Agreed. It makes sense, too. Now, Serenity cannot leave (not that it was any condition to leave anyway).
I think it’s deliberately stylized. I certainly don’t think it’s “bad” in the sense of “someone tried to write natural sounding dialog, and failed, and came out with this”.
Moi? Nah. That was the style of the scene.
That’s because that scene was total girly-porn.
If I take two pills, can I call Dr. Tam in the morning? 
MrrrWowrrrr…
It’s established that Reavers use small harpoons against human-sized targets (Jayne got one through the leg, on the Mule), but against ships, they use magnetic grapplers. And maybe I blinked, but I didn’t see any more spikes coming through the windshield, nor a Reaver ship tethered to Serenity.
I, too, was somewhat surprised by how built Simon turned out to be, once he took his shirt off. I mean, he’s a doctor, so you’d expect him to take care of his health, but he still seems rather scrawny, when fully-clothed. Then again, he wasn’t the main focus of my attention in that scene.
Definitely more spikes came through. My perception of it was that the dude who was on grappling-hook duty got a little trigger happy, saw a chance to take a shot, and said, “RRRRRAAAAAAAUUUUGHGGHGHGGH!” or whatever Reavers say. Perfectly, within the confines of the universe, plausible to me.
Yeah, they were shown using magnetic grapplers, but remember that the harpoon they used on Jane was from a spaceship. It may’ve been designed for antipersonnel fighting, or it may have been used to attach an attacking ship to a salvage job, or to attach to another ship in space. My understanding of the Reavers is that they use whatever weapons are at hand, and they don’t really do much in the way of complicated weapon manufacturing.
Daniel
By all the other details that have been covered ad nauseum in this thread. :rolleyes: yourself. ExTank’s comment makes sense.
As Zoe was trying to get Wash’s sorpse out of the driver’s seat, Mal knocked her to the ground to save her (and him) from at least one other harpoon/grapple/big pointy stick.
Is it too much to ask that Serenity 2 be rated R? My wife has a serious jones for Jayne, and I have a similar venereal twitching for Inara and Plumper-Kaylee. Seems like it wouldn’t be hard to write in a scene set in a hot tub, somehow…
Why would one expect that? These are the descendants of interplanetary colonists some 500-600 years in the future, with a major Chinese cultural and linguistic influence. Note that the characters more likely to engage in oddball (by our standards) grammar are Mal, Kaylee and Jayne, who are clearly the ones with the least amount of formal education. Book, Simon and Inara, by contrast, are from the educated classes, and speak quite regular (again, by our standards) English.
Ever seen Clockwork Orange? Man, they sure talk real funny, like they’s on dope or sumpin’.
Actually, it’s established that one Reaver ship uses a magnetic grappler, and the rest seem to use big harpoons. You’ll note towards the end of the movie there’s various scenes of Reaver ships using Harpoons, both in orbit over Miranda (We see two Reaver ships tearing a third ship apart) and against the PeaceKeeper… er… Alliance Fleet later on.
Also, I do recall extra harpoons flying through the windsheild, and immediately after they leave the ship, you can see the Reaver ship that had been persuing them hovering above Serenity with the grappler chains attached.
Oh, I dunno. When Serenity is creeping through the Reaver fleet on the way to Miranda, two Reaver ships are seen tearing a third ship in half. Also, when they run like hell to Mr. Universe’s planet, at least one Reaver ship can be seen tethering (and then rapidly spinning around) a snagged Alliance ship. This might be accomplished with magnetic grapplers, but it looks like the Reavers don’t care if the tethering damages the target, so why not a hull-piercing harpoon?
Certainly, we’ve seen Reaver ships tethered to other ships, but I don’t think that the attachment method is clear in any of those cases. And the harpoon that got Jayne wasn’t really comparable to the one that got Wash; the thing that impaled Wash was far bigger than the thing that went through Jayne’s leg.
If there were shots of more harpoons through the window, and of a Reaver subsequently tethered to Serenity, then I guess I largely retract my criticism. It’s just that, when I was watching the movie, I didn’t notice those details (like I said, maybe I blinked or something), so it detracted from the movie for me.
Well, Chronos, you know what that means. You will just have to go see it again this weekend!
With the number of truly sucky sequels following adequate to very good movies, why do so many of you seem expect a brilliant Serenty II? Let’s just thank Og for this one and move on.
Well, thanks for the advice, Captain Bringdown, but the second Star Trek, Alien, Terminator and Mad Max movies were all improvements over their originals (though I expect there’s some debate, especially, on Aliens) so why are you trying to write off a movie that won’t even go into preproduction for months, assuming it even does? Wouldn’t careful optimism be a less depressing tack?
Well, we seem to have had pretty good luck with sequels in the last couple years. X-Men II was better than X-Men, Spiderman II was better than Spiderman, Revenge of the Sith was better than Attack of the Clones (not a difficult feat by any means, but still…), the Lord of the Rings trilogy maintained a consistent level of quality (personally, my favorite was the first one, but it’s a matter of minute degree). I’m willing to take a gamble on a Serenity II. If it sucks, it can just join the long line of Sequels Which We Pretend Don’t Exsist.
Umm…mine was sarcasm. So double :rolleyes: on you!
-Joe, captain rippedpants
Not to mention that of the sequels Miller mentioned, the main creative forces remained intact. Spider-Man kept Raimi at the helm, and though the writers changed, it was arguably an improvement (depending on what you think of Chabon); X-Men kept Singer and Hayter; and so on.
And there’s no way in hell, I would imagine, Joss would let anyone else write or direct Serenity 2, so why not be optimistic?
Um, Serenity itself is already a sequel of sorts to Firefly. So we know Joss can do sequels.
I have every reason to expect a sequel to be just as good as this movie. Joss has already said he has numerous stories on file that he planned to tell during the series, and that he’d love to make movies out of some of them.
Whedon’s style lends itself to serialization. He tells stories about characters, not fancy technology or universe destruction. The problem with many Sci-fi sequels is that the original movie had a world-changing plot of some sort. Where do you go for a sequel when the first movie has the protagonists saving the universe?
But with Whedon, it’s all about the characters. How about a light-hearted ‘caper’ sequel? Whedon’s brilliant with those. Some of the best episodes of Firefly were the funniest ones. He could do a straight-up comedy for Serenity II, much like Star Trek IV lightened the tone for that series. Or he could do a tense psychological thriller with the same characters. The Firefly episodes were of many different styles, and all uniformly good.
Joss could write a dozen Serenity sequels and not run out of ideas. Hell, I’ll bet he could pull off a Serenity musical - he managed it with Buffy, and it was one of the best episodes from what I hear tell.
When your characters speak a new dialect, it gives a lot of room for the writer to write great prose, and Whedon takes advantage of that. If you take the dialog in Firefly or Serenity apart and really listen to it, some of it is downright poetic in a way that would be almost impossible to pull off if the characters spoke straight English. It would sound stilted.
The same is true of Deadwood. The prose is almost Shakespearean, and the use of ‘old language’ gives the writers so much creative freedom with the dialog that they can rise to heights of eloquence that are hard to achieve otherwise.
The language is one of the best parts of the Firefly 'verse. It’s understandable but unique, and really improves the flavor of the stories.