“A casual relationship with reality”
Categories: Movies, Television
"I don't wanna explode!"
I've been looking forward to "Serenity" since I heard that it would be made. The excitement grew significantly about three or four episodes into the "Firefly" DVDs, and only continued growing as I watched the rest of the fourteen episodes of the short-lived series.
For those of you that don't know what "Firefly" is, you can read my earlier post about the show and the movie.
So, obviously I saw it on Friday. If I sounded pretty excited about it last April, that's nothing compared to how I felt in the couple weeks before it was finally released. The last couple of days before Friday, I had the theme song running through my head almost non-stop.*
So, finally, what did I think of it? Well, I thought it was great, really great... but just a bit imperfect. Let me be clear, I'm in no way disappointed (except for one minor totally irrelevant detail), but the film critic in me wanted certain things just a bit different.
So let me get into what made it work. First and foremost: it's a ton of fun. At the same time it manages to be exciting, emotional, compelling and First of all, lots of that brand-name Joss Whedon dialogue: funny, smart, original and a real pleasure to listen to, without being "over-written", which is a trap many other talented writers of a similar style can fall into. Whedon's dialogue is the hook that draws people into his shows, but it's his characters and storylines that ultimately keep them coming back. "Serenity" makes good on that as well, though it's the characters that I think will probably end up creating the largest difference of opinion between fans of the series and the rest of the audience that has never seen an episode of it.
The storyline for the movie is a tight, compelling arc that compresses what would have been the entire second season into about two hours. Happily, Whedon has a philosophy about television that states that each season of a show should be a self-contained storyline that resolves itself by the season finale. I keep meaning to do a post about this, because I think this is a much better way to tell a story, but I have to save that for later. My lazy posting aside, this ends up benefiting the movie because its not trapped into having to start off resolving some cheap cliffhanger. The storyline has roots in the show's one season, but exists separately enough to be crafted into a movie that must assume most audience members won't have seen the show.
And then, finally, what makes the movie work is that it does know its a movie. In other words, the relationship between the characters and the world they inhabit undergoes a fundamental change between the beginning and the end of the movie. That cryptic pseudo-scholar-speak is as specific I can get without discussing important events in the film, but suffice it to say, the storyline doesn't feel like an oversized episode of the show, it feels like a movie.
However, that's the beginning of some of the film's problems as well. Even though the storyline itself is properly movie-scaled, other elements don't make the transition so well. Sacrificed first are some of the characters. Firefly's nine cast members became well-fleshed out, compelling characters over the course of the show. For an ensemble show, nine cast members is a perfectly comfortable size, but in a two-hour action oriented movie with several important plot points, nine characters can't all be given their due. Jewel Staite's adorable Kaylee gets the biggest shaft, I can only remember one line she had (she had many more, of course, but only one is memorable). And that sucks, because I totally heart her. Wash (Alan Tudyk) also doesn't get enough of a role, and that sucks because Tudyk is hilarious, although his role is definitely larger and has more significant developments. Shepard Book (Ron Glass) has a larger presence than Kaylee as well, however his character on the show is so layered that anyone who hasn't watched the show will have a hard time understanding why he has any relevance to the storyline. So this overly-large cast becomes a problem for both fans and non-fans alike. Fans won't get enough of certain characters and newbies will be wondering why the film sometimes breaks focus from the primary characters. However, the decisions regarding which characters to focus on (Mal, River, Simon, Jayne and Zoe) are definitely the right ones.
The next problem comes from Whedon's directing. Now, he's actually a very talented director, having honed his craft on many pivotal episodes of "Buffy", "Angel" and "Firefly". However, I have to concede that his transition from TV director to movie director is almost done, but there's a bit of the TV director still left there. By "director", I'm talking specifically about the cinematic side of directing — shot selection, framing, kinetic pacing, etc. — and not the dramatic side, which principally involves coordinating and shaping the performances of the actors. This is a difficult thing to explain without having clips of the movie to show, but it really comes down to not creating meaningful shots. Practically speaking, TV directing is so fast paced that there simply isn't time to find the shot that expresses a personal visual interpretation of that moment in the story. In other words, as long as the action is captured in a comprehensible and hopefully compelling way, the demands of TV are met. However film requires a more sophisticated visual language in order to create meaning beyond what the script and actors provide. Whedon definitely understands this, but he reverts to his TV roots out of habit (and the pressures of a very tight shooting schedule).
And the final problem, which is actually the least important as well, is the necessity to provide a great deal of exposition to the uninitiated audience that the show's fans already know without boring or overwhelming either party. It's a nearly impossible assignment which Whedon manages elegantly for the most part, but the pacing of the first 20-30 minutes is a bit uneven in order to accommodate the front-loaded info required by the story. The reason this issue ends up being so minor is that once the movie gets into its groove, the momentum of good old-fashioned storytelling takes over in ways I haven't seen in years.
I know that by examining these problems in such detail I may be giving the impression that this is a deeply flawed movie. It isn't. "Serenity" is a fun, well-crafted and thoroughly enjoyable entertainment because it's built from what most other recent summer fare has abandoned: Character, story, wit and heart.
* Actually, my only genuine disappointment with the movie is that they never played the theme song, not even during the closing credits. This surprised the hell out of me, especially since there's a point late in the movie that is literally begging for at least the melody. I bet it's some rights thing (it always is), but I don't see how, since Joss Whedon not only composed it, but wrote the lyrics as well.
posted by Mark Kawakami at October 06, 2005, 01:10 AM // permalink // (5) Comments