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Firefly Movie Gets The Green Light
An anonymous reader writes "According to FireflyFans.net and Ain't It Cool News, Universal has greenlit production of 'Serenity,' the motion picture based on Joss Whedon's cancelled TV series 'Firefly.' Both sites point to an article from Variety that says the film will start production in June, and be ready for release in 2005." The informative Whedonesque weblog is also monitoring developments regarding this much-deserved resurrection.
Can someone point out what was especially good about it? I'll grant without having seen more than half an episode that it was better than Enterprise or any other show in the genre on tv currently, but that's not saying much.
I'll take a shot at this one. I've been catching the episodes on Canada's SPACE channel, and to me the series definitely had a fairly solid setting and mood in its first season, which is rare for a sci-fi series.
The show fuses sci-fi space conventions with Wild West-era characters and environments. The whole "space Western" thing is not subtle, but that might actually be a good thing. I've found that when sci-fi producers try to be "subtle", their works ends up coming across as obvious and pretentious, like the ST:TNG episodes that tried to disguise the contemporary parallels, then beat you over the head with The Contemporary Moral Message. The Western aspects aren't taken so far as to be implausibly anachronistic; the six-shooters and shotguns seem to fire some kind of directed energy instead of projectiles, and there is still advanced technology. It just so happens the super-cool machines have some rust and loose screws, which only adds to the plausibility. I still have some trouble conceiving of just what volume of space the series takes place within, but then again, technobabble is kept at a minimum, which is a plus.
What little CGI I really took notice of looked pretty darn good, which isn't difficult to do nowadays--but then, compare Firefly to Babylon 5's first season and a half, and Starhunter. Also, there is no sound in space scenes. This threw me at first, but it's also accurate. For all the lack of adherence to anything resembling physics and scientific accuracy, I found this to be a nice touch.
Firefly worked really well in a contained-episode format, instead of the plot arcs that damn near everyone tries to shoehorn into shows now. Thing is, Whedon has shown a tendency to start with just such a pure episode format, then eventually move the series into multi-episode or even full-season arcs. This makes the short life of the series even rougher, because the creative team didn't even have a chance to really go places with the show.
Incidentally, J. Michael Straczynski's Crusade series died under similar conflicts with its network (demands for more sex and violence, episode juggling harming continuity), and it appeared to be developing in a similar fashion. JMS had the pressure of following up Babylon 5 with an expected second strong effort right from the start. When TNT demanded new episodes be shot and aired before the originally-shot episodes could see airtime, there was little chance the series' potential would be realized early on, or allowed to develop.
I wonder how amazing Firefly could have been in further seasons, given time to settle in. I say it again, the series felt quite well-realized for a first-season sci-fi program, and it got cut off at the knees by a network known more for trashy "reality" TV and amusing cartoons than fantasy and science fiction.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.