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First Clip from Firefly Movie to be Shown at Comic-Con
Snaller writes "It's almost a tradition. At Comic-Con a few years back, Joss Whedon showed a stunned audience the first clip from Serenity, the pilot for his new show Firefly. Although the movie isn't due to open until April 22nd next year, Whedon is ready to show the first clip from from Serenity, the motion picture based on the Firefly series. He'll do it this weekend at Comic-Con, also present will be the cast from the series/movie (all 9 actors), editor Lisa Lassek, special effects guru Loni Peristere and producer Chris Buchanan.
It will take place on Sunday July 25th, 1-2pm, Room 20, afterwards there will be a signing session in room 28DE.
This was reported on what used to be the official Fox board, by the user 'AffableChap' which has previously been confirmed to be Chris Buchanan."
I'm having mixed feelings about the prospect of a full-blown Firefly movie. One side of me is skipping and jumping with joy, but my more skeptical side is wary of several things, even though I've learned to trust God^H^H^HJoss Whedon implicitly.
The original two-part pilot for Firefly was about the length of a full feature film, and yet it only introduced the characters, the universe and some of the backstory. The movie will have to do the introductions all over again, since I'm thinking they'll try to lure in more than just the fans of the TV series. How is the movie going to relate to the aired episodes? Is it a complete retelling? How much time will there be to tell a decent story that would satisfy an already-converted Firefly fan? Or how big a priority is that, anyway?
Maybe the film SHOULD be directed at the average moviegoer at the cost of mildly displeased fans. I mean, if the ultimate goal is to draw crowds large enough for the network to bring back the series (is it?), then maybe the hardcore fans should accept a "lesser" film than they'd hoped for, in the interest of this goal.
It remains to be seen how many compromises Whedon ends up making to cater to both interests: fans AND average moviegoers, many of whom may not have any prior contact to Firefly. I'm just afraid that the end result will be a film that tries to cater to so many various tastes and expectations that it ends up pleasing nobody.
I have no doubts that the movie will be entertaining and a pleasure to watch, at some level - it's just that I'm afraid I'll have to pretend the series never existed to feel that way.
Well, Whedon usually manages to surprise me positively, so in any case I remain carefully optimistic.
To be fair, the remake of Battlestar Galactica was pretty good. There were a couple of good story points compared to the original one like the lost colony not existing, betrayals. On the other hand Starbuck shouldn't be a woman. He's a womanizer, not a woman!
To many, Firefly actually confirmed that he could produce good TV outside of the "Buffy-verse". As with most Whedon productions, it included a mix of great characters, good interplay between them, and a polished mix of drama and comedy. He often seems to inspire love-him-or-hate-him reactions, but has declared in the past that he would rather produce something loved by 1,000 fans than liked by 1,000,000 (or something to that effect).
Firefly lacks some of the usual cliches in Sci-Fi (aliens, time-travel, etc) and I personally prefer it to most of the other stuff being produced. But each to his own I guess!
Hey, kid, this is the Internet. Things move fast here. We don't have time to wait for it to happen three times! Hell, a lot of the time if you wait for it to happen twice, some newer, more aggressive e-tradition will get in before you and steal all your mindshare!
In fact, soon you won't even be able to wait for something to happen even once. You'll have to declare something to be a tradition before it's happened at all. You can already see this beginning to happen with urban legends...
The movie is supposed to take place about 6 months after the series ended, and centers on a reaver attack on a planet, and a very very efficient alliance agent tracking down the doctor and his sister.
And it is indeed meant to be seen by everybody. That's the reason its going to be called "Serenity" and not Firefly. Universal felt that it wouldn't be good for business if people thought "oh its a movie based on a tv series i never saw, i probably won't know whats going on". So there apparently there won't be any references to the series.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I wonder if hollywood will ever wake up to the fact that sub-cultures and small fanbases can have nearly the same income potential as the large dis-intrested masses.
I for one am a HUGE firefly fan...i was skeptical of the show at first..western in space, BAH...
but after watching the show i was instantly hooked...the subtle char interactions and the real depth they are given makes for an incredible watch.
Wich brings me to my point...i love this show so much i would...no question...pay 150$ a year for a dvd set with the entire season on it, and I dont think i'm the only one out there that feels this way. I have no problem paying for somthing i enjoy...
Producing a high quality show like firefly and bringin it straight to dvd would definetly be risky...but i really belive it could pay off in the long run..based on the sales of the 1st season compilation we are talking multi millions in revenue.
