Here is the tract you receive when you pass through the doors:
Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.
Here is what you get when you have taken your spot in the unfamiliar pew:
Joss Whedon populates his mongrelized science fiction-western world with a population carefully painted from the diversity palette. Mal (Nathan Fillion), the leader of the pack, wields a six-shooter laser gun slung from a hip holster, lacking only a woven poncho and tired gaucho hat to pass for a spaghetti western anti-hero. He is joined by Zoe (Gina Torres), the cannon-toting Cuban woman who is married to Wash (Alan Tudyk), the nutty, Mentos-white pilot; Kaylee (Jewel Staite), the lovelorn, daft but cute-when-she-wipes-off-the-grease chief mechanic; Jayne (Adam Baldwin), the oafish gunman with a heart of gold; and Inara (Morena Baccarin), the captain's sometime flame, imbued with the power to cause him to stammer and grovel like a hormonal 13 year old.
This tossed salad of “OC”-friendly archetypes is tasked with mercenary, future day Robin Hood raids on outposts of the all-powerful Alliance. Our happy band’s lives are complicated by the presence of square-jawed Simon (Sean Maher), the sensitive-man doctor, and his waifish sister River (Summer Glau), a tortured teen of indeterminate race who apparently holds a dangerous secret within her fevered head. The Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who could be Wayne Brady’s long lost brother), the Inspector Javert to River’s Valjean, plays the villain with gusto, showing off a talent for the dramatic … pause … that is utterly Shatnerian, and yet not out of place in this mildly campy romp.
The opening sequence of the movie sets up the girl-in-danger, rebels-running-from-the-law trope well, with clever changes of scene and narrative paths that may not be what they seem. Our heroes then bounce around the universe running from The Operative and his minions, their lives and livelihoods threatened by the mere presence of River among them. Thanks in part to the deus ex machina powers of Mr. Universe (David Krumholtz), the Serenity crew slowly learns more about the torment afflicting River. They are motivated to do so by her stunning display of combat prowess, which reveals that she will take down anyone who might stand in her way of reaching … something. Instead of abandoning the crazy, weaponized girl and her mopey brother, the crew stay together to solve the mystery of River, bound by an amorphous sense of common cause against … something.
Motivation is the weakest element of the film. Other than a rushed expositional voiceover at the beginning of the film, the only contact the audience has with the Alliance is The Operative, who admits that he is only a mercenary acting on the Alliance’s behalf. Mal once fought on the side of the Alliance, but now operates in the shadows at its edges, stealing from it. The leaders of the Alliance are unseen and not heard, yet we know they send amoral soldiers of fortune to carry out their plans, schemes that we are simply left to assume are nefarious. The Alliance governs (rules?) the universe, yet they chase the rebels with warships that unaccountably belch out oil smoke like a poorly tuned 1967 Plymouth Fury. (The Alliance clearly views the Kyoto treaty with disdain.) Does the film pack an allegorical punch against current events? The viewer might be led there, but the Alliance is never developed enough as a character in the movie to support either that notion or the determination of the characters to carry out their respective missions.
When the secret of River is revealed, it sheds only dim light on the horrors presaged by the dark setup. The Alliance’s plan to solidify its hold on the universe seems oddly benign, particularly because the crime that is revealed appears to have been confined to one location and consigned to the dustbin of government projects that didn’t quite work as planned. River’s apparent psychic powers notwithstanding, the magnitude of the threat she represents to the Alliance is not made sufficiently clear to explain her treatment at the hands of the Alliance or the intensity of their attempt to recapture her. In the end, the movie’s attempt to make a statement about “truth” rings hollow in the absence of context; i.e., the “lie.”
Structurally, then, the movie is a tent with a broken center pole that causes the whole enterprise to collapse confusingly upon itself. That does not prevent much fun from happening under the big top in the meantime. The effects are imaginative, the sets (particularly the interior of the Serenity) are well-designed, the action is predicable but well-staged, and the actors are given fun, oddball dialog to chew on. With a strange mix of old West drawl and occasional Elizabethan formality, Whedon clearly enjoyed crafting the spoken words. Humor frequently leavens (or undercuts) the implied dread that attempts to set a serious tone. On the whole, the movie plays like the brightly-lit, snappy, ironic television show that spawned it. The token romantic moments are almost intentionally cloying (causing even the faithful Whedon disciple next to me at the screening to cringe in embarrassment), the characters are stock and unsubtle, and drama is indicated by volume of explosion and mode of music rather than created by the story, but “Serenity” is a fun time nonetheless.
