Slashdot Mirror
Serenity Opens Today
joemite writes "As every Browncoat knows, Serenity, the motion picture based on the Firefly series opened today. For the uninitiated, Serenity is based on the short-lived Fox television show Firefly (created by Joss Whedon, [Buffy the Vampire Slayer]), which follows a group of outlaws in a unique space-western universe. While there are no aliens or temporal anomalies, the stage is set for our group of heros to out-wit and out-strategize the giant and evil Alliance. Go out and watch the movie this weekend and see why the Firefly series is an Amazon.com best seller." If you're on the fence, reviews available at SFGate, Wired, the Seattle Times, and IGN.
Saw it this morning. I never go to the theater, either. Props to Marcus Theaters in Gurnee. Great sound, great visual focus. Benefit of missing Navy pay day by a day.
Serenity has great Free Market plot lines, just as Firefly did. My "beloved" LRC has some good insight here andhere.
Even the theme song is freedom loving:
Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out
to the black.
Tell 'em I ain't comin' back.
Burn the land and boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me.
Have no place
I can be
Since I found Serenity.
To bad Whedon's a socialist. Weird.
Maybe we can change that. I'm ready to pay Joss Whedon a nice annual subscription to have him bring Firefly back (web based video, high quality codec) to an online format. Fuck ox and Cable producers. Anyone know of a way to contact him about the idea?
FWIW the movie does feel TV-ish. I'd like to know what it was filmed on and edited on.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
The pilot wasn't very good. Just watch some of the other episodes. There's only six or so. It wont take long. It's the humor and cast chemistry that makes the show work. There's no science in the show, its pure entertainment.
Part of the point of Firefly that you miss in the pilot is that the captain and crew are fleeing the sterile, oppressive environment of Star Trek. In Firefly, the Federation/Alliance are the bad guys. The crew of Firefly want to live as they please. The life is crude and dirty, but they live every minute.
I didn't like Star Trek because it was overly contrived, condescending morality, and very little cast chemistry. It only got worse with each spinoff.
It definitely is sad to think about a future that isn't better than the world we live in today, but it's also hard to imagine large corporations and government departments truly looking out for the interests of the average person.
-- Reality is for people who lack imagination.
Julian Sanchez, over at http://www.reason.com/ has an interesting article about the Camus and Sartre influence in Serenitty.
*Warning MEGA Spoilers* *Warning MEGA Spoilers* *Warning MEGA Spoilers*An excerpt: (full text behind this link.)
I'm sure the comparisons to Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star (nevermind Blake's 7 from 25 years ago) have been done to death ever since Firefly first aired. The thing is, it has some elements of these shows, yet it doesn't feel derivative of any of them. Yes, every time they land on a frontier world it feels like Trigun, but thats like saying Trigun feels like Big Jake or Cowboys (John Wayne films). The shows are borrowing from history, and attaching a bit of fiction along the way.
What I like is not where Whedon is necessarily getting his inspirations, but what he does with them on the screen. Firefly/Serenity is a lot of fun, and spared the heavy-handedness of the Trek and SW franchises. The show sort of takes itself half-seriously, and the latent humor in such an approach pays off rather well. I hope Whdeon gets to make more of this, although I read (somewhere on fireflyfans.net, I think) that Fox still owns TV rights.
I consider myself a reasonably discriminating movie enthusiast, and I abhorred the "War of the Worlds" remake and enjoyed "The Island" (also a remake, btw). Of course, I was expecting "War of the Worlds" to be good and "The Island" to be bad, from their respective previews. Cry_Wolf looked so bad I'm basing a parody submission for a trailer contest on it.
But to get back on-topic, I'm totally looking forward to Serenity (loved the series on DVD, not on Fox), but I have to admit the trailers make it look pretty dumb. Unfortunately, I'm not expecting much from the movie (hopefully it will wow me!), and I don't expect it will have a particularly awesome opening weekend, not only because of the trailers but because, frankly, who is going to want to watch a movie called "Serenity"? Sure, the title makes sense from the series, but isn't the whole point of any movie to have some sort of conflict? "Serenity" sounds like a sleeper, literally. Maybe it's a marketing snafu on Joss' part, or perhaps it's genius, if the movie is also genius. Sure, only an ignoramus will judge a book by its cover, but considering our current president, ignorance currently has majority representation in the US.
