Firefly / Serenity

It’s not easy getting out to Elizabeth, New Jersey but once we got there we had the pleasure of seeing a rough preliminary edit of the film Serenity.  This movie is from the creators of both Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

I am not much of an expert on futuristic movies.  Struggling to pigeonhole what kind of space film this  is, I can only say that Starship Troopers is one possible reference point.

The Serenity future world is excellent.  Sci Fi storylines live and die by the quality of the proposed future and this future was quite messy and realistic.  I frequently sensed the influence of Iain M. Banks paperbacks.  On screen, Blade Runner long ago put to rest the notion that our future was destined to be played out against shiny white plastic environments with tasteful lighting.  Following in this Blade Runner vein, Serenity’s world has tungsten lights, not fluorescent.  Gunpowder is more useful than lasers.  Cloud's of filthy smoke come out of the ship's engines.  Things are dirty and broken, right down to the thrift shop furniture lying around the bridge of the ship.  And realism?  I think this movie has a cinematic first: a scene where the space cowboy, dustpan in hand has to clean up the enormous mess that was made in the previous scene’s fight.  Little things like that, characters sweeping up broken glass, are the kind of tiny details that abound in this film.

Chinese creeps in everywhere, whether it is in the pull down menus on the computer, in the chopsticks only ship’s galley, or in the incidental words people mutter in the background.  The actual script didn’t have Mandarin dialogue but in the background you can hear people saying:
Yo may yo? (Do you have it or not?)
Shao Jyay! (Young lady!)
Shin Tzi! (Now!)

Where would I rank it?  Pretty high.  Serenity was not as good as the original Star Wars movie but I liked it more than any of the Star Wars sequels.  It’s definitely much smarter than anything George Lucas or even Star Trek could do.  I know there are a lot of fans of the Matrix;  I personally couldn’t handle the Matrix screenplay.  The script in Serenity shows how the Matrix could have been written.  The dialog here is Quentin Terentino caliber, exploding clichés and expectations constantly. 

We sat in the exact front row of the theater.  Imagine our surprise when the lights came up at the end of the movie and the female lead, Inara, stood up from our midst, turned around, and said hello, seemingly having walked right out of the film.  She was almost toe to toe with me (I try to sit near the center of the row), which was really embarrassing because I’d been eating a huge sack of food and there were various wrappers and discarded crusts scattered in a five foot radius at my feet.  She seemed quite nice.

Serenity is due for official release in the Fall. 

Comments

[very metal]

Good. Now that I know about this great new movie, I'll enjoy waiting for it until the fall...

[rach]

I normally have little tolerance for science fiction. But this film, and its one-season-only TV show (this ought to indicate how smart it is...), are, well, shiny. Absolutely shiny. The balance of tongue-in-cheek events (I mean, the opening shots of the star spaceship, Serenity, show it falling apart!) with utter pathos is stunning. The characters are compelling psychological snapshots and the language is probably the best I've ever heard in TV land. Go see it, and make a second season happen!