Serenity

Serenity (2005) by Joss Whedon

I'm reviewing this film because I got into a debate with a Browncoat over this film. And you know what? You assholes are taking a good thing and blowing it up to proportions that it has no right being. Alright? This is a horrible film. Period. It fails as a film. Taken apart from the rest of the series (I admit I wasn't a fan until recently, but even now, despite that changing, I can still say this is a bad fucking movie), it doesn't hold up its own weight, much less that of an aborted television series that should have gotten another chance. Look, I'm a Star Trek fan, and I'm a James Bond fan; but even I can admit that more than half the Star Trek movies (including all of the Next Generation films) are Godawful, and that there are sadly more Moonrakers than From Russia With Loves when it comes to Bond. I can love a series more than the sum of its parts, and can acknowledge that even some of the films I do like are just as bad and dumb as you think, and will happily agree with you (the reboot of Star Trek, while enjoyable, is a fucking mess plot-wise, but still watchable and fun) just as I can like and appreciate FireFly while watching Serenity and thinking, "What a smelly piece of shit".
The opening scene shifts perspectives several times, from an omniscient, passive point-of-view, to becoming somewhat of a classroom-like overview, to changing its focus onto River (the equally bizarrely-named Summer Glau). While it was necessary to give new viewers an overview (I had only seen a vaguely admired the first 2 episodes when I first saw this film), the shifting point-of-view also makes it difficult for those same viewers to know who is doing what and why. The long-takes in Serenity itself introduced each character individually, but, again, due to the time constraints, they were played slightly more broadly than on the show, and as such, it did little justice to the characters themselves, who I now appreciate and enjoy, nor to the actors, who'd spent so much time developing their characters into individuals. Hell, even two of the characters are killed for what seems to be arbitrary reasons.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, what the fuck are you doing in this movie? Why are you hamming it up? And why does the set of your Alliance vessel look like something out of Space Mutiny? Where is the rest of your massive vessel? We only ever see about 3 rooms. As a villain, he was much too goofy and over-the-top to truly be terrifying and formidable, and the protracted fights (between him and Mal; River and pretty much everyone else in the movie) paradoxically stop the film cold. While the cinematography would have been impressive on the small screen, again, in a movie theater, it feels sadly confined.
I can imagine that the prospect of finishing an unfinished television series on a budget less than half of what typical sci-fi actioners traditionally go for (and what Universal was willing to supply), by a first-time feature film director who initially started with a script that was over 3 hours long...well, the final product feels rushed, confined, and oddly anticlimactic. If this film had been a television special, or mini-series or made-for-TV film, I would not have been so vehement. But the production design, music, and effects work are what killed the film for me, simply because the scale did not translate to "science fiction action Western feature film event!" This was SciFi Channel's The Shining remake: as dull, boring, and bereft of action that the budget would allow. They killed Book and Wash, and I didn't care (and, well, the characters didn't seem to care either. Hell, when Spock died, that added a heavy weight to the entire Star Trek series that needed another film to undo.) Here, two of the main characters die and there was no real time to mourn or move on, and their loss wasn't really felt after the film ended. I walked into the theater hoping to see what the big deal with the series was, and walked out not wanting to have anything to do with it.
Look, if you're going to kill off one of the main characters, it needs to mean something. Spock died to save every other character we love. Vader died to save Luke and, ultimately, redeem himself. Hell, even when the Terminator died in Terminator 2, it was after he'd developed as a character and made a fundamental change and made the audience root for him. Wash and Book died...okay. Did they make a personal change or sacrifice? No, Wash just crashed the ship trying to land it, because he did another crazy maneuver the ship wasn't designed to make. Now they have no ship. (Oh man! Now the stakes are raised! We don't know who'll live or who'll die!!!...*after the film*...Oh, nope. No, they just had nothing to do anymore. They weren't intrinsic to the plot).
And finally: why show the Reavers? The one thing that stuck with me in the show was the concept of the Reavers, and how fucking insane they are. Yet when they are (for whatever reason) revealed? They're like fucking Native American zombies. And their backstory sadly makes them less interesting (again, having unexplained evil threaten characters is so much more interesting: that's the difference between Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal Rising; or Batman and The Dark Knight: getting to know the history of embodiments of evil makes them relative, and thus removes the veneer of danger and mystery they have). For an expansive universe that seemed to stretch out so much, with such an interesting rich fictional history on the series, the film pares everything down to a bite-sized chunk, where everything intertwines and is woven together in a neat package. The mess that was the gritty world of the series is replaced with low-budget facsimiles of sprawling sets and city-scapes, and an epic space battle that, sadly, I'd played back in the day during Colony Wars (where's the movie for that?!)

Serenity fails as a film. Period. It goes for the scope that it can't handle, and instead implodes into something much more confined and exclusive than it wanted to be. If it hoped to attract new fans...well, I doubt it did. I was indifferent to FireFly before I'd seen Serenity, but after Serenity, I wondered what the big fucking deal was and wanted nothing to do with either. I couldn't remember anything about the movie, and it took me looking up IMDB, wikiPedia, and watching the damn thing on YouTube to remember anything about the film aside from the main characters, Wash getting killed (I forgot Book dies too!), and the failure of showing the Reavers. If I walk out of a movie theater and forget what it was that I'd watched...guess what? That movie failed, even to entertain. It was a missed opportunity that I can't blame on Joss Whedon, who did everything he could for the show and the film, or the cast, who seemed to enjoy revisiting the characters one last time. But if this was to be a send-off, then make it Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, not fucking Star Wars Episode III.