*** Official SERENITY Discussion Thread - Page 3

Actually, my only complaint is that she doesn't have blue eyes.

and
Morena:


I'm not sure what you mean by casting people who don't look like the character? At least in this case, (yes Mary-Jane Watson could've been a better pick then Kirsten) but I think Morena looks pretty much like WW. Hair is the right color so that comment can get thrown out. As for the contacts, most actors wear them in movies, or they get changed digitally. No big deal. I personally think Morena would be great. Charisma would be pretty good too. Either or I'd be happy.

I'm a little bummed to not see Serenity in the #1 spot, but I can't say I'm all that surprised, what I am surprised is that it landed #2. That's not too shabby.

Hopefully we'll see more Serenity in the future... maybe bring back Firefly... Hey if Family Guy can do it, why not Firefly?

I just heard from a friend of mine from a state far away, and she let me know about a great film she's just seen called Serenity!

What was great about this is that she is a person who'd never seen the series (like I surely had!), nor even heard of it. She was moved to see the film after reading an interview with Whedon and being impressed by him!

So she saw Serenity, and loved it, and she felt as I do that it is a smart film, with some really funny dialogue. She said she hadn't expected there to be humor in it and that was a pleasant surprise. (Perhaps because films like Star Wars have made people think that science fiction is all about angst?).

She also accurately detected that River's brother (I mean the actor who plays him) sets off the gaydar detectors. She liked all the actors, all the characters.

She dug the film and she plans on renting the series (though I expect there may be a few dozen people planning the same move on the video store!).

So, yay! It is reaching non-series-fans.

BTW She said the audience size was fairly decent but not filled. She could tell there were many fans of the series around her because of the expressions of horror and outrage when Wash dies, "They killed my favorite character!" and such.

Too bad the answer was so silly. One giant solar system, with hundreds of planets & moons in the habitable zone, all with approximately Earth equivalent gravity? This was my biggest quibble with the movie, and it was so unnecessary.

My second biggest problem was that River's secret didn't seem like all that big a deal, although I did like the info about the origin of the Reavers. But surely other people had to know about Miranda at some point.

I'm really, really glad the toned down most of the Western stuff.

I'm really sad about killing off Wash, his jokes were one of my favorite things about the series. But I'm glad they had the guts to do something like that, even if it was just because Alan wanted to be done with the character. Book wasn't such a surprise, but they left a lot of unanswered questions about his history.

All in all, though, I felt that even if this is the only movie that gets made, Serenity provided enough closure that I can't say I'd really mind it if they did end it here.

I'm not sure what they could cover in a sequel that would be big enough for a feature film and yet didn't seem like a rehash of this and other previous stories. Maybe some big secret about what happened on Earth would be fitting.

So...I've seen Serenity three times in the past week. First time was at the blogger screening last Tuesday. Second was last Friday, and third was today. I think I'm spent. There may be a fourth, but I highly doubt there will be a fifth time in theaters.

Saw it for the second time - loved it even more.

I hope word of mouth can give this puppy some legs.

If a sequel does get greenlit it should be interesting to see where Whedon takes Serenity. I could see Mal becoming the leader of another resistance movement against the Alliance.

And Kaylee is supposed to be younger, I think.



To be honest, that's always been a problem with Joss' concept of the show. He never spelled it out, but it was sounding like it was just a solar system. A small group of solar systems probably would have been better, but you needed some way to cross the vast distances. (Course, the concept seems to work for Cowboy Bebop...)



If the government controls all the information, that all the people there are dead or Reavers, and most people would be discouraged from going there because of the Reavers, it isn't difficult to understand that most people wouldn't know about it.

Personally, I think it was a pretty solid movie all around. You didn't need to know about the characters to enjoy it, but it did make it a richer experience.

Jason

The same exact thing occured to me. I believe we caught all the clues that we were supposed to on the matter. Including the foreshadowing at the end with the operative standing in front of Serenity.

Diallo, that Book was a former operative was kind of implicit to every coy remark he made throughout the series, but your illustration of how this related to the story of Serenity was masterfully done. Thank you.

I may be wrong here, but isn't this the same situation as the Star Wars universe? I always thought that the central planets of the system were more under Imperial control than those in the outer rim planets, but they were all in one solar system.You never hear complaints about how that universe is organized.

