If you haven't seen Serenity/Firefly, you should stop reading this now, go buy them on DVD, and thank me later.
…or thank Richard, he's the one that introduced me to Firefly.
Ok, with that out of the way, I want to say that I was dissappointed with Serenity. Now, I really enjoyed Firefly, especially the early episodes. There's something about the characters and their interaction that was amazing and that I find hard to describe here. If you saw the show, you know what I mean. It really is a travesty that this show was cancelled. It's also partially my fault because I didn't watch the show when it came out. How was I supposed to know this show was going to be that good? It was made by the same guy that did Buffy. BUFFY, for cripes sake.
Anyway, the point is that the show depended on its characters, not its being set in some post-civil-war-esque future, its characters. The series had built up Mal as this sort of misunderstood good thief character. There was a tension between him and Jayne about helping other people, but by the end of the series it seemed that Jayne had learned a lesson about helping people and that Mal considered Simon and River as part of his crew. But what do we see at the beginning of Serenity? Mal is bringing River on a mission for no apparent reason, he doesn't consider her or Simon part of his crew and Jayne no longer shows any remorse for selling out Simon and River. What the hell happened? What happened was not enough people saw Firefly. So Joss Whedon must have decided that characters beyond 2D cardboard cut-outs would be too complicated for the audience of Serenity.
Let me say that I don't have a problem with the overall story for Serenity. In fact I think it would work pretty well if we could see the change of Mal from Firefly to where he ends up at the end of Serenity. In firefly he's a beaten soldier who has given up on fighting for indepedence. Mostly he is working for himself and his crew, but holds onto his values of helping other people. To go from that, back to the idealism that he must have had before the end of the war would be cool. But instead what we got was this development from some other starting point that we see at the beginning of Serenity. It's not even clear what that starting point is. I guess my point is the characters in Serenity don't feel like the characters from Firefly, and so I don't get the sort of emotional arc that I expected from the beginning of Firefly to the end of Serenity.
The other problem that I had with Serenity was that it felt very formulaic. I don't mean that Firefly had built up its own sort of formula (which to a degree, it did) and that Serenity continued to use this formula. No, I mean that Serenity felt like it was using generic space movie formula.
Having said all that, Serenity is still worth seeing. In fact I intend to watch it again and see what I think the second time through. I'm sure I'll end up watching the whole Firefly series several times through.
I might have more to say, but I'm getting tired.
![[Joe]](images/emoticons/joe.png)
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