theMediaman.com

After watching “Serenity” in theatres last Friday, I was trying to figure out exactly what to write here about it. Turns out, someone outlined 90% of what I wanted to say in his own rant. Read DOM’s post about Serenity (about half-way down the page) at Megatokyo.

Here’s the summary, to give you the idea of how I identified with this post:

• Heard and read from a lot of psycho-devoted fans about how good the “Firefly” TV series was
• Personally never liked any Joss Whedon series (Buffy, Angel). Could be attributed to a severe drop in television-viewing over the last eight years.
• My interest was peaked from a particularly exciting (read: kick-ass) trailer
• Never having watched “Firefly”, I decided it would be best to hold out and see it without any preconceived notions about the show. The X-files movie handled non-fans as well as the fans. The X-men movie did not.
• Considered not going opening weekend, or even wait for the DVD to come out. The situation arose where friends were going to a movie on Friday anyway, so I came too. It was partly my choice to actually GO to Serenity tho’.
• Dialogue was clever, but not so much that it became cheap humour
• Excellent at moving between scenes driven by dialogue and action.
• Didn’t have that “dedicate my life to this series” attitude, but I enjoyed it as much as I expected to
• Surprising to have a science fiction movie live up to the hype when so many films over the last five years have failed to fully produce on lofty expected results (ie. Star Wars and Matrix)
• Background was presented well, bringing non-”browncoats” up-to-speed, without boring the true fans
• Getting outshot by Flightplan is an insult. The opening weekend only brought in $10 million, while the Jodie Foster plane-drama took another $15m.

The only other thing of note with this movie is that there’s no naughty language. None. It’s like a $45 million television episode. In Hollywood where “vulgar language” can make it into any PG movie, it was suprising to see a film aimed at the 20+ crowd have such clean dialogue. Really, the only thing objectionable about the movie are the caniballistic, zombie-like bad guys… and a couple people get stabbed and shot. But that’s nothing we don’t see in prime-time.