Also, the issue of gravity was explained somewhere as a result of the terraforming process. I don't remember exactly where due to my Firefly/Serenity binge- it may be in the roleplaying game book for Serenity or in one of the episodes.



Also- many of the people who live in the central planets think of Reavers as "campfire stories" or something like that (I forgot the exact quote- Simon says it in one of the two Reaver episodes, and the Alliance commander in Bushwacked seemed to support this notion). There definitely is a lack of information on these planets that make the inhabitants underestimate the Reaver threat, if they believe in Reavers at all.

Not that Star Wars is a paragon of scientific accuracy, but no. The Star Wars universe takes place throughout the "galaxy far, far away", not in the same solar system. That's why they have "hyperdrive", to cross the vast interstellar distances. There's no reason why the Serenity universe couldn't have some sort of FTL drive.



It must be in the roleplaying book, since I haven't seen that. But it still doesn't make any sense. Gravity comes from mass. Also, it's not just gravity. Planets in different orbits around the sun are going to get differing amounts of sunlight. Miranda, being waaay at the edge of the system should barely get any sunlight at all, and yet on the surface it was ridiculously bright.

I like Diallo's summary about Book being a former operative - I had a feeling he was one, but I wasn't sure since the dialog in the screening I saw was a bit mangled (the audio was too cooked in the theater). But when I thought about it afterwards, it did make sense, and Diallo clinches it!

And yes, I loved the movie - best B-movie sci-fi movie ever? Either way, it was fun, and a little sad. Great stuff.

Wasn't there a line in the last episode of Firefly with the Operative saying of Book "He's no Preacher..."?

- Steve

That wasn't the Operative. That was a stand alone bounty hunter, Jubal Early.

There was a TV program playing before RIVER beat the hell out of everyone in the bar. In it (what sounded like a news report) a woman said "The Alliance has never supported claims of the existence of reavers..." it was softly in the background before the candy bar commercial turned River loony.

Oh, wah, wah, wah! Cripes, it's that kind of whining over absolutely inconsequential details -- hey, ever hear of CONTACT LENSES! -- that make fanboys look like completely inflexible blockheads.

For the record, I think Gina Torres would make a great Wonder Woman. Not that I really give a crap about that character or the movie, but she's a wonderful actress who has the athleticism to pull it off.

But I guess that idea would make you start foaming at the mouth....

I saw this Sunday night.
It was in the one of the theaters biggest theaters.

I'm a fan of the show(discovered it on DVD)

Overall, I was happy with the film, but yet somewhat disappointed.

I did feel that the transfer over to film had lost some of it's tone.
Also disappointed on the deaths in the movie.

But glad Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

Im definitely going to see this again sometime this week, as I think the second viewing will help me like it better.

I just wished it was still on the air

I am clearly in the minority here, but I haven't seen the TV show at all, save for some promos. This is what I wrote on the first page in the other "Firefly movie" thread:



As it happened, I wanted to see a movie this past weekend, and "Serenity" was the only one that was showing during the time I wanted to go. So I saw it.

I am still surprised that this movie even made it into theaters. And I'm surprised that it made even $10M at the box office, since the show is still rather obscure, even though it had good DVD sales.

However, the movie itself was pretty good. And by that I mean that the first 45 minutes were extremely dull, with numerous references to a TV series I'd never seen, so that just made it even less interesting. The tone of in the first half was way too self-congratulatory, and it really felt like Whedon just loved how clever and witty he thinks he was in his dialogue. The movie also felt way too TV-like, and generally pretty purposeless. I was ready to walk out of the theater at that point.

Then, when River finally started kicking ass and the actual storyline of the movie with the Reavers and the Alliance cover-up began, it was like it was a different movie. It had focus, great action sequences, a more serious tone, and some great character moments. I really like that part of the movie. Some of the characters were interesting (the Alliance agent was great, the captain of the ship (Mal?) was a complex and interesting anti-hero) and the story was finally going places.

I just don't get what the target audience is for this movie, except for the "Firefly" fans (and Whedon fans, I guess, unless they're the same) and those like me who found nothing better in that timeslot to watch. .
I have watched better sci-fi on TV this year ("Battlestar Galactica" really raised the bar, IMO, and entertaining fluff like "Stargate Atlantis" still beat this movie, IMO), and I would be surprised if this movie doesn't dive-bomb at the box office next week already, even if it was actually pretty good in the end.