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This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
This show was cancelled for a reason,
;)
The reason being that fox is run by a bunch of incompetent wankers.
it just wasn't good. In fact many people think its terrible.
No, not many people. Very few people actually. Its like Lord of the Rings: 99% of the people who actually watch it (try the DVD's and watch it in order) they love it. But for some reason, the tiny minority who does not like it aren't satisfied with simply accepting that tastes differ, but they have to vocally try and put it down every chance they get.
Weird that.
It'll be totally bad when Whedon gets his first Oscar
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Well, it (the show) got Fox'ed, which is to say they fucked it up. They played the Pilot ep last, for gorram sake! It would be moved for time slot to time slot and day to day, IIRC.
I think the DVD's have enjoyed some decent sales, which is why the show, which was only able to air 10 eps (of 12 or 13 made) is going to see the big screen.
I'm sure this is going to make me unpopular, but here goes...
As much as I liked Firefly (and I liked it a lot) in almost every episode I watched I kept on thinking, "if Whedon wanted to do a Western, why did he set it in space"? I assume that it was to do with selling it to the studios, who wouldn't have bought a new "Wagon Train" or "Rawhide".
But really every plot could have been done just as easily in the 1870s rather than the 2700s (or whenever it was meant to be). The psychic girl could just as easily have been a mystic rather than surgically enhanced, most of the other characters (the preacher, the prostitute, the hard-bitten veteran) would be basically the same. Most of the plots would be exactly the same (e.g. the train robbery).
I think it would have been even better to just do a Western-set "historical" series (with fantasy elements) rather than shoehorn things into a far-future, science fictional setting. But probably the networks aren't buying Westerns any more (though there was that TV version of The Magnificent Seven a while back).
-- Nothing unusual happened today
WOO HOO!
I have been going through the DVDs and at the end of each episode I think to myself "Damn you Fox! This is one of the best series I have seen in a long long time and ranks right up there with Band of Brothers in terms of TV quality. How could you have screwed this up?"
By looking at the air dates of the episodes and seeing how everything was played on TV out of order (it's a linear series, it's not a good idea to play a series that was written in order all jumbled up) I can understand how a whole lot of people would have just given up on in.
But thank goodness for the DVDs and if this movie is as good as the series I will be very excited come next spring.
I loved the series and I must say that any science fiction that respects the "no sound in space" rule gets additional kudos in my book.
(That would be SiChemist's Big Book O' Kudos for the curious.)
God is imaginary
Ok, I may get flamed into oblivion for this, but I'm genuinely curious, so:
What's the big draw of Firefly? I loved Buffy and Angel, but I just don't see why so many people seem so taken with Firefly. I saw all the eps that aired on TV and it just seems mediocre to me. Is it that I'm not a big western fan?
It got cancelled after 1 complete season because Fox insisted on showing the episodes out of order in a timeslot that many other shows had already died in.
Since it hit DVD, it stuck at Amazon's number-1 slot (a pretty spectacular accomplishment in itself) and is perhaps one of the alltime best selling DVDs.
Seriously, go grab the first couple of episodes off a p2p network and if you like them buy the DVDs. The stories are entertaining and often insightful, the photography is excellent and the CGI is probably the best I've ever seen - you really do forget that the CGI scenes aren't real. (The CGI is all rendered as if it's shot with a handheld video camera, which fits in perfectly with the rest of the filming which is all done on handheld cameras - it really does make you feel like the camera man is right in the middle of real action.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
as a response to many of the salient points raised in the smashing of this show I'd like to offer some arguments. Some have probably been mentioned in other posts, but these are mine and my reasoning alone
1. Western in space - anytime anyone sees the low slung pistol belt and horses, the comparison to a western will be made. Simply put, the same problems and attitudes with which the American frontier was settled, would translate into any "push in the bush". Tech level would drop to a point where it could be maintained on a local level, with various exceptions based on money/power. Sci-Fi references to this situation abound..."Ringworld" "Time enough for Love"
2. Incoherent story line - Fox producers didn't think that the original pilot had enough draw power to snag the target demographic so Joss and crew had to gin up the train job episode. Maybe a smarter move would have been to show the pilot as a movie first, but we'll never know. Also directly related to this , IMHO, is the fact they put the show in a timeslot that pretty much guaranteed that the demographic that the show would appeal to (intelligent non-teenagers under 50) would be unlikely to see, mostly because those folks usually aren't watching TV on a Friday night! Sunday's would have been better, ferchrissake!
