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More on Serenity
OK, now it's a new day and I'm not so tired, I thought I'd marshal some more coherent thoughts about Serenity.
Bad
Science First up, the whole solar system thing. Apparently it's implied in the series but I didn't notice except that a lot of people live on moons which I assumed were Earth-gravity satellites of gas giants. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
neongraal said it's canon in the game but I don't care: it's crap science. You can pack a solar system with planets but there's still only a very narrow band of liveable orbits. Terraforming won't work on planets too close to or far from the sun unless they're moons of a gas giant that has its own warmth. Also that verse feels like a big one to me. in Out of Gas I had the impression that they were a long way from anywhere, not in a crowded system. Besides, how the hell could they hide a whole planet in the tiny liveable part of one? Who did they have as science consultant, Paul Darrow?
Simon What's this--action-man guerrilla-infiltrator Simon? Come on, he was a newbie to this when he joined Serenity, a reserved and socially-inept doctor, hardly the self-assured and accomplished impersonator we see. And why was River in a chilly-bin in the series? Consistency in important. It makes the dough plot hold together.
Serenity She's made of pixels. How hard would it have been to make her look like the Firefly we know? And OK, maybe the crew needs to do a payroll heist because they redecorated, but I missed the familiar mess room.
River One of the biggies for me. All that intriguing mystery and she just turns out to be a kick-arse Ninja? I expected a lot more, esp from her "I can kill you with my brain". I kept expecting she damn well would, but once again we had the purely physical fighter any well-placed bullet could have taken out. And besides, since we never see her do anything but mooch about the ship, where did she get the muscle tone?
Mal He was back to the cold cynical guy we first meet in the series but I suppose I can explain that away by him being hurt about Inara leaving. Not that I had much sympathy for either of them there.
Reavers I hate the whole idea but I'll put that aside and just look at the logic. I'd like to know how they have the reasoning to fly and maintain ships; I don't even think they have speech and my cats have more intelligence. I can understand why the Alliance never took them out--they provide a good shield for Miranda--but how come they didn't eat each other already? Surely the food in the fridge is more convenient when you're hungry than going out for takeaways.
Blue Sun - and gloves. What happened to them?
Book I wanted to know more about him. Damn. I suppose I can assume he was an operative but I'd still like to know why he left. If he knew the truth, why keep it a secret?
Wash There were three people I was afraid they'd kill and yep, they got one of them, and gratuitously too. Well, that or calculating: we need a place for River on the crew. If that was the case, wouldn't two pilots be better? People have to sleep. I like them all to varying degrees, but it was cruel to take one of a happy couple. Not that people who hadn't seen the series would even get the tragedy behind Zoe's words as it wasn't shown what they were to each other.
Fighting This applies to most action films so it's a bit mean singling Serenity out. There was too much, esp of the unbelievably-protracted fist variety. Real people can't take that, esp when they've been shot and stabbed. Also, real people tend not to walk around as if nothing much happened when they've been shot or harpooned. But hey. A lot of this was still fun to watch even though I had to suspend most of my disbelief.
Good
The title Having it on the ship was very cool.
Jayne Jayne was great. Jayne was funny and in-character. We should have had a lot more Jayne. :-D
Witty dialogue There were some wonderful lines. Pity some of the dialogue was hard to hear, but in general the humour made up for that.
Mr Universe He was a fun geek character. I'd like to have seen more of his android. I half-expected her to be programmed to at least try to avenge his death.
The Operative He was a superb character: complex, believing he was doing the right thing, and honourable in his own way.
Reavers Well, the explanation for them anyway.
Confounding expectations Extra points for not dropping the Operative down the well / through the big damned fan (which I'll assume was homage) or having him repent and join the crew.
Shiny There were some wonderful SFX. So sue me. I like 'em.
In short, I'd have liked this a lot more if I hadn't seen the series. The contradictions wouldn't annoy me and I wouldn't have built up any bonds with the characters. By itself it's a good film, just not a good resolution to the series. YSMV of course.
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I'm quite sure it was calculated, but not for that reason. IMO (and I've seen a lot of other people say the same thing) the rest of the movie would not have worked anywhere near as well without that moment, because it gave you a very real feeling of "OMG, these people really are in danger and can die." It gave what came after it a gripping, nail-biting suspense that just would not have been there if I'd been sitting there going, "Oh, come on, you know they're all going to be OK." This is part of what gives me such an odd schizoid reaction to the film: for the movie, taken on its own, I'd say that was absolutely the right thing to do. But as a conclusion to the TV series, it didn't feel quite right. That's not the way TV-Wash should have gone, y'know?
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YMMV, of course, but that was very much the effect it had on me.
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I kind of decided that what we were dealing with here is what I'd call a stellar cluster: a lot of comparatively weak stars in close proximity of one another (a bit like the Pleidaes, as I understand it). Thus, you've got plenty of optimal orbital real estate - and if you add in some brown dwarfs, even more. Now, granted, I ain't no astrophysicist, but I respect Joss for deciding to do without the standard sci-fi cliche of the existence of FTL travel. And as for the Out of Gas "long way from anywhere" bit, don't forget that they were flying that way by design, not by necessity. Mal had Wash plot a course that was deliberately long and out-of-the-way. I think the exact line was "a journey that should only take a few hours is going to take us the better part of a week."
