Firefly

Serenity review: the nitty gritty

Last week I saw Serenity for the second time. My father hadn’t seen it yet and I had unfairly gotten him hooked on the DVD and not taken him yet. After the screening my father turned to me and said "Well...they’re not going to be making any more of that, are they?"

What follows next are my thoughts on the movie and what I think the future holds for fans of Firefly. These thoughts contain MAJOR SPOILERS. So if you don’t want this movie ruined for you, you should stop reading now.

Okay.

Angela and I saw Serenity in the best possible conditions: at a sneak peek with hundreds of Firefly fans. The movie was exciting, fast, funny, and reminded me why I fell in love with these characters in the first place. As a fan of Firefly, it delivered 100%.

My favorite line in the movie is "I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar." It’s the line we all want to quote, but can’t bring ourselves to because it is now forever associated with the biggest shocker of the movie...the death of Wash.

I was surprisingly unaffected by the death of Shepard Book. I love his character and I would miss him from a television show. However, I was getting along fine and enjoying the movie without him, so it didn’t hurt so much when he died. They had just spent a good portion of the movie convincing me that the Firefly universe could still be fun if Book was absent. But Wash? He’s a big spark in that cast. It’s hard to think of Firefly being the same without him there. But Wash and Book’s death makes perfect sense.

Walking into the movie, we have expectations and unanswered questions left by the cancelled show:

1) Why is the alliance after River? What did they do to her and why?
2) Will Mal and Innara ever work out?
3) Will Simon and Kayleigh ever hook up?
4) What are the Reavers?
5) What is the deal with Shepherd Book’s past?

The movie tied up every single one of these questions as far as I’m concerned. Joss tied up every loose end. The alliance made the reavers. Simon and Kayleigh hook up finally. Mal and Innara, in one exchange, figure out how to coexist without pushing each other away. The Reavers were made by the Pax. Maybe River was designed to fight them. I personally think that Book was once an operative like the one chasing the crew in this movie. I think he was once a believer for the alliance and much like the operative in this movie, he woke up and broke away. Everything got tied up.

And there were consequences. Changing consequences. The Alliance Parliament was shaken. Wash died. Book died. River was cured of a huge mental problem. Things are changed in that universe.

Which may mean that we won’t be getting more Firefly. It certainly, in my opinion, means Joss Whedon is assuming we wont.

Serenity wasn’t movie #1. It was movie #3. We got Return of the Jedi first because I don’t think Joss was certain that if he started with movie #1 he would ever get a chance to show us movie #3. So he gave us the last movie first.

He let us see how things end first. He let us peek at the last page of his novel. He wanted to make sure that his fans got to see how everything ended. The final chapter. He gave us that first. And even though we know Wash dies, he can always show us previous chapters and we can all still enjoy them. Book and Wash still live in earlier stories that Joss and his cast have yet to tell us.

I really like that Serenity was so final. I like that we got to see how these guys end up. That they went through a lot but ended up okay, and made a difference in their world. I don’t feel so sad now about the loss of the show because he gave us closure on these characters. I really can’t thank Joss enough for doing that.

It’s really a brilliant move.

So bottom line. Serenity really kicked me in the balls. It was fun, exciting and most importantly, satisfying. It really helped me scratch the itch that I couldn’t reach after Firefly was taken from me.

Thank you Joss!