Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Serenity

So I went and saw Serenity the other night. Believe it or not, I've never seen a single episode of Firefly, network TV showed it in the middle of the night so I didn't bother watching it and the DVD set has proven to be difficult to track down. So I was in the unusual position of being a Whedonite watching the movie without knowing the backstory.

I found it to be pretty good. The characters and setting were all introduced and explained adequately, save for the romantic subplots which were fairly uninteresting to the uninitiated viewer (OK, except for the one line “...I've had naught twixt my nethers that doesn't run on batteries!”) A few people elsewhere have worried that a certain character's death part way through the movie would not have the impact that it was meant to on someone who had not seen the series, and guess what, it didn't, but it's not like it inhibited my enjoyment of the movie in any way either. Although it did amuse me that the first time this character appeared on screen I thought to myself “I bet that's the one who dies.”

Anyway, this movie is nothing incredibly great, but it's still very enjoyable, with lots of cool action (the fight scenes are far superior to anything from Angel or Buffy) and the clever dialog we all expect from Joss. The sci-fi meets wild west setting was especially cool, and the asian influence was a neat original touch. I'm very glad I caught it in the theatre and I'm definitely going to try harder to get a copy of the Firefly DVDs.

2 comments:

Joel said...

Damn, I had the full series at some stage, I should have burnt them. But the DVD set would be nice to get ahold of.

I'm thinking an Amazon binge will be in order soon. Do you have a wishlist there? Would be cool to keep up to date with music you've heard about. Mine is "ferrouswheel", not surprisingly.

Jon said...

Actually I haven't logged on to Amazon for yonks, although they did just send me a 'security warning' asking me to log on to [bullshit phishing domain].com/cache/update.amazon.com.login-file.secured-membership.RC4.with.128bit.encryption.on.amazon.com, with all that encryption it must be safe!

Anyway my wishlist is under Jon Travaglia but there's not much in the way of music there, just Darling Violetta, which brings us back round to firefly by way of Joss Whedon...