I do and he agreed.
While the show will never be called cheery, it wasn’t as oppressive as it could have been and was a lot more light than it possibly should have been considering its subject-matter – the examples **RTFirefly **gave being prime evidence.
Given enough time, I’d be willing to bet money, and lots of it, that *Firefly *would have had its own Smile Time as it wasn’t any more dark than *Angel *was at its peak.
Or better yet, Once More, With Reavers! :S
I agree that the show was lighter than the movie, but not radically so, and the show got darker as it went on. The tone of the movie was a logical extension of where the show was already headed. Remember, Joss always wanted the show to be significantly darker than the Fox execs would allow. Had the show been a success, it would have given Joss much more leeway to make the show the way he wanted.
And the movie had some pretty funny shit in it, too. Even in the middle of their last stand against the Reavers.
There’s a scene in the movie that has gone totally uncommented so far - After Book is killed, an Alliance pilot starts to climb out of his wrecked ship. This is no Reaver, just an injured military guy trying to survive. Mal shoots him dead without a thought. No surrender, no questions.
And it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Of course he went out like a punk. That’s the point! It’s horrible. Whedon wanted you to rend your garments and gnash your teeth. You wouldn’t have done that if he let you achieve catharsis. Instead, Wash’s awful death doesn’t sit right – anytime you think about it, you’ll feel a fraction of the pain that Zoe feels. It will never resolve (although, y’know, it’s fiction, so it won’t be keeping you up nights either). Good movies make you sick to your stomach, because that only happens when you forget they’re not people.
–Cliffy
I believe Jayne said, “Zoe, get your ass back on the line!” That was a great scene. Normally Zoe is the most coolheaded character on the crew when under fire. You get more chance to see this on the show, but it was there in the movie too. After Wash died, she was definitely freaking out, but not in a big, obvious, break down and cry sort of way. While Jayne was making crate barriers, Zoe was just sort of standing around looking shell shocked. Mal said, “Zoe, are you here?”, and you could see her take a breath and pull herself together a bit, only to go berzerk and try to take on the Reavers hand to hand. There’s no way in hell Zoe would leap into the fray like that if her head was on straight.
I think I agree with you. I actually knew in advance that Wash and Book died, because I was stupidly reading some spoiler threads when I should have known better. During the descent to Mr. Universe’s lair, my train of thought went like this: “Oh shit, I wonder if this is when Wash bites it. C’mon man, you can do this. Whew, he made it, I wonder when - wait, what the hell was that? Where’d that fuckin’ spike come from? I guess it was some sort of grapple chained to that Reaver ship, but that was weird.”
Even so, I almost forgot that no one else was going to die when everyone else started getting hammered. I at least thought there might be some serious maiming. I left the theater feeling somewhat annoyed with the particulars of Wash’s death, and even mulled over the thought that he should have died as a direct result of the crash, but that didn’t seem right either.
The main problems I think boil down to the relative positions of the two ships and the nature of the spikes. When Serenity crash landed, it spun to the left by about 60 degrees and plowed straight into a bunch of junk. This wouldn’t seem to leave much room in front of Serenity for a Reaver ship to get a good firing angle, and yet the big ass spike came in straight through the nose and cockpit. Also, it’s hard to tell because it goes by so quick, but it seemed like the Reaver ship was not in front of Serenity afterwards.
As for the spike itself, it was almost a nonsequitor - a little too strange. It seemed more like a stray jagged piece of metal or a weird alien claw than a weapon. I was confused for a long moment about what, exactly, killed Wash. Yeah, yeah, I know the Reavers have bizzare weaponry, but still. Plain old gunfire or a high-tech beam weapon might have been too mundane for Reavers, but at least it would have gotten the point across more clearly. An array of smaller spikes or something that more obviously looked like a giant hook or harpoon would have worked also.
I’ve been introducing my wife to the series lately, so in the past few weeks, we’ve watched the first 11 episodes (through “Trash”). And I have a hard time seeing that darkening trend. (And I can’t see the last three eps as evidence of such a trend either.)
Sure, we’ve got Niska (as discussed) in #10, but he was in the second episode, too, just not in quite as big a way - and of course the Reavers dominated #3. (IMHO, that episode - “Bushwhacked” - was the darkest ep of the entire series, and I’d characterize the pilot and the next two episodes as the darkest sequence of episodes.)
But back to the series v. the movie:
Sure, in the series as well as the movie, “Firefly is a dark fuckin’ universe.” But with rare exceptions, in the series, the darkness is out there somewhere, and the mood on ship, in between dealing with the threats of that 'verse, is one of wholeness and cheer. Think of the basketball (sorta) game at the beginning of “Bushwhacked.” Think of the conversation at the end of “War Stories” between Mal, Zoe, and Wash, which starts off with Mal telling Zoe that she’s got to sleep with him for the good of her and Wash’s marriage, and ends with Wash and Zoe headed out with the words, “We’ll be in our bunk.” (And this right after Mal’s being rescued from Niska. This says bad stuff happened, but back here, we’re still whole and well inside, and cheerful enough to kid about what we’ve just been through.) Think of the numerous relaxed conversations around the dining table.
In the series, Serenity is, as Patrick O’Brian would have Aubrey say, a happy ship. There’s no way around that. We’d all love to be part of those pickup games in the cargo bay, the conversations around the dining table, because they’re relaxed and happy and warm and full of trust and life and cameraderie.
None of that’s in the movie. Sure, there’s snappy lines, and the characters still trust each other underneath the tension, but the warmth and happiness and good cheer that were only briefly absent from the series are only briefly present in the movie. That’s a pretty major swing.
And it’s reinforced by the lighting. The difference in the lighting in the scenes inside Serenity in the movie and in the series is, almost literally, like night and day. I don’t usually think about