Serenity
After the beer festival, Jethro & I were picked up by my kid brother, who then picked up his girlfriend, and we headed out to a special private midnight premiere of Serenity, the feature film based on the excellent, short-lived 2002 TV series Firefly. My verdict? Well worth seeing.
Firefly was a truly excellent show; I’ve written about it, and written again, but for those new to the series, here’s a brief description: it’s the far future, and mankind has finally colonised the stars. The interior planets are built up and civilised; the frontier planets are rough-and-tumble, mostly rural places where horses are still used for transport. The show had a kind of sci-fi/Western flavour (the creator, Joss Whedon, had previously done the horror/high school mixture known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and it got that down dead right. It was great, but Fox aired the shows out of order, pre-empted them for other programming and generally did its best to kill the show, finally succeeding before the season was done.
But the show did manage to pick up a few fans, and it managed to get a DVD release, which release did so unbelievably well that Universal decided that it was worth giving Whedon a shot at the big time: a full-length theatrical film. Thus was Serenity born.
The movie is in many ways excellent, but the dialogue is perhaps its best feature. Whedon’s forte has always been witty, pop-culture-literate dialogue, and Serenity doesn’t disappoint. The look of the film—a mixture of cowboy Western and high-tech—is very successful. I want to live on those worlds!
I’m not certain how successful the film will be among those not already fans; it seems to do a good job of introducing the backstory, but it’s hard to imagine many becoming invested in the characters over the few short minutes (1:59) of the movie.
It’s not perfect, of course. My major criticism is that it feels far too TV-like; in fact immediately after seeing it I said that it was the best TV movie I’ve ever seen. But it was good, and it should be seen, and Firefly needs to get back onto TV so we can see how it plays out.
