*** (out of ****)
Starring Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jewel Staite
Directed & written by Joss Whedon
2005
119 min PG13
So what I thought was going to be an exercise in futility actually turned out to be a pretty good time. “Serenity” is the movie based on the “Firefly” television series, and of that I have watched the pre-title sequence of the very first episode. (I pretty much only watch TV that makes fun of TV.) I wasn’t so much worried that I would have no idea what was going on as I was worried that I would be paying good money to watch TV in a movie theater. Because, believe you me, it’s not just that TV comes in a little box and movies come on a big wall, television and cinema ARE inherently different. Are there silent TV shows? Art-house TV shows? When was the last time you said “oh, good camera angle” and it wasn’t “The Simpsons?”
No, all television is basically the same handful of camera angles, the same editing pattern, all showing the same framing of people telling us how they feel. I didn’t want to see the trite camera angles—the stop-start pacing that’s adrift without commercial breaks—a half-dozen useless supporting characters trotted on and then given nothing to do—and the pages and pages of superfluous dialogue in case you’re starting the dishwasher and can’t see what’s happening. This last one is the most important: in “The Screenwriter’s Workbook,” script-doctor Syd Field describes TV as “a talking medium…a radio show with pictures…the main characters talk about their feelings…they describe how they feel in words; it is not shown in pictures.” Test Field’s theory, if you doubt me and can choke down any of TV’s “most talked about dramas.” That’s TV, and I don’t really like TV. I like movies. But I’m a boy, and boys don’t like talking.
But no, “Serenity” is, for a good 75% of the time, an actual, honest-to-God movie! It could stand to lose a few more TV pounds—a couple extra characters and some excess chatter—but it looks and moves like it belongs on a big screen. Spaceships go ka-boom, flesh-eating space cannibals jump out, and it all ends with two guys trading fisticuffs over a huge precipice. There’s even a De Palma-esque tracking shot just after the titles, in which we follow the skipper from one extreme of the ship to another, as he chats with his crew, in one, unbroken take. “Serenity” is fast-paced, chintzy fun—it looks good and no one takes it too seriously. It has the kind of exuberant, energetic silliness of the original “Star Wars” pictures, allowing it to leap past the kind of logical and scientific problems that would stymie a lesser sci-fi. (For instance: how is it that the space cannibals can run screaming and drooling into gunfire one moment and then operate, maintain, and decorate spacecraft in the next? And if they’re so insane, why don’t they eat each other?)
For the most part, thanks to a little bit of opening narration, “Serenity” stands alone just fine. It was actually kind of amusing listening to fans of the show ask me if I understood what was going on. Well, of course the hero fights with his ex-girlfriend. Of course he lives on the edge and plays by his own rules. Of course his crew is a rag-tag band of misfits, always a step away from mutiny. I’ve seen movies.
The basic set-up is like “Blakes 7” crossed with the Old West. On one side we have the requisite evil fascist superstate of the future, which never has a shortage of faceless, interplanetary goon squads. On the other, we have the outlaws, living on the outer planets, robbing banks, pulling pranks, and generally being handsome and roguish. They’re led by the requisite brown-haired white guy (Nathan Fillion) who is the hero of almost all science-fiction. All this has an Old West atmosphere to it, in the lingo, the costumes, the laser six-shooters, the desert planets, and the soundtrack. “Serenity” never quite decides if its outer space is going to include sound effects or be silent, but whatever.
Our Heroes are the bank-robbing crew of the spaceship Serenity, and as if being caught between the fascists and the cannibals weren’t enough, one of the crew is an escaped psychic that the government wants back. The fascists sick the nameless Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) on Our Heroes. In the course of the chase, Our Heroes find out just how far the fascists are willing to go, and how many people they’re willing to kill, in order to bring peace and prosperity to the cosmos. What they find is a planet like the one in “THX-1138,” before all the kinks were gotten out.
Political debate in democracies, for the most part, is about balancing liberty with what’s good for us. “Serenity” has made this balancing act central to its premise. In America, we are free to poison ourselves with alcohol and cigarettes, but not with marijuana or unbuckled safety belts. The two main schools of American political thought are each random collections of liberty and enforced morality. In the broadest sense, one side believes in personal and sexual morality but environmental and economic liberty, while the other side is the reverse. Although the villain in “Serenity” is singularly unthreatening, his philosophy is genuinely scary: he has given himself completely over to the ideal of enforced happiness, and accepts all his crimes and monstrosities as unfortunate means to a holy end.
“Serenity” and the “Firefly” series are the work of writer-director Joss Whedon, who is also the creator of the enormously popular (and utterly unwatched by me) “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” He deserves credit for streamlining “Firefly” into a two-hour feature, but it’s not a complete success. The movie features two, if not three unnecessary characters, two of them girls, and all of them love interests for more interesting players. Why are they here? Because they were in the TV show, of course. No screenwriting teacher would tolerate them standing around, doing nothing, past the first draft.
Page two of "Serenity." Back to home.