3. Characters are one-dimensional. That's opinion, but I think that, just like in life, it takes time to really know a character, and just when you think you got them down, boom, here comes the curve ball. Mal's character went through the most changes, again IMHO, from reserved and sullen, to a likable, loyal rogue. River's tragic character didn't have time to properly develop and we only got hints at it, primarily from the last (in series not televised) episode. She went from pitiful and weak to downright scary powerful and it would have been interesting to see how the others in the group reacted to this new wrinkle. The preacher Book had a past obviously, ripe for exploration. Kayleigh's savant like talent for machinery and obvious need for acceptance was fully grounded in reality. Zoe could have been a great role model, loving and tender one minute, strong smart and able to kick @$$ the next. Jayne's full-on mercenary character is rooted in today's society(willing to sell out anyone to make a buck...remind you of the Fox network?). Simon and Wash's characters didn't have enough time to truly develop, but I suspect Wash was Joss's way of putting the viewer into the mix, plus the fact that he was the archtypical classclown of the group. The supporting characters and long story threads we re interesting to me. It showed that the writers were willing to invest as much time as the viewers. Niska and Saffron were different sides of the same coin and most of us "know" these characters in our lives. Add the ever present Alliance, with the Blue Sun corporation over sight, with the majoirty of the population going along with it as long as they get entertained, food on time, and creature comforts at the expense of freedom and a misguided sense of safety, and you've got an analogy to every powerful society ever concieved by man.
4. The comparisons to every other Sci-Fi space opera franchise ever. This isn't another iteration of Star Trek. Not knocking ST, but it did get preachy at times. Not star Wars, with it's convoluted sense of self. Farscape, interesting, but they kinda lost me early with the muppet character and the Alien for the sake of Alien tone. This was the story of humanity reaching the stars and bending them to it's will, for good or bad. That's what we do, we bend the environment around us to suit us. So it's only logical that we continue this practice into the future, not the "Prime Directive", which ignores the viral aspect of human behavior. This show takes the stance that man is his own worst enemy. And that, my friends, is damn interesting TV, much easier and more interesting than the "alien invader" scenario.
In closing, Firefly could have been the flagship series for Fo
Their are millions of people on this planet right now who exist in even more primative conditions than the "Cowboy" setting of this show... The only difference is that they are culturally different... How can this be when we have jets, and computers, and everything we do?
The answer, and the reason the show was believeable is that their will ALWAYS be those who live on the outskirts of civilization... Even in the future, and they will almost certainly have less technology than it takes for you to read this message...
On the other hand, it's not like the whole galaxy was filled with cowboys... On the episodes where they went the center of civilization... It was very modern... Very advanced... And THEY were the strange looking ones...
On the whole, the show got me thinking about the future in a lot less 1 dimensional a way... Come to think of it... Maybe I should write a sci-fi novel that explores the even more likely scenario of the existance of culturally VARIED primative societys on the outskirts of a galactic civilization.. IE, somewhere their should be a planet of Samurai...
hard core geek-ware
And for those of you that are going to the SF Worldcon in Boston, there are two "Firefly" shows on the ballot for best dramatic work, short form. Rather than have them knock each other out of the voting, I'd like to see everyone concentrate their votes on "The Message," so that Joss can get the Hugo he should have gotten years ago for "Buffy." The other nominated episode, "Heart of Gold," wasn't written by Joss, and I don't think it's as good.
Also, in answer to the question "why set it in space?" Alan Tudyk answered that in a recent interview on NPR. Tudyk was being interviewed because he plays the robot in "I, Robot," and the interviewer (obviously a fellow sf fan) asked the question about "Firefly." According to Tudyk, it's a plot point. The cheapeast way to settle newly terraformed planets is to land some people on them with tools and horses, and leave them to their own devices. It also effectively gives the Blue Sun Corporation, which is paying for the terraforming and the transport of settlers, indentured serfs who are totally at their mercy.
dionwr (dee-uh-NOOR; it's Welsh)
Make a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
B5 was better because it got to tell its entire story and spawned two spin-off series (admittedly one only went one episode). SG1 is better because it's on what, season 7 now (?), plus it has a spin-off of its own. Firefly was off to a glorious start, and was cut down in its youth by rapacious suits who judge the quality of TV by demographics and ratings, not by production quality or artistic merit. I have no problem putting Joss Whedon up there with JMStraczinsky or the guy who created SG1 (can't remember his name!) as excellent storytellers. But "THE new voice"? Whedon was around for years before Firefly!
I just hope the movie (or movies) does well enough to give Firefly a second chance as a series.
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-Those who do not learn from history are doomed.