Geek & Random 05 Oct 2005 03:24 pm
Serenity
Last night I went to the theatre to watch Joss Whedon’s Serenity, the movie version of the TV series Firefly (very mild spoilers ahead). For those who don’t know it, it’s a little bit like Old West movies, but set 500 years in the future and with a touch of Japanese culture thrown in.
Having never watched the series, I have to say that the movie is pretty good. It’s fairly easy to draw parallels with Star Wars (the original trilogy): a renegade captain and his crew, with a somewhat old spaceship, suddendly take aboard two passengers that are more than they seem to be and find themselves as the target of the organisation that rules the known universe. Yes, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I like the type of humour displayed in the movie: somewhat sarcastic, almost self-derrogatory and still violently to the point. The acting seemed a little off in the first scenes, though, and some of the dialogue was, hmm, almost cheesy; I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to be like that, but it gets better as the movie progresses (or maybe I got used to it). Still, the characters are great, but they needed to better developed (perhaps the series does that). And have I mentioned the humour? It’s fantastic.
It’s refreshing to see a sci-fi movie set in a universe that follows most of our normal physical laws: ships actually have to go through re-entry procedures when landing in planets! They need heat shields! They have seat belts! That’s something you don’t usually see. Still, a few things were a little on the “plot device” category, but that was not really a problem.
All in all, it was lots of fun, and now I need to get my hands on the DVDs of the TV series.
on 05 Oct 2005 at 5:32 pm 1.Geejay said …
Hiya! First, thanks for posting on our site.
Now, on to the topic. I heartily recommend you indeed get the DVDs as it will flesh out the characters more. The tone for the series was that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Maybe that’s why you think the dialogue was a little cheesy. But yeah. I was wondering how the movie appeared to people who haven’t seen the TV series. 