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Serenity Trounces Star Wars
DogBotherer writes "The BBC is reporting that the film Serenity has been voted the number-one Sci Fi film of all time. Serenity is a followup to the series Firefly. The 2005 film beat out Star Wars better than two-to-one for the top honors. This result came in a poll of 3000 readers of SFX magazine.
But Serenity wasn't that great of a film. Firefly was an amazing TV show, but the film was without the same depth.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Excellent, even. I can see it beating Star Wars. But the likes of Blade Runner? I mean, nothing against Serenity, but I really don't think it's the Best Science Fiction Film Ever.
I wanted to like, "Serenity." I went to the theatre expecting to like it. But I was bored silly by a boring plot that was full of holes. The characters weren't especially compelling. I couldn't figure out what was so great about this. After finishing it, I couldn't even figure out what was tolerable about it. From what I've seen since then, it seems as though "Serenity" fans are fanatically loyal and vocal, but most people who weren't already fans didn't find the movie especially entertaining. Obviously, I haven't taken a poll, but the box office results must mean SOMETHING.
As for "Star Wars," I don't agree that it necessarily ought to be classified as fantasy, but it's also silly to see it as representing all of science fiction, as so many people do. "Star Wars" was an example of one particular branch of sci-fi, but it came to be seen as what sci-fi really was because ignorant studio execs all tried to clone it after it made a lot of money. Good science fiction is easy to find it books, but very hard to find on screen, IMO. It's hard to see either "Serenity" OR "Star Wars" as the best sci-fi movie ever.
David
Me and my mod points are going to maintain a distance of no less than 3 articles from this inevitable flame-fest.
These sorts of surveys are more about who has the more devoted and active fanbase at the moment. That doesn't make the result less significant, its just a matter of what the result is actually saying: Firefly has managed to develop and extremely devoted and extremely active fanbase. This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise. Oddly enough it still remains far more likely that we will see another Star Wars film than a sequel to Serenity (though neither is that likely). Star Wars fans may be apathetic about the films these days, but they still exist in vast numbers.
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Let's see of the results hold after Serenity makes a sequel with Jar Jar Binks.
I thought so.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Look at Star Wars - coming up is Star Wars Celebration IV, where around 30,000 people will attend. Having been to the last Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis, I can easily believe those numbers.
Now look at the last Serenity convention - the Flanvention. Even if it had not abruptly folded the day before it was to go off, it only had some 500 people attending - as did the one the year before that I attended. Now partly that was a limitation by choice of the event organizers, but I'm not sure they quite reached even 500 the first one.
I really, really like Firefly and Serenity - but they have no-where near the fan base that Star Wars does, in either size or bredth or sheer fanatisim. This was just a case of Browncoats gaming the polls before the Star Wars Bantha could wake to smite them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How exactly is star wars somehow less scifi then firefly?
I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly.
So what do you define as science fiction?
I mean, it's fiction, about science.
Firefly barely had enough science to make it not qualify as a current fiction w/ spaceships.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
I really enjoy both the Firefly and Star Wars universes. That being said, there's a LOT more material to be found for the latter, orders of magnitude more.
In a way, I think this poll shows some disappointment with some of that vast collection of material for Star Wars. Some of it is very, very good (the original trilogy, KotOR, etc.), but some of it isn't quite so good... in fact, some of it's really quite ridiculously bad.
Firefly/Serenity, on the other hand, is:
a) relatively new and fresh in our minds
b) excitingly dynamic, humorous, sexy, etc. in a way that Star Wars failed to be in Episodes I-III
c) a fairly small collection of material. All of it quite good (imho).
There's something to be said for having such a high overall level of quality in such a concentrated amount of material.
However, I do agree that a similar poll 20 years from now might not have Firefly in the top 10. Then again, maybe Star Wars will decline over time?
Where is "Brazil"? Where is "12 Monkeys"?
"Serenity" was fun and all, but those are good films...
3,00 readers of one SF magazine...yeah, that's definitive. I can think of a handful of SF films better than either. I'm a huge Firefly fan, loved Star Wars, but this "trouncing" is only slightly more relevant than me and my homies declaring 'Jabba the Slut' best SF-porn of all time on our MySpace page.
Neither one is much of a scifi film they are both fantasy films. It's not a value judgement I enjoyed both they just aren't really scifi films. 2001 and Bladerunner are scifi films. Neither of the films, Star Wars or Serenity, gave more than a passing thought to science. Star Wars had little to do with science and Joss Wedon seemed to keep confusing solar systems and galaxies. Both films were fantasy space operas. Really entertaining but in no way predicting a future that will or could ever happen. Star Trek has faired remarkably well as has 2001 but Star Wars is still fantasy. There's nothing wrong with space operas, they actually go back to the Buck Rodgers era, it's just they aren't science fiction. There's so little real science fiction people seem to be forgetting there's a difference.
