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SERENITY (2005)
I reckon it's powerful good y'all I never got into the show Firefly, mostly because of its awkward, too-literal meshing of the space opera and western genres - I only saw two episodes, but they both had barroom brawls in them, and I took that (along with all those "reckon"s and "powerful"s) as a hint. MANY movies and shows have set western stories in outer space and didn't have to do dorky shit like that. So I didn't have high expectations for Serenity due to that, a lame trailer, and my overall disillusionment with dead TV projects necromanced by fans who can't cope with loss (I've already gone on at length about Farscape, and Family Guy these days is like a half hour of pop culture references without bothering to include, uh, jokes). That the fans all creamed their collective pants over the movie neither surprises nor impresses me - that it's currently at #184 at the imdb's all-time highest-rated list, despite pretty much tanking in theatres, only brings to mind an exhaustively organized campaign by the same kind of people who put way too much effort into getting their friends to vote for John & Aeryn in TV Guide's "best screen kiss" poll. I was surprised to find myself enjoying Serenity, a lot. Yes, it retains a lot of those klutzy attempts to take only the most superficial western clichés and employ them in a space opera setting. The dialogue does tend towards some kitschy stiltedness (the dildo joke almost doesn't even register as a dildo joke) and like with The Peacekeeper Wars, there's a death or two designed to drag some tears out of you even though the dead are characters most people won't really miss. There's even another barroom brawl. But while I can't speak for how "true" this movie is to its source material, it does remind me, coincidentally enough, of the many things I loved about Farscape...and that alone is easily enough to give me a smile. This is just about everything The Peacekeeper Wars should have been. The movie opens with a scene which moments later we see was dream - then after we've assumed that what we're watching is the waking world, it turns into surveillance video footage! Thankfully, this sort of trickery is short-lived, as a plot unfolds which involves a teenaged girl with psychic powers and super kung-fu skill (Summer Glau) who is busted out of a government lab by her brother and whisked off to the starship Serenity and its crew of rogues, with an emotionless, ruthless G-man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit because the girl, being psychic, has the government's most awful secret - and it's a pretty bad one. The crew of Serenity are in the midst of some hard times, and the jobs they find themselves having to accept are getting harder to take and more impossible to say no to, which takes the heaviest toll on the slowly-hardening captain (Nathan Fillion). They find ways to rationalize armed robbery, but that's basically what they're doing, and their work finds them tangling with the government, each other, bar patrons, and the Reavers. To my understanding, the Reavers were mentioned in the TV show but never actually seen. After that kind of hushed buildup, when we see what they are I can't help but think old fans of the show will be disappointed - they're basically your standard self-mutilating post-apocalyptic space hooligans. They're such chaotic rabble that one wonders where any of them find the time (or the discipline) to learn things like starship maintenance and mechanics when they're not raping and pillaging. Still, they're awful horrible terrible sort-of people, and make for excellent faceless (bwa ha ha) villains. As with Farscape, the crew of the ship are all rogues in their way and it's again a welcome change from the lifeless pan-competence of a Star Trek crew. Even the ship itself looks like an ungainly hunk of junk in a way that most viewers (least of all me) never saw the Millennium Falcon, though I think it would've looked better as a model than as a CGI effect. Not that the CGI is bad; most of it's quite good (the government's seat of power is beautiful, some of the best I've seen) but so far as hunks of junk go, I don't think you can beat a model. These big-screen (or miniseries) versions must be under a lot of pressure to be more "epic" or "cinematic" or whatever equates to basically throwing more money at it than its equivalent length in TV episodes. And yes, Serenity does seem to be done on a somewhat grander scale than anything that was likely done in the TV series, what with its civilization-spanning deceptions and the monster space battle late in the film (don't think I've ever seen harpoons and tow cables so used before!). But it never feels like a sop to these bigger-budget expectations; the core of the story still comes down to characters behaving true to their natures (Farscape's most stinging failure at the end), the big money shots never simply feel like an FX orgy, and it all stands nicely on its own. Even with my minimal experience with Firefly, I had no trouble following the story and doubt anyone completely unfamiliar with the show will be much tripped up. They might even find all that dorky pseudo-western dialogue cute. Serenity has probably more implied violence than I've ever (not) seen in a PG-13 movie - you may not get to see the hours-long rapes, butcherings, flayings, axe-wounds, facial mutilations, and save-the-last-bullet-for-yourself suicides, but you sure hear about them. The Reavers in particular seem like they flew in from a different, R-rated movie, not that that's a bad thing, but some well-intentioned parent is going to take their eight-year-old to this and that poor kid's gonna shit himself. I guess I'd better watch that series now, and be grateful that for once, the fans' unwillingness to let something stay dead has paid off. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |