it was going to keep me awake tonight.

For the record, I love Firefly and I love Serenity. It's a great season 1 finale. It's just not a good feature film.

Cheers,
Danny

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough; in its defence, though, the first scene on Serenity with Mal moving through the ship and having a one-line exchange with each character is probably one of the most effective introductions I've ever seen done - it sets up each character so quickly and efficiently!

(Oh, uh... Greg Tannahill here, feel free to visit at http://amongthedust.blogspot.com )

[dalekboy.livejournal.com]

Hey Greg, you great spunk!

I love that scene. It's great on many levels. But if Serenity was my first taste of the Firefly universe, it wouldn't have been enough. Certainly not enough to make me feel anything when Wash died, and I think that's a great shame. He's a great character. Interestingly, the regular character that gets the best treatment is Jayne. By halfway through the film, you really know him and know how he's going to respond.

Mal changes too much within the film to get to know him. If you've seen the show, you already know more of these levels and complexities.

As I said, I love it. Main reason it anooys me that it's not a good standalone is that that was the best way get people actively looking for Firefly. And if that happened, then we'd have more chance of it coming back.

[sjl.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's an ok film, not a great one, taken as a standalone; it only really shines, as you say, if you've already seen most of Firefly. I have a friend who mentioned he was interested in seeing Serenity; I promptly loaned him my Firefly DVDs, with the words, "Watch this first."

We may yet see more of that universe; it depends, to a large extent, on how well Serenity does in DVD sales. I'm pretty sure that that was what Universal was planning on from the start; at least, I hope so, given that it didn't make all its money back at the box office, as far as I can tell.

Grenade?