Serenity
"Serenity" is the name of both an enormous space-faring jalopy in the 26th century and the hotly anticipated film the ship sails through. For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching "Serenity" is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.
"Serenity" marks a miraculous moment for the 4.4 million people who weekly watched "Firefly" before Fox canceled it in 2002, and for the hordes of fans who've made the DVD a bestseller. The show, created by
Joss Whedon, the 41-year-old also responsible for TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," was about a motley band of scavengers in a post-war, post-Earth, multiracial universe.
In the film, the solar system is divided among the cannibalistic Reavers; the Universal Alliance, a crypto-corporate entity that lays down the laws; and the three-man, two-woman Serenity crew, which tries to skirt the law as often as possible.
The movie, which Whedon wrote and directed, resumes more or less where the unaired 14th episode left off. The young telepath River Tam (Summer Glau) had been taken by the Alliance and experimented upon. When we meet River, her brother Simon (Sean Maher), a medic, has rescued her and brought her aboard the Serenity.
The Alliance dispatches a new character called the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to retrieve River. He's a regal (read: British) fellow who sees nothing wrong with wiping out lots of folks to get to the Serenity.
Of course, there are members of the ship's crew who think the Alliance can have the girl. River has been programmed to kill. At one stop, she beats up dozens of people, including Jayne (Adam Baldwin), the hulking mercenary who doesn't trust her. But abandoning River and her brother would mean no movie. Funnier and more urgent is that, for Kaylee (Jewel Staite), the ship's randy hick mechanic, getting rid of them would mean no nookie for her and Simon.
Whedon has a fondness for the comedy in that sort of human predicament. He also demonstrates a healthy respect for the climactic whiz-bang of science fiction, too. But, at its heart, the movie he's made is a Western. The Serenity's captain, Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), is a semi-moral loner whose conscience often takes a back seat to the will to survive. (It's the sort of role that should have made Fillion a big TV star; he has very good comic timing and is credible as a fearless leader.)
Mal's love interest is a courtesan (Morena Baccarin), and they enjoy one of those frustrated "can't live with her . . ." relationships. "You spin me about," he tells her. "I wish you was elsewhere." Louis L'Amour couldn't have writ it finer. The movie's director of photography, Jack N. Green, was Clint Eastwood's longtime cinematographer, and Ruth Carter's excellently weird costumes suggest Marc Jacobs in 1875.
But Whedon has a difficult time managing the movie's tone. If Yakov Smirnoff made an outer-space flick with Wild West overtones, it would be "Serenity." Whedon's writing is much more assured than his direction. Some scenes jerk from the comic to the serious often and violently enough to give a viewer whiplash. It's easy to understand why the show never properly caught on: It's hard to get a grasp on Whedon's inconsistent style, which was rarely the case with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Much of this has to do with the editing. The movie looks and feels as if it was cut with a chainsaw.
Still, "Serenity" has instant diehard fans. The night I saw it, one very satisfied customer suggested the movie signaled a sea change in the science-fiction universe. As the credits rolled, he damned George Lucas with an expletive, and many of the dozens of stragglers applauded.
The derision makes sense. "Serenity" does for serious Lucas fans what Lucas hasn't done for them lately. It evokes the wild-and-woolly zing of the first three "Star Wars" pictures, when the series's myth-minded self-seriousness was the stuff of subtext and its dumb jokes could bring down the house. If "Serenity" takes off and spawns sequels (as it seems destined to), it's crucial that Whedon take a lesson from Lucas's greatest flaw and never stop laughing with us.
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