Strictly speaking, you only watched the first episode. Fox hated the actual pilot, and was not at all interested in airing it. AFAIK, it was first broadcast recently when sci-fi picked it up.
As for the clean look, after so many years of star trek, I find it boring. The Alliance in the show look very clean and proper. It makes an interesting contrast.
I think the point you should remember is about half of the money you spend to see this movie will be used against you at some point.
As a fan of the series, it's a great movie. Whedon did a great job of taking what I assume was several seasons of plot lines and collapsing them into a two hour movie. The result flowed well and didn't feel too rushed. I do suspect that spreading many of the developments over the course of many episodes would have made the important revelations all the more significant. As closure for the series, I'm very satisfied.
However, I'm pessimistic for people who haven't seen the series. Whedon does an admirable job providing a Cliff's Notes of the series. He even does so in a way that doesn't bug me as a fan; indeed several minor details that were never expounded upon in the series were cleared up. However much of power of the series was the attachment you formed to the characters. That's something that takes hours. You can't do it in a movie.
So I suspect the movie will do well in the short term as the fans flock to it, then it will quietly fade away. This will be the end of the series; it will remain with a cult fandom, but nothing more. (That said, I'm surprised at the positive reviews it's getting from people I doubt are fans.)
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Oh noes, did they run out of megahertz? Were there not enough shots by Weta Digital? WERE THE POLYGONS DISAPPEARED?!
Jesus Christ, what are you expecting these days? A Jurassic Park-type revolution in CG with every new movie?
They looked just fine. I work in film CG and I was pleased with them. What exactly did you expect that wasn't dutifully appeased? "The visual Effects blow" is about as compelling an argument as "the American Godzilla movie rocked, 'cause check out that slick CG!".
I bet they forgot to buy more PixelShaders for their DirectXs. That's it.
That brings up a good point. Reading reviews and seeing a preview, Serenity looks like it should be called "The Adventures of Han Solo." Is this not just a Han Solo-like character in a Millennium Falcon-like ship doing what Han Solo did (smuggling), and avoiding the organized oppressive bad guys with bigger ships?
> we'll be able to point to this year as the year things changed
Yeah, I said the same thing the year both Clerks and Waterworld came out.
sigh...
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
Except, you never actually see them acting like anything but perfect little boy scouts. They even give the proceeds of their train robbery back. Yawn. And when he finally does kill, it's only out of self defense. Mal Reynolds is about as bad as my Amish grandma. Even she could shoot a fox that was going after her chickens.
All those 'from the creators of' shows flopped because only the original show had a great premise and people got interested.
Except Buffy, of course, which has such a crazy premise it's still near impossible to get people to watch it. It's a joke.
Or they had a good timeslot.
Unlike Buffy, which was not only in a sucky timeslot, but on a network no one could find.
Or it managed to get so popular so fast that everyone was talking about it next day.
Unlike Buffy, where some people still look at fans oddly.
In fact, there is absolutely no traditional reason that Buffy succeeded. Instead of the any above, it relied on good stories, great actors, and metaphors people can relate to.
Other shows had gimmicks that can't be duplicated that sucked people in, and shows by the same people after can't pull them off. Buffy is rather unique in that it had negative gimmicks that discouraged people from watching.
If a person can put together actors and stories and writers, there's no logical reason he can't do it again.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I believe Whedon has referred to the Enterprise-D as a "Floating Sheraton in Space"
I think it made me spit coffee out of my nose when I read that, and I'm a die hard trekkie as well.
There's something to be said for how much more interesting drama you can get when all of the main characters don't share the same ideals, though. The only thing keeping them together is that they're misfits and have no place in a society who has some rules that they don't believe in.
Hey you!! Don't copy that floppy!! -- The Software Publishers Association
You wouldn't steal a purse would you? Downloading pirated films is stealing!! - anti-piracy advert
"Ahh, your a land developer? Please.. Have a seat.." -- Your elected officials
"We have documented more than 10,000 instances of government taking property from one person to give it to another in just the last five years."
the plaintiffs argued that it was not constitutional for the government to take private property from one individual or corporation and give it to another, simply because the other might put the property to a use that would generate higher tax revenue.(They Lost)
eminent domain today has degenerated into a means for politically connected developers to steal peoples' homes
Remember kids, it's not called stealing unless you are poor..