Serenity - 2 thoughts

[brixtonbrood]

I went to see a film!!! In a cinema!! Without children, and back after dark!! Thank you husband (he doesn't like Whedon, and I didn't leave until brood were abed, so it was no major loss to him).

Since I took so long to do it I avoided most of the reviews for spoiler reasons, so feel free to tell me that everyone knows this already, but...

How Iain M Banks is it? Gibson claims, on finally watching Blade Runner to have said "How did those people get inside my head?" I hope that Banks is sober when he watches this, or he may get very confused.

Isn't what happened at Haven the most hackneyed and nauseating thing ever perpetrated in a Joss Whedon project? The corpse of the cute kid? The Morgan Freeman chap being just alive enough to say a few sage words before croaking? But I'll almost forgive him for that for then using the corpses as set-dressing.

Other than that, yeah, good. I thought that Ejiofor's final redemption made up for the fact that he was a fine film actor reduced to walking plot for the first hour and three quarters. I did know that deaths were afoot, and therefore Wash stood out as being too nice to live. I probably missed loads by not having seen Firefly, but I didn't feel that I was missing anything, which is all that matters.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The Morgan Freeman chap being just alive enough to say a few sage words before croaking?
That was so much the sort of thing that was subverted on Buffy that I was shocked when it wasn't in Serenity. I wandered out for a pee.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

A discerning customer chose that moment to snore very loudly in our screening - the entire cinema cracked up.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Book did, indeed, get screwed by this film.

I'm not seeing the Banks similarities, though, I have to say ... maybe I haven't read the right books.

Banks

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to pin down exactly what made it so Banks-y for me, but I think it's the Reavers, and the Operative and perhaps River and Simon - they all felt like characters from Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons to me. Matt, who I went with, agreed (independently), so I know I'm not completely insane.
Maybe it's the fact that, more than any other original sf film I've seen, it has the sensibility of a modern mainstream hard(ish) sf novel, and of that genre, the author I know best is Banks.