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Date Posted: 08:55:16 10/08/05 Sat
Author: KdS
Subject: My comments on "Serenity" the movie

Overall, I thought Serenity was pretty good. If anybody's looking at the commercial omens, the cinema I was in wasn't full, but was more populated than you'd expect for lunchtime on a weekday. Hopefully this wasn't just the first day effect.

I'd start by saying that I actually went into Serenity with mildly lowered expectations, as a result of an attack of that oft-diagnosed disease of Fans Who Think Too Much, the That Wasn't The Plot That I Was Hoping For Syndrome. When I first watched the series, I was hoping that River wouldn't turn out to be primarily a super-warrior, but that was what we got. It still seems to me that Whedon has a tendency to create not so much powerful women as women with powers who are horribly damaged by their side effects, or only have their powers as a result of some hideous victimisation. I was also a little depressed by the European publicity images for the film which concentrate on River with huge weapons in a tiny shift, and remind me of the tackiest end of the sub-genre of the Way Hot Female Action Hero who's so empowered that she fights in her lingerie (see also the trailer for Aeon Flux that came before the film).

I must say, though, that Whedon still has a grasp of dialogue and emotion that puts most commercial US storytellers to shame, and there are some nice metaphors here as well. Even more than the TV series, Blake's 7 appears to be a huge parallel to the film, what with fanatical government assassins, weirdly-clad psychotics, and the Pax subplot. Chijwetel Ojiofor manages to completely avoid scenery-chewing as The Operative in a way that few actors could. (Note, however, Whedon returning to type by casting a well-spoken British actor as the villain, although I often get the impression that US people don't really think of black UK actors as British.) Possibly as an acknowledgement of how difficult to accept some people found it, the Western element is almost completely absent from the film, except in the very opening section. Instead the genre shift is very much to horror-tinged SF, with the Reavers shifting from Injuns to Romero-style flesh-eating zombies in terms of genre signal. I must say, I didn't think the Reavers were quite as impressive as they could have been, although they're interesting as another example of Whedon's BtVS/AtS tendency to view tattoos and other bodily modifications as a signal for some combination of malevolence, nihilism, and doomedness.

I had my doubts about the frequent attempts of capital-L Libertarians to claim the Firefly TV series for their political school of thought, given the TV series's concentration on the downside of laissez-faire minarchy (Adlai Niska, savagely exploited labourers economically trapped on the worlds to which they're lured, local government by the thug with the biggest private army, Adlai Niska�) but Serenity-the-movie makes its philosophical orientation quite apparent, with its central concept of government social engineering creating either depravity or inaction. However, the revelation of the Reavers as a threat inadvertently created by the Alliance government effectively gets rid of the unfortunate political overtones of portraying a Native American-analogue group as torture-crazed maniacs.

Unfortunately, the film also shows off some of Whedon's weaknesses as revealed in late period BtVS/AtS. We have the standard late-Whedon approach to character development at the beginning of the film (give me FUCKED UP! No, MORE FUCKED-UP!), with Book and Inarra alienated, Mal colder, crueller and more amoral than ever, the ship falling to pieces, and Simon and Kaylee still stuck in a romantic holding pattern. At least River's slightly saner and calmer than she was in the TV series.

There's also the problems of the ending(s). Um, yeah. After BtVS6 and BtVS7, Whedon still seems to have the impression that you can portray a darkly-toned, gritty, hostile universe for 80% of your story and then base a happy-ish ending on a series of rose-tinted events that stretch suspension of belief to breaking point. To a minor degree I'm talking about River managing to slaughter an entire horde of Reavers, even if she does have super combat conditioning, but I'm mostly talking about what happens with The Operative. Sorry, but this man has been painted throughout the film as a totalitarian fanatic who believes that anything is justified to improve the human race, even down to the slaughter of relatively innocent bystanders by the thousand. However, we're then expected to believe that he is instantly stunned to a complete moral turnaround by... the revelation that the government accidentally killed a lot of people, and that if you tranquilise people too much they sit around until they die of thirst. Ahem.

I have great difficulty in deciding how accessible the film is to people who aren't fans of the TV series. The setting, I think, is comprehensible, but I think the problem lies with the decision to have all nine regular characters in the film. This means that, say, Inarra and Book are reduced to respectively snarky-but-still-torching-semi-ex-girlfriend and doomed-saintly-old-mentor. I don't think viewing the film alone gives you a lot of the established relationships that will allow you to see the depth in the characters' interactions, and, to take another example, I don't think anyone who watched the film alone could understand why Jayne is such a genuinely loved character by many fans.

A question re the Reavers - a whole lot of people seem to have been speculating after the TV show, possibly on dropped spoilers about the film, that the Reavers are being deliberately supported and directed in some way by the Alliance to terrorise the outer planets. I don't see any suggestion of this in the film, and the portrayal of the Reavers in it leaves one to wonder how a group of animalistic madmen could maintain starships for any length of time, or engage in sophisticated behaviour like booby-trapping the colonists' ship in Bushwhacked.

This all sounds really negative, but because of Whedon's strengths and weaknesses it's hard to put the good things about the film into words. It's just an atmosphere and character-based thing, that can only be summed up by a succession of moments:

The Operative's initial scene with the scientists. As in War Stories, Firefly really does not like people who talk about pain and death as noble things.

Just about every line of dialogue during the discussion of the technical failures during the initial landing.

Don't shoot me until they get me!

Twin Badgers!

River as eternal eavesdropper (although I think River spying on her brother shagging Kaylee for the first time should have been left to the fanficcers to imagine)

"It isn't incense"

The big Jayne/Mal confrontation.

You have to accept that this is a dark universe when Warren is the good guy.

The sheer eeriness of the Miranda scenes.

The moment when the Serenity emerges from the dust cloud, followed by the Reaver fleet (cribbed from Galaxy Quest, but still fun).

"Like a leaf on the wind" (but Joss will never allow any relationship to stand). And Zoe's heartbreaking competence afterwards, throughout, which was more effective than any overdone breakdown.

Mr Universe cradled in a man/machine peta, and his voice emerging from the bot's body.

Mal's final speech to River. Mal/Serenity, One True Pairing 4ever.

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