By the way... have you guys looked at the IMDB all time rating? The "Firefly" fans have gone out in force, and through 8000 votes put it at #136 of 250 on the all time list... I wonder if all of those voters have even seen it yet...

Hey, even a hater found something to like about this film.

Jason

Great

However, the movie itself was pretty good. And by that I mean that the first 45 minutes were extremely dull, with numerous references to a TV series I'd never seen, so that just made it even less interesting. The tone of in the first half was way too self-congratulatory, and it really felt like Whedon just loved how clever and witty he thinks he was in his dialogue. The movie also felt way too TV-like, and generally pretty purposeless. I was ready to walk out of the theater at that point.
***

The first half doesn't really reference the series directly. This appears to more or less be your mind's awareness that this was based on previous events causing you to believe everything is a reference to a past event.

Think of how you view a television series beginning the 3rd year. "Oh, two years have gone by and I haven't seen a single episode yet... there's no way I'll understand what's going on."

Once you watch the season 3 premiere you're likely to think everything that's happening or being revealed is a huge reference to a past episode, regardless if that's true. It's just the psychology of it.

A lot of movies reference something that happened previously... you can never really begin at the start of something in any film. The movie really was stand-alone. Other than one or two scenes of Kaylee staring at Simon and the fact that Simon and Kaylee were on board... there weren't direct references to the film at all.

Hell, even the stuff with Inara could be summed up as "She was a woman Mal had a connection with, but he drove her away because of his personality..." The notion that she'd previously spent a good deal of time aboard the ship is not important in the context of the film... and it is not referenced except with maybe a line or two of dialogue.

Thank you Joss Whedon, cast, crew and Universal Studios! In a word, "EXCELLENT". This was the most entertaining movie I've seen all year!

Far better than recent offerings from George Lucas. It had more emotional impact than any of the recent Star Wars films and was better than War of the Worlds.

Effects were not as perfect as something Lucas or Spielberg would come out with, but the movie wasn't about effects, so much as it is about characters.

I was in a state of complete and total empathy for the characters, something that I don't recall feeling since the original SW episodes 4-6).

As sure as I know anything, I know this. It is some kind of BIG DAMN FUN for sure! I hope to sneak out and catch it again next weekend!

I just assumed that the school stuff and the River stuff were references to the TV-series, since they began without much of an explanation. If they were events created solely for this movie, it still didn't really work (IMO)... felt rushed, as if they were trying to just get it over with.



The way it was written, it was obvious that the dialogue was shorthand for something the audience was supposed to know, and that if they didn't know, those lines were thrown out as a sort of "cliff's notes" version of what had happened. If it had been a stand-alone movie, I think the dialogue and the scenes regarding this would have been much different.

The school flashbacks/dreams were brand new to the movie, none of that was in the series. I liked them.

River's rescue from the Alliance was actually changed for this movie. In the series Simon didn't have an active role in getting her out. But I can see why the change was made - Whedon needed a quick way to introduce the characters and River's backstory for those not familiar with the series. I thought it was pretty effective.

I don't understand this thinking.

The target for this film is clearly young audiences who want to enjoy entertaining sci-fi/fantasy/action. The western stuff (and zombie stuff) is just gravy. It's the epitome of a popcorn movie. Pure genre fun. It should be the easiest target in the world, and with a "name" playing Mal, and a real marketing team, it would have been a summer film with a $40+ mil opening weekend.

Even you describe how much you liked a great deal of it!

No way does any episode of Stargate (and, I find that show to be a lot of fun) come close to this film. I'll grant you that BSG 'raised the bar', but that is philosophical/political/'true' sci-fi, not space opera, popcorn entertainment.

I would bet this film does not dive bomb. Of course, it can't drop far...the opening weekend was pretty poor. It will be lucky to break $35 mil, but I think it could on word of mouth. DVD sales on both the series and the film should do well. Just look at the reviews and the fan and non-fan reactions. The movie works.

I don't think River was on Miranda at all. She just "absorbed" the knowledge of Miranda and its debacle via her psychic abilities when presented to the "key Alliance figures" that examined her periodically.

I think the incident at Miranda happened a number of years previously (20-30 years?). Reavers had been created, but were a sort of "urban legend" to a lot of the younger generation because the Alliance covered up their existence.