Downright unsettlin'

It's cold in the lab today. The morning cup of tea is brewing, but I'm not focusing well on science right at the moment. Allow me a moment or two to rant.

We finally went to see Serenity last night.

(For those who aren't enormous nerds, the rest of this won't make any sense. Just letting you know.)

We didn't like it.

We had just finished watching the series on DVD, and saw that the movie had come around to the second-run theater. We were very excited. Reviews were good, we loved the series, revelations were promised, mysteries would be solved and questions would be answered. The characters we loved would make a triumphant return.

Except that the movie didn't have any of the things that made the show actually good. Firefly was remarkable for humor and character development, for the intricate blending of sci-fi and the Western, for comfortable intimacy and roughness around the edges. The movie was nothing more than a mediocre science-fiction shoot-'em-up action film with shiny special effects and lots of blood, which would be fine if it didn't have characters we cared about caught up in it. No one smiled for the whole damn film. There was none of the humor, the revelations didn't make any sense, and River's "powers" turned out in the end to be the same old Buffy choreography.

I think, with 9 main characters and a story designed to be told over 5 years of TV episodes, the problem was simply one of time. Joss Whedon had to jam 4 seasons of events into an hour and a half. Of course there wouldn't be time for anything but cursory interactions and gunplay. It's a real shame, and it just didn't turn out well. I think he knows it, too. Movies aren't suited to the kinds of stories he wants to tell. The, um, finality of a certain event towards the end suggests to me that Mr. Whedon doesn't want to make any more movies. Firefly is done.

I understand why the movie got made, and I had hoped that it would be the capstone to a great series that should have been. Instead, it's a headstone, only showing what Firefly would have been if they had caved into the bland commercialism the studios wanted in the first place. I liked the way it ended better before. It was sad and incomplete, but it wasn't dead.