Movie Review: Serenity. Long, with some minor spoilers

First of all: Spaaaaaaaaaaace Mooooviiiieeeeeee!!! (Hi, Em!)

Secondly: I apologize in advance for any ridiculous Wesleyan-boosting contained in this review. What can I say… some people have schools whose teams play in Bowl games, we have alums who do cool shit. In this case, however, it’s actually pertinent, because if Joss Whedon (’87) didn’t actually take one of Professor Slotkin’s "Myth and Ideology at the Movies" classes (or one of their siblings- all of the Slotkin classes I took were elegantly structured complex variations on a relatively simple theme), he for damn sure had a friend who did, or he read Gunfighter Nation. Possibly the whole damn trilogy, in fact (Regeneration Through Violence, indeed).

I was actually shocked by how much I liked Serenity. Not just because the officially released trailers looked like crap (which they did), and not just because I didn’t particularly care for what little of Firefly I saw when it was actually airing on Fox (for those who don't know, it was cancelled after 11 episodes, which aired inconsistently and out of order, but became something of a smash hit when released on DVD, which led to the movie’s finally being made). Both of those concerns had been more or less dealt with by the Sci-Fi network’s re-airing of the series over the course of the summer. Getting to see more of the show than the first few introductory episodes, which were… well, largely awkward and stilted, to be honest, finally made me understand at least a little of what the series’ fans were so worked up about. In addition, Sci-Fi aired teasers for the movie during the shows’ commercial breaks that were actual coherent scenes from the film rather than choppily edited attempts to woo video game-obsessed fourteen-year-olds.

However, as much as I was amused and intrigued by the world Whedon had created (basically, 500 years in the future, Earth is used up and a Chinese-Western coalition has colonized another solar system or galaxy or something, and there was a civil war between the civilized inner planets and “wild” outer planets, after which Our Heroes became Han Solo-esque space pirates), it seemed like it was probably best suited to the hour-long format. Whedon had often stated it was his desire to make a “space western.” When the series made fun of this conceit (as in the “Hero of Canton” episode), it was fun and funny. When it was overt or taken too seriously, however, it felt labored, with the most glaring example being the folksy faux-western patois (mingled, intriguingly, with untranslated Mandarin curses and slang) the Firefly crew spoke. Although the actors settled into it as the series progressed, it never felt quite as organic as Whedon’s quirkily inventive Buffy-speak (with the exception of the use of “shiny” as a synonym for “cool,” of course). Similarly, the series seemed to work best when it forgot it was a western and remembered it was exploring the lives of some typically atypical Whedon archetypes. Given that the movie would have to have enough exposition to appeal to viewers who had never seen the TV series, and that the intended first two episodes of the series had been written more or less as a short movie (which I’d read and mildly enjoyed long before the series aired), I didn’t really think the movie could be entirely successful.

I was wrong. Serenity was not just thoroughly enthralling and enjoyable, with genuinely tense action scenes and lots of humorous moments, it’s an actual goddamn western, with encroaching civilization (AKA the Railroad), Indians (known here as Reavers, and genuinely the bearers of fates Worse Than Death), shootouts, showdowns, and last stands. And it all works. Quite frankly, if George Lucas doesn’t see this movie and feel deeply, deeply ashamed of himself, he really has lost interest in everything but the set design. Whedon packs as much political back story into the first fifteen minutes of his movie as Lucas managed to stretch out over two and a half freaking movies, and does it in a way that both creates character depth AND feels like it might be a plausible future for our own world.

Much of the tension in the movie is created by Whedon’s lack of interest in pulling punches. People die in the movie, and not just the people that genre would demand. Very early on in the movie, Mal, our Solo-esque hero, kills a young man by shooting him between the eyes. This is a fairly normal gunslinger move, except that the circumstances are not what we expect. The young man has been explicitly figured as a hero (though the movie makes just as clear that the concept of a hero is a vexed one at best), and he has just pleaded to join Mal’s crew. At the moment of his death, he has been captured by Reavers, and is being dragged off to meet his fate. Is Mal a good guy because he spares the young man that fate? A bad guy because he didn’t either take him aboard the transport or stop to fight the Reavers (both of which would likely have gotten his own crew killed or injured)? Both? Neither? Of course he’s our wise-cracking tough guy hero, but in strictly generic terms, he’s the rebel soldier who goes west because he can’t stand the union and can’t stand to stay in his own homeland either. In fact, in strictly generic terms, the Alliance is a stand in for the Victorious Union… and the march of civilization, industrialization, and progress (or “progress).

Politically, of course, I can’t imagine that Whedon is any kind of unreconstructed Confederate… rather the opposite, in fact. The Alliance is a multi-planetary corporate mega-monster, served by true believers who think that progress must be achieved at any cost. The only thing that can stop them is a galaxy-wide media moment that exposes their lies and corruption. Does this sound like a familiar fantasy?

The final third of this movie had me on the edge of my seat, not least because I wasn’t entirely convinced Whedon wouldn’t kill EVERYONE. Angel ended on a Lady or the Tiger moment with the series’ heroes facing impossible odds (afterwhichtheyareprobablyalldead, but you didn’t hear me admit that). I’ve always chosen to stick my fingers in my ears and chant “la la la la la la it’s the lady la la I can’t HEAR you la la la,” but after the second major character death in Serenity, I’m pretty damn convinced that Whedon’s response would be “duh…. Tiger.” One of the movie’s appealing strengths is that it’s slightly less necessary to suspend disbelief than usual. The clothes (of the FUTURE!!) aren’t ridiculous, and the town/frontier dichotomies even make some aesthetic sense as an extrapolation of current and past retro-futurist design movements, whether they’re high-culture design or low-brow nostalgia. It makes sense that a burnt-out earth would be replaced by recreations of various groups’ visions of its idealized past. Similarly, injuries in this movie look like they really HURT (there’s a shot of Nathan Fillion with a blood-rimmed iris that distracted me for a good three minutes, because… are there really contacts that do that? Or did he actually get punched accidentally?), vehicles have a rickety physicality that makes you feel like they could have the space equivalent of a blow out at any time, and it’s a good bet that all the dead people are going to stay well and truly dead. Furthermore, the actors all have such an ingrained sense of their characters at this point that the genuinely come to life, and none of them feels disposable. When people die (and even when they're injured), it's shocking and painful in a way that few films of this genre manage (go ahead, try to tell me you got teary when Luke Skywalker found his aunt and uncle's farm destroyed. Thought so).

In the end, the film manages to both build on and expand the world of the TV show, without being alienating to new viewers. I'm going to state that categorically because, of the four of us seeing the movie, I'd seen the most of the show, and I've only seen around half the episodes. It has a satisfying resolution that leaves the door wide open for more movies, but resolves unanswered questions from the series (the explanation of the Reavers' origin is particularly satisfying, and chilling, and is a nice literalization of the po-mo discussion of how we create our own monsters in the mirror of the Other). Should you see this movie? Well, it all depends on how you feel about the original Star Wars trilogy, I’d say. If it was either inherently too sci-fi for your taste, or not sci-fi enough, Serenity is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you really liked the first Star Wars movies despite a niggling sense that they should really be better-written and probably better-acted, and, uh, maybe have fewer aliens, Serenity is probably going to feel like a good old-fashioned time at the movies.



And, um…. Go Wes.