It's been voted best by a one magazine with a tiny poll of 3000 readers?
;)
Hardly conclusive evidence, given the fact that 99% of people who have seen Star Wars have never heard of the magazine in the first place
Serenity was excellent, but definately not ground breaking - that's the difference.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Does anyone think there would even *be* a Mal Reynolds if there hadn't been a Han Solo first?(and yes, they both shot first!)
Despite the depths of mediocrity that Lucas has since sunk to, give credit where credit is due. Star Wars and all the technology that ILM created during the making of the Star Wars films changed the industry forever. Blade Runner certainly changed the look of sci-fi films, but it still didn't have the impact that Star Wars did. I'm not sure that was the overriding criterion for making the list, though.
Serenity was great (GREAT! "I am a leaf on the wind!"), but c'mon, let's not get stupid here. While you don't have to have watched Firefly before Serenity to enjoy it, it certainly helps immensely. The whole Mal/Inara history has much more comedic impact if you have the Firefly backstory. The Rev? A complete throwaway character if you haven't watched Firefly!
The bigger surprise(s) of the list (for me) were what was included, that most fans have forgotten:
Planet of the Apes (the original) and Forbidden Planet. Right on.
Back to the Future? Uhm, I don't think so.
The Star Wars film that most fans seem to think was the best (Empire Strikes Back) wasn't even on the list? That seems a little odd.
Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction.
Science fiction and fantasy are both speculative fiction sub-genres.
Science fiction is mostly defined by its setting and subject matter: outer space, aliens, time travel, imaginary technology, etc. Star Wars is certainly science fiction, even though it crosses the boundary a little with what might be considered magic (as does Dune). What Star Wars is not is hard sf, a sub-genre of science fiction in which the plot itself is based on plausible scientific theory.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That's always the problem when a poll is based on the will to participate (and knowledge of its exitence).
In 1999, the city of Paris organized an online poll in which we were asked to vote for the most important person of those two millenia and someone in my electronic school put his name, so we all voted for him, then another scholl put up its own champion against ours. shortly before closing the poll, they had to eject both of them because their poll, supposed to be based on notoriety, had two totally unkown winners above 40% each, with Jesus being a good third around 3% and everyone else below 0.5%.
In reality, science fiction is fairly loosely defined and Star Wars fits very well under some definitions and not at all under others. Firefly is given more science-fiction credit because of the fact that it didn't have random fantasy elements (well, except for River's psychic-ness, but we never got around to getting a good enough explanation of whether it would be better classified as a faux-science or a fantasy element, but from what we did get, it seemed as if they wanted to at least try to make it more the faux-science route.)
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This is one of the few topics I feel strongly compelled enough to comment on. For those who voted Serenity topping Star Wars, I understand completely. Let's be real here. Star Wars was a space opera, a caricature of science fiction. The SF genre, in my own opinion, is one that deals in honest ways with how science impacts our lives on a daily basis. Star Wars wasn't an original story to this genre. It was the same old good versus evil, take down the evil conglomerate story which could have easily been told in a Western. Serenity crossed boundaries in ways Star Wars did not. It relied on a political back story familiar to those of us not subject to "empires" even as it showed a human side to the struggle. What? Luke Skywalker lost his hand in a lightsaber battle to Darth Vader, only to have it replaced by seamless prosthetic? Malcolm Reynolds got the crap kicked out of him and LIMPED away from his LUCKY defeat of the bad guy. His crew fared no better. The story itself was more relevant to our society than Star Wars. The primary struggle in Star Wars was Luke not becoming his father and joining the monolithic religion his own version of which was opposed to. It was individualistic, properly suited for the coming 80s decade of similar attitudes of self-preservation. Serenity dealt with issues of survival of minority against a seemingly benevolent majority. It mirrored one man's issues of being on the losing side of a war and contrasted them to the why's and how's wars are won and lost. Given the 14 episodes of backstory from the single season it was on and one comes away with an even better understanding of this movie. In summary, Serenity trumps Star Wars as a sci-fi movie because it is actually more REAL and deals more specifically with real issues. It is not some fairytale fantasy story, able to be retold in any genre without losing anything.
Star Wars *had* a loyal fan base.
That is, until Lucas started to repeatedly rape the fan's memory, trying to squeeze the last penny he could get out of the franchise.
