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.

Comments

Rotten Tomatoes

[andy4322]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/serenity/

Currently 83% fresh!

Re:Rotten Tomatoes

[BrynM]

I think this one-liner sums up what Sci-Fi has been starving for:

"Like watching the original Star Wars for the first time, or better yet, watching The Empire Strikes Back... Mal is a guy who would shoot Greedo first."
-- Fred Topel, ABOUT.COM

The episode that won me over for the show was The Train Job. (small spoiler) This "bad" guy is blabbering about how he would hunt Mal down and make him pay. Since Mal had him tied up and in front of a large turbine, he just kicked the "bad" guy into it. Ended the whole "threat to hunt you down" thing right there. These are the cutthroat actions you always knew Han Solo and Kirk were capable of, but never saw them do.

Re:Rotten Tomatoes

[Anthony Boyd]

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?

Hmm. Well, first, I'd pay good money to see a trilogy of movies about the early adventures of Han Solo, so although your comment sounds dismissive, to me it sounds quite enticing.

Having said that, if you mixed Han Solo up with some precogs from Minority Report, and added a bit of Johnny Mnemonic, you'd have a more accurate summary. But even that's not quite right. It needs a bit more to put it in a box. Maybe some Gattaca -- the idea of a perfect society, outsiders living free but in sometimes less than ideal conditions, hmm. Add in some of that "space western" from early, early Star Trek, and maybe that's it.

I don't know, I feel like I'm not putting it in a box very cleanly. Someone else could do it better, I'm sure. What I do know is that it's selling the movie short to just say "Han Solo."

For the uninitiated

[stefanlasiewski]

For the uninitiated, Serenity is based on the short-lived Fox television show Firefly

If you're that uninitiated, you'll need to know this-- Slashdot is a "Web Site" where we talk about geeky things.

Surely, if anyone on Slashdot hasn't heard of Serenity, it would cause a quantum singularity and we would all get sucked into a blackhole.

Not to get all Treky or anything.

Firefly

[LiquidCoooled]

I heard all along that it was another sci-fi show that was from the creator of Buffy.
I left it alone because "another hit show from the writer of XYZ" is usually a steaming pile of bumpoo. This kind of hype is like a one hit wonder from the music charts trying to get his 2nd song sold.

I don't care who wrote it, I wanna know how good it is.

I'm currently half way through the dvd episodes and I'm hooked.
Why the hell didn't anyone tell me it was this good on its own merits?

Hope the movie is as good.

ps, even after my rant, how exactly do you hype a series about a rag tag group of cowboys flying around in a spaceship getting into scrapes? I've never been able to describe it to my friends properly.

I saw it as a "noob"`

[acomj]

You need to know nothing. I never watched "firefly" and I got it. It takes a little bit to come together but it does.

Re:Informed users?

[Beolach]

Fox Networks screwed the show over pretty badly. The episodes have a pretty strong sequential order, and Fox aired them completely out of order: for example, the first episode that introduces the Captain & the ship was the last to be aired. The TV network just really mishandled the show, and then when (due to their mishandling) it didn't have a very high rating, they cancelled it before the season was even finished.

Anyway, even if you didn't catch any of the TV show, I'd still recommend seeing the movie: it doesn't require that you have seen any of the TV show to follow the plot, and is an excellent movie. If you like it, pick up the TV show's DVD box set.

Re:Great movie with free market touches

[Deslock]

"It is, in fact, the leftists who have so little faith in fellow human beings that they believe a strong forceful central government is needed to get everything done."

You're describing authoritarians, not leftists/liberals. Some leftist beliefs are authoritarian (nuclear power limitations/regulations, environmental regulations, restrictions on tobacco advertising and use in public places, etc) and some are libertarian (gays have right to marry, less restrictions on most drugs, etc).

Likewise, some rightist/conservative beliefs are libertarian (market should be free of all regulations, tobacco should not be restricted, etc) while many are authoritarian (sexual practices should be regulated, gay couples should not have the same rights as heterosexual couples, use of drugs other than nicotine/caffeine/alcohol should be illegal, etc).

Re:I like the clean look

[dr00g911]

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.

Alliance == giant != evil

[corporate zombie]

So the Alliance is giant but not evil.

http://homepage.mac.com/merussell/iblog/B835531044 /C1592678312/E20050916182427/index.html

Section II, first question.

M.E. Russel (Q): "Firefly" and "Serenity"'s political and cultural underpinnings are unusually well thought-out. You've obviously developed a whole system of planets, a Sino-American political system, a mix of languages. How long did the concept fester in your head before you started writing?

Joss Whedon (A): It festered for a while. It was probably two or three years after I came up with the idea that I made the TV show, a year-and-a-half doing that, and then a couple of years to write the movie. So it's had time to bake. And people are always like, "They're fighting an evil empire!" And I'm like, "Well, it's not really an evil empire." The trick was always to create something that was complex enough that you could bring some debate to it -- that it wasn't black-and-white. It wasn't, "If we hit this porthole in the Death Star, everything will be fine!" It was messier than that, and the messiest thing is that the government is basically benign. It's the most advanced culturally....

More of the same (not evil) later in the interview.

-CZ