What's this--action-man guerrilla-infiltrator Simon?
Yeah, if there's one thing that didn't sit easy with me about this film, it's the retconning of Simon's rescue of River. I rationalized it by deciding that there was one more section of the recursive flashback that we missed - Kaylee was dreaming about how the Operative was initially assigned to apprehend them, and correspondingly came up with a more dashing and romantic scenario in which Simon rescued River. (This dream, of course, took place after the end of the movie, when she knew more about the Op than she did at the beginning of the movie.)
I'd like to know how they have the reasoning to fly and maintain ships; [...] how come they didn't eat each other already? Surely the food in the fridge is more convenient when you're hungry than going out for takeaways.
You'll note that their unstoppable rage is focused only on living human beings - there was no desecration of the corpses on Miranda, and as soon as Mal shot the guy who tried jumping on the mule, the Reavers tossed him aside. Extending this, I'd guess that there's a way for the Reavers to make themselves register as "not human" in the eyes of their fellow Reavers - which actually goes a long way to explaining why they have the facial mutilations. A Reaver sees a fellow Reaver with an unblemished face, he registers the other Reaver as human, goes beserk, kills the guy and eats him. A Reaver sees a fellow Reaver with a mutilated face, he registers it as "not-human" (about as interesting as a corpse), and is able to co-operate long enough to fix/fly a ship and go looking for other humans upon which they can both feast.
Blue Sun - and gloves. What happened to them?
The Blue Sun corp is still around - its logo shows up on the bottle of whiskey that Jayne slides over to Simon just before they depart Miranda. Blue Sun's connection to the guys with gloves was never made clear, but the nature and ultimate fate of the Blue Hand Men is outlined in the Serenity comic, written by Joss and taking place between the end of the TV series and the beginning of the movie. (Here's a clue: those weren't gloves.)
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OK, those are all explanations and some of them even believable. The Simon one is so stretched it snaps though. What happened to the Firefly then? A complete hull makeover and refit? Hardly disguise given the name on the hull; that was a very good moment though. I forgot that bit. [Goes to add it under 'good'.]
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Oh, I'd agree. If you want the real reason that Joss had Simon be the one to rescue River firsthand, it was basically for plot expediency. He had to establish, quickly, that River had had her brain messed with; that Simon, her brother, risked a lot to save her because he loved her; and that the Operative knew and understood these facts. The most expedient way to make the audience - an audience not necessarily familiar with the show, mind you - understand this without confusing them or burdening them with a lot of potentially boring exposition was to show Simon rescuing River firsthand. Even if that wasn't in Simon's character or entirely consistent with previously established details. I'm not saying that I liked it, but I understand Joss's reasons for doing it that way, I can't say I wouldn't have done the same thing if I'd been in his position.
I'm of the opinion that when it comes to matters of consistency, I'll always find ways for seemingly contradictory items to co-exist, rather than declaring that the existence of one denies the existence of the other. Occasionally, this results in a rationalization between the two that's unlikely at best (i.e. Kaylee's dream), but I'd rather not have to chuck anything shown onscreen out wholesale.
And I'll be completely honest - while I did get the impression that Serenity did look a little different, I chalked it up mainly to the fact that I was seeing the ship on the big screen rather than my TV. (I hesitate to ask this question, fearing that I may be loosing a monster, but...) What exactly were the differences that you saw?
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I do think the film works much better standalone. Taken by itself, it's a stunning and exciting story, just not a good resolution to the series because it just doesn't match in plot, characterisation, and feel. I think each works much better without the other. I don't suppose it helped at all that I watched some Firefly eps just this week.
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Re the Science. They don't have Faster Than Light ships but they do have gravity manipulation on all sorts of scales. So with transit times of the order of hours or days they simply can't be in more than one Solar System. Smaller moons in the life zone can be "adjusted" to be Earth norm gravity and hold atmosphere.
Re Mal Joss has said that he was asked by the network to "lighten" Mal up during the series, he was always supposed to be a hard, hard man with a core of honour.
Re Simon He was playing a doctor, surely the one role he can portray with confidence and elan. Though the information he got during the rescue is a bit out of sorts with what he claims to not know during the series.
Regrettably some of the other changes were made due to real world requirements. They had to rebuild the Serenity set and it had to accomodate a film camera and crew. Apparently also the two deaths were also done with consideration for monetary reasons and in one case actor request.
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And they could still have made the ship look the same in CGI. The interior set I could accept.
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Reavers are, in this reading* people suffering from a drug-induced psychosis caused by their paradoxical response to The Pax, and spaceships seem to have a lot of automatic functions. I'm sure there's a higher turnover among Reavers than Barnes & Noble stock clerks in the Christmas Season, but nobody much, including them, actually cares.
*I kind of liked my pre-BDM theory that they're survivors of a parallel evolutionary--oh, excuse me, intelligent designary--track, sort of like Neanderthals and H.Sap, like in William Golding's "The Inheritors."
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