Overzealous Serenity

[Editor's note: OP was invited to an advance screening of Serenity in the Fashion Square Mall's Premiere 14 in Orlando on 9/27. Serenity is a movie taking place in the same universe with the same characters as the short-lived Firefly series, which ran 11 episodes on FOX and went largely unnoticed until DVD sales surged, leading to a movie deal. PEOPLE NOT WANTING SPOILERS SHOULD ONLY READ THE SUMMARY SECTION.]

Summary

Believe.

This movie asks you to believe... in something. It doesn't matter what it is, but you have to believe in something.

I would never have believed you if you had told me before I watched Serenity that I would actually like the film. But I didn't just like it, I really liked it. Believe it. For personal enjoyment, this movie is easily four stars because it's a lot of fun and it keeps you involved. In the overall pretentious-movie-critic analysis, it might be three and a half stars, but then, I don't watch these types of movies to unravel the deep or superficial secrets of the universe or to tell me about humanity-- that's what Star Trek is for.

This is just good, clean, overzealous fun. Give it a chance.


Background

I am not the best person to tell you about the history you need in order to understand this film. That would be the person who sat next to me in the screening, whose interminable description of the movie's prequel television series (Firefly) left me wishing I had never gotten involved with OP. But I cannot give the movie its deserved praise without some background.

You've got the big Alliance, which isn't purely bad, not purely good, trying to exert control on other human worlds. The Alliance is clean, bright in the same way that the United Federation of Planets is, except that it has a very very dark underbelly. This is Joss Whedon's way of saying, "We like Star Trek, but it's an ideal, not reality. THIS is reality." Other human worlds rebel and LOSE. Some of those losers form a rag tag crew under Mal, who led 5000 troops into the Battle of Serenity Hill and was one of two survivors. Human civilization is mostly comprised of American and Chinese influences, although other things survive, like various religions.

Yup, this is a rag tag bunch of characters. If you want to know more, read this excellent review of the movie by a real fan.


Brief Plot Notes

***SPOILERS BEGIN SPOILERS***

The plot does revolve around the mystery of River-- a young gifted girl, perverted into a dreadful weapon, who is being tracked by the Alliance. Throughout our dalliance with River's thoughts, we find that the Alliance is dangerous in both its firepower and its covert infiltration through propaganda and education.

The Serenity has to go through many trials, notably with the Reavers. These demonic humans apparently rape people to death, eat people, skin people, and not necessarily in that order. In one scene, Mal has to shoot someone who was being captured by the Reavers. They're horribly disfigured and people with queasy stomachs may see them at night before they go to bed. I have read some other reviews of Serenity from fellow bloggers who attended the screening and I want to dispel the 'gore' notion-- there's not much gore at all and I think Whedon goes out of his way to not show bloody Braveheart style human limb destruction.

But we do get an epic space battle out of this between the Reavers and the Alliance. Yes, there's shaky camera work, but it's all the rage right now in the much-vaunted naturalistic science fiction. I don't think Whedon is arrogant in it, and it works for the tone of the material. It's not Star Trek, folks. Get used to it.

Throughout the movie, from beginning until end, we deal with death. Admiral Kirk once said that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life. Whedon, as massive a Trekker as he is, seems to be ill-suited to grapple with the question of death in this movie. With characters so important dying, though, I expected better of him. Then again, these deaths also were more senseless and in that way, more natural. Sometimes that's what life throws at you.

Fortunately, Whedon does far better with questions of life.

I'll follow up on this later.


The Operative

The Operative was superb. Whedon's stated purpose with the character was to have him be calm, cool, and incredibly creepy. His says of the actor, “Chiwetel managed to completely internalize The Operative and make him somebody very real. Decent, thoughtful and a mass murderer.” Throughout this movie, you can see a slow transformation for The Operative. The Operative starts out as someone who has never met his match and never met his moral equivalent. He coldly sneers, "What do you think is going to happen?" when he thinks he has but one more move before checkmate of our good Captain.



The Operative makes his move

And yet, you get the peculiar sense that this man is, for all his belief, still someone looking in from the outside. He often lectures, but he's too smart to be the braindead sort of patronizing lecturer. He responds to challenges, "Do you really believe that?"

Don't ever be fooled by Whedon's association with Warren Ellis-- he's very much in the market of creating characters with two sides to them. They are human, even The Operative, who is in a Warren Ellis character mold, but with the depth of a Whedon character. Ellis' superliberal diatribes lack depth or any semblance of complexity for they depict sheer charicatures of ideas and longing. They are so shrouded in the ethos of the social reject as powerful and special that they crowd out any potential brilliance. Ellis and Whedon are good friends, and I know Whedon admires Ellis' work, but it really should be the other way around... as The Operative proves.


Conclusion

In the end, the movie proved surprising in many respects. The characters had more depth, and more sides. They were not singly social rejects, nor singly courageous, nor singly anything. Although I might have issues with how they dealt with death, and these are not minor issues, they have to move on. If we want to see them deal, I suppose we can beg for a sequel.

The movie had some themes. One was the power of belief. Whedon, I think, tried his best to have some commentary, but it ended up seeming more mystical in the Matrix sense. In the Matrix sequels, the writers took themselves far too seriously and invented a set of circular neologisms that they probably thought were really clever. Serenity isn't that bad, not by a long shot, because they don't dwell on *belief* and *love* for very long, but they're kind of propped up... for what, we're never really sure. Contrary to what Whedon sloppily tried to throw in there, belief wasn't at all a component of Mal's actions in saving the day. It was more relevant for The Operative, but still... yeah. You'll see. And yes, River is obviously just a computer geek's fantasy writ large for all the Firefly rejects to see, but I don't think Whedon overdoes it.



River

In conclusion, I highly recommend the film though because it is entertaining, fun, and hilarious. You want to keep watching what comes next. You want to hear what all these characters have to say. The special effects are good. You won't see too many of them, but that's just as well since the strength of this film is its characters. The music works very well. On occasion, as you can see with The Operative pic I posted, there is a beautiful vista. The directing at times is weak, but the pacing seems good. Some of the one liners are weak, but I promise you, they are not as bad as they could have been. My brother, who is supposedly much cooler than I, and who initially claimed I had "burned" him by bringing him to the theater once he was the other people in the room, said he really liked the movie too!

So, having said how much I didn't want to like this movie at first, I think this is a universe we can come back to in order to see what happens next.

And I hope we do.

For more comprehensible analysis and round-up, click here.

Update: 1838 hours from IMDB:

In her review, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times compares Joss Whedon's Serenity with George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith. Serenity comes out ahead. "Scene for scene," she writes, "Serenity is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time." Jan Stuart in Newsday makes a similar comparison, remarking: "George Lucas could learn a thing or two from Whedon. Serenity flies with sass and spirit, qualities that have been in palpably short supply in that Star Wars series since, well, Star Wars." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times also indicates that he had a good time watching the movie, writing: "Serenity is made of dubious but energetic special effects, breathless velocity, much imagination, some sly verbal wit and a little political satire." Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News notes that the movie appears to exist as a the final episode of Whedon's canceled Firefly TV series and because the show's fans "made the Firefly DVD set an unexpected best seller." She adds: "Whedon's sci-fi fantasies smartly parallel the serious issues we're grappling with here on Earth, while his protagonists remain mordantly funny in the face of utter disaster. Like Star Trek before it, the outer-space setting is perfectly suited to a big budget" movie.