The Serenity verdict: a great genre product. A made-for-TV movie blown up onto the big screen, but far more entertaining than, say, the new Star Wars movies, or any episode of Next Generation I've seen (which, lacking and not wanting a TV in the apartment, isn't that many, though I do dimly recall Steve Caldow showing me one featuring robotic villains in Carl Andre-style aluminum spaceships back in the early 1990s).

The cargo ship Serenity is messy, "inhabited." Writer/director Joss Whedon obviously looked very closely at the first hour of Ridley Scott's Alien, at the cramped and confining quarters of the space tug Nostromo. Serenity's pilot has a plastic palm tree and little plastic dinosaurs mounted on his flight console. Things break or fall off the ship at regular intervals; it's the science fiction equivalent of my rusty Subaru. The onboard lighting is deep and uneven, evoking Scott McFarland's cabin in the woods, as opposed to George Lucas' flat even Final Fantasy-style tones. The characters all talk in a kind of stylized fragmented prose that emerges in little bursts, as if they have to work very hard to articulate their thoughts and feelings. Their misunderstandings and general air of emotional incoherence are awfully funny; it's like your typical Pulpfiction workday, interspersed with ravenous zombies (yes, spacefaring zombies) and a nefarious assassin villain who apparently just flew in from his Othello stint at the Ashland Shakespeare festival. Other highlights include Autistic Teen Goth Girl, a truly over-the-top CGI space battle, and the film's opening fifteen minutes, which nests three or four temporal jumps one inside another, like a Russian doll. The only thing missing is Ms. Carrie-Ann Moss' delectable nose, cruel shades, and black fetish-night PVC catsuit. Come to think of it, though, none of the Wachowski brothers' characters really fit into Serenity's world. The film is a throwback to an older, slower kind of storytelling that lacks the visual polish and videogame pace of things like the Matrix or Doom. It's not great art, but it's definitely an idiosyncratic product, the work of an individual vision, made with great passion and technical skill. It held my interest and entertained me; in these respects, it's vastly superior to every other big budget movie I've seen this year.
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 AM