I think the the new trilogy has done more harm to the fan base, than actually a concurrent franchise stealing fans.
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(put my waging money on it)
People who did not see Firefly tend to forget that it already had cult status and recognition... Browncoats bought so many Firefly DVDs that they convinced Fox (or whomever) to produce Serenity in the first place!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'll translate for those of you who don't feel like reading: Serenity and BSG have too much emotion and too little technobabble. I'm uncomfortable with the former and therefore dislike shows that deal with it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Some of my favorites in no particular order:
:P
Brazil
Blade Runner
Altered States
The Fly
Solaris
Red Planet
Forbidden Planet
Metropolis
Alien/Aliens
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Tron
Dr. Strangelove
The Last Starfighter (cheesy I know, but what is cooler than a kid who becomes the hero of the universe by getting top score in an arcade game)
Logan's Run
THX1138
Alien Nation
Amazing Stories
The Black Hole
Westworld
Charly (film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon)
War Games
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Dark City
Dark Star
And the list could go on and on and on..... (really, I have tons more I love to watch now and again)
Notice, you don't see Serenity or Star Wars on there. Yes, I do like them, but do I consider them Sci-Fi? Maybe in the same way that I consider "The Terminator" or "The Transformers" to be Sci-Fi.
Serenity was a spaghetti-western in space, only not as good as the real spaghetti westerns such as "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" or "Pale Rider". I didn't even think Firefly was that great either. Star Wars was entertaining, but I thought it just to be another action flick like Indiana Jones or whatnot, only set in space. Don't get me wrong, I love the movie, but I just didn't see it like I guess some other people see it. The Empire Strikes Back was excellent, and one of the few in the series that Lucas didn't get to screw up the first time around, hence why it was better than the rest. Space opera definitely. I felt like I was watching a fancier Flash Gordon with a better plot.
BTW: Everyone needs to quit dwelling on the whole "Luke this" "Luke that" thing. The entire story arc of the movie series was about Darth Vader, not Luke. The whole Luke obsession thing is almost homo-erotic
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Dune will never produce a good cinematic version, either. You'd think people would learn to leave cerebral books with a great deal of politicking and internal monologue alone.
The honest and hard hitting question is.. Who would win in a fight, Firefly or Millenium Falcon On a serious note, my first time getting onto the net in the early 90s, the first usenet post I came across that had a massive depth count was a thread on The Enterprise vs The Death Star. Sometimes I miss those days.
No. There were Real Life reasons for killing Book and Wash. Book's actor wanted out of acting to do political activism full-time, and Wash's actor had other acting commitments.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I agree 100%
I had never seen Firefly, but I had a lot of friends who were fans of it. We all saw Serenity, and while it was a decent movie, if you asked me a week later what I thought of it, I wouldn't have even been able to recall what it was about.
Recently, I was convinced to sit down and watch all of firefly. I really enjoyed it. Then I watched Serenity again. It was like I was watching a completely different movie!
Seeing the movie by itself, you don't really get attached to the characters like you do in the TV show. [Spoiler] When Wash and Shepherd die, you don't really feel badly about that in the movie, because you didn't really know them. Shepherd especially, he wasn't much more than a background character.[/Spoiler]
"They won't see this comin'."
As both a Star Wars and a Firefly fan, my first reaction to this news was disbelief, but as i read a bit and thought a bit, i realized that i agree - Serenity is better. Of course you have to realize that no matter what the poll actually said, both were judged on their entire series, not just on the individual movies. Star Wars includes episodes 1-6 and Serenity includes Firefly. Would you rather watch Episode 2 or any 4 episodes of Firefly? Star Wars was the phenomenon that it was because it was new and amazing. Serenity was better because the story and characters are better.
Plus, be honest, when the Serenity and her 'escorts' come flying out of that nebula, don't shivers just run down your spine? No scene comes close to that "whoa" factor in all of Star Wars, imo. (Blasphemous as it may be to say, the light saber fight between Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jin probably comes the closest.)
Whether Serenity (+Firefly) is better than a lot of the others is a much tougher question.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
The plot was pedestrian, the characters who were so rich and multi-dimensional on the show were reduced to almost comic simplicity in the movie (and, in the case of Simon, COMPLETELY altered). Malcolm Reynolds, for example, was presented on the show as a decent, but harsh and practical, mercenary who felt a strong loyalty to his crew but had completely rejected juvenile notions of "changing the world" from his younger days. In the movie, he's presented as a stock reluctant hero, just waiting to save the world and make bombastic speeches at the slightest provocation (it was as if the old Mal had been replaced by a retired James T. Kirk). It was the kind of implausible and simplistic "redemption" story that would be perfectly at home in fan fiction written by an 6th grader.