“Serenity” may not be enough for the nonbeliever to see the light, but it is charismatic enough to lead the curious to come back for more.
2 comments:
Andy:
Thanks for your insightful comments. I don't need or ask anyone to agree with my review, as it is merely a rundown of my impressions of the movie as someone who had no exposure to anything Joss Whedon had ever done.
As such, my comments come from the perspective of someone who does not have the benefit of the history of the events described in the movie. There's no real need to re-analyze my comments in light of yours, but for sport, I will anyway.
I may have completely missed Mal's prior affiliations, which would certainly color my understanding of him. My bad. However, the fact that the point was made or not based upon 2 seconds of expositive voice over says something about the difficulty of depending on so much extraneous backstory, and the movie's mixed success in doing so.
It looks like I probably also misunderstood who was chasing the crew at the beginning. However, as explained below, the Alliance/Reaver connection, or lack thereof, was never explained very well. The Kyoto remark, while offhand, I think has some resonance, if Whedon is really trying to pull off some political commentary. Again, because the Alliance is not, in my view, very well explained, I can't tell how much current event overtone is intended.
I regard Jayne has having a "heart of gold" because from a dramatic point of view, there was absolutely no likelihood that he wouldn't remain loyal to the crew and the mission. That is a side effect of using stock characters. None of his silly threats mattered (to me, anyway), because his role in the ensemble was obvious.
On The Operative's dramatic pause, watch the end of the opening sequence again. I laughed out loud in the theater.
You bring a lot of interesting thoughts to the analysis of the Alliance. Points very well taken; I simply didn't see all of that expressed in the movie. I saw hints of it, but there was not nearly enough described or revealed about the Alliance to draw those kinds of conclusions. It is so nameless and faceless that its powers and actions never arose from the background. In that sense, it was appropriate that the Alliance's envoy (for dramatic purposes) was an amoral mercenary who had no real loyalty to the Alliance beyond it being a job. I thought that substantially undercut the threat that the Alliance should have represented.
You and I differ in our understanding of what Miranda was, which effects how we view the Alliance. In my view, the movie plays Miranda off as an experiment (sinister in intent though it was) that had some unpleasant side effects and was subsequently mothballed. There is nothing in the movie to suggest that the experiment was continued or put into practice elsewhere, which is why I found it to represent a relatively benign threat, as it applies to the presentation of the story in the movie. We tried this bad thing, but it didn't work right and had some pretty bad unintended consequences that we couldn't control, so we shut it down. It happened, it's over, before you ever got here; move along, nothing to see here. Frankly, I think the script could have done far more here to make the universe a more threating place, and the threat represented by Miranda much more powerful, but that would have required (in my view) a character or several to represent the Alliance and its views. Instead, we only hear about the Alliance in passing.
Nor did the movie make clear that there is some sort of coordinated action between the Alliance and the Reavers. As I understand it, Miranda resulted from [SPOILERS COMING] an effort to subdue the masses, not an effort to create a zombie class. Since Reavers have no loyalty to anyone, it seems unlikely to me that the Alliance intended or actually did make controlled use of them. Again, I may be wrong, but these are my impressions based on the two hours I saw in the theater.
As for Mal's motivations, I simply didn't think they were all that meaningful, in part because of the paint-by-numbers inevitability of the story. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, because westerns have been made for decades with great success based upon the same general story arc, and the movie was certainly fun. I don't think, however, that the story as presented offered much ambiguity, hence dramatic tension, about what was to come.
River herself was a bit of a mystery to me as far as the Alliance's intentions were concerned. I will grant everything you said, but because the movie seemed to be more about hiding the secret of Miranda than creating a superweapon, I never quite caught up to what was going on, which goes back to my point about the Alliance's lack of active involvement in the story.
All that being said, the movie was enjoyable. The special effects for once served the story rather than the other way around. The dialog was fun. The settings were imaginative. For the non-fanboy audience, I think there were some holes in the story that robbed it of dramatic tension and some coherence, but on the whole, it's a good movie.
And yes, I would be interested in seeing "Firefly."
I think your last paragraph is spot on. If the series is written well, it can be far more satisfying that a movie based on the same general characters or events. There are plenty examples of this, but X-Files comes immediately to mind. I can't imagine how incomprehensible and unsatisfying that movie must have been to the three or four people that hadn't seen at least some of the series first. By that measure, "Serenity" shines.
Until next time, Mr. Ebert, this is Mr. Roper signing off.
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