Serenity finally
Friday, November 18, 2005 - 10:40 AM
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So I had a long, fairly intricate review planned of Serenity, back when
I saw it. I thought it was a really great movie - had loads of
plot, snappy dialogue, great characters, awesome space battles,
basically everything that all the browncoat crazies have been saying
about Firefly.
(SPOILERS. YOU'VE BEEN
WARNED.)
Then I borrowed my friend's Firefly DVDs, and started cranking through
the episodes. More of a good thing: the characters, the
interactions, the symbolism, the music, the... the characters...
basically, I loved the characters. (Some of you may remember me
saying this recently.)
Of course, when the series ended prematurely after fifteen episodes, all
I had to continue with was the movie. The movie, which KILLED
WASH. Wash rules. Wash is the heart of the ship. The
movie, which ends the second most intriguing mystery in the entire
series - Book, and what he is - without so much as a hint of an
answer. Nothin. He just dies, and that's it.
And after finishing Firefly, that last episode, where the bounty hunter
gets his comeuppance and River gets a smile from the captain, and then -
suddenly - some time has passed and some things we don't know about have
happened, and "Serenity" is splashing across the big screen and some
black samurai dude is shoving a sword into a bureaucrat - and I hated
the movie. Really hated it. Didn't ever want to see it
again.
Then, yesterday, Scott Kurtz over at
PVP finally
posted his own review. He's been into Firefly for a lot longer
than I have, and he sees things that I didn't. And he figured it
out. The movie feels like it does because that's it. That's
the last chapter, the end of Serenity's story. He got to tell the
first couple pages of his first chapter - on TV - and then, when someone
said here's a hundred million dollars go make a movie, he skipped
everything, his whole plan, his whole story, and gave us the ending,
because he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to make it again.
Scott's diagnosis really feels right to me. It explains some
really ridiculous things about the movie - the Irish gangster guy,
introduced in the first episode of the TV series, turns out to be
identical twins. Mal knows this, but we sure didn't see it coming.
(We should have - Joss cast one half of a pair of identical twins in the
role.) Why Inara and Mal are acting like ex-boyfriend and
-girlfriend, when they were just starting to figure out that they liked
each other. Why Book is suddenly off the ship, with no
explanation. Why Wash dies.
It's a great ending to what I'm certain is a great story. It sure
would have been nice to see the rest of it, though. Hopefully some
day we will.
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