The movie was also loaded with ridiculous "crowd pleaser" fight scenes and FX extravaganzas, with Whedon even ripping HIMSELF off with the cheeseball and ludicrous "River the Reaver Slayer" fight scene (at least Buffy's ability to defy all known physics could be explained by magic). This would have been bad enough had the FX in the movie looked even as good as the series. I don't know who they hired to do the special FX in this movie, but it's rare to see FX in a movie adaptation that look WORSE than in the TV series (was that landspeeder chase scene meant as some kind of JOKE, a la "Army of Darkness"?!?!?)
I could go on and on. But, suffice it to say that I wish they had simply left the series alone. The movie failed on virtually every front.
Firefly was really meant to be a series, and was ill-suited for the feature film form (even if they HAD done a better job of it).
I just hope Ronald Moore learned a lesson from Whedon's mistake. Don't do it, Ron.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Then Blade Runner is trivia.
Nothing more came from that. (not directly)
If you want innovations, here are some off the top of my head:
space shot in handcam style - everything in BSG's external shots is Firefly derivative.
The wild-west space - a genre-crossing adventure with the idea that not everyone will have golly-gee technology
Inara was wicked hot. (sorry, not a valid point, but still true)
Does anyone think there would even *be* a Mal Reynolds if there hadn't been a Han Solo first?
Well, there was a time when the hero in a story was always entirely good - I think the modern term would be "all american" (think Flash Gordon). The idea of a hero with flaws and conflicts was popularized by Lord Byron, oh about 200 years before Han Solo hit the big screen. Here's the wiki article for further research.
I realize that you didn't actually claim that Lucas had invented the Byronic hero. I just want to make it *painfully clear* that he didn't invent it. But you're right, Han Solo did make the archetype very popular.
It bothers me a bit that Lucas gets any credit. Lucas is an idiot who stumbled clumsily into a great movie (ep. IV) that he really didn't deserve. Lucas himself has no clue what a Byronic hero is. Lucas doesn't appreciate it or value it at all. This is why he was willing to change episode IV so that Gredo shot first. Lucas is a drooling idiot staring at a movie that is accidentally good, and going "deeerrrrr, lets maik hand shot first, har har. deeeerrr."
If Lucas understood Han Solo, he would have made it *more* obvious that Han shot first.
Also, in the scene in Empire where Han is getting lowered into carbonite, Lea says, "I love you" and Han says, "I know." How cool is that guy, you know what I mean? Well, Lucas actually wrote the script so that Han says, "I love you too" but Harrison Ford changed it. What a moron Lucas is. He has no clue whatsoever.
The Falcon would win in a fight...the Serenity isn't even armed. 8)
Nonsense! On board Serenity is none other than Jayne Cobb, the Hero of Canton! He is science fiction's answer to Chuck Norris!
Jayne doesn't just shoot first, he shoots *before* first!
Star Wars was released in 1977. If we're talking about the original Episode IV movie, we're talking about a movie that is 30 years old. Many movies have come and gone since then, and Star Wars still holds up remarkably well. I enjoyed Serenity, but I think its success in this particular popularity contest is primarily based on it being the best scifi movie to appear in recent years.
Take another poll in 2037 and see where the two stack up. I suspect Serenity will hold up well, but I don't know that it will have the broad effect of Star Wars. Despite its faults, Star Wars embraced big themes and grabbed hold of the imagination in a way that few films have.
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People who keep objecting to the "silly old-west" theme should perhaps talk to an anthropologist or historian or two who knows a little something about how remote or frontier societies develop, even when their parent societies are affluent.
There are places on Earth *right now* where people don't have running water or electricity, and do subsistence farming with domesticated animals. Western-style clothing evolved in the US because it was *practical* for low-tech manufacture with locally available materials and for the local environmental conditions. Why would you think that all remote space colonies would all have their own replicators and Mr Fusion generators?
Compared to almost all other sci-fi shows ever made, more of Firefly was realistic than fantastical. There was no faster-than-light travel or wormholes of folding space or whatever. People had to grow and raise their food, and it was real food not bioengineered food paste. The entire show took place within one single solar system. People had idiomatic speech patterns that were not simply "This is how we talk today with some made-up words thrown in". Which is not to say the show was pure science-based speculative fiction, but it generally took much smaller leaps than the typical sci-fi show.
Firefly isn't going to bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity or foster a new religion, but there was a lot of positive things to say about it as a representative of the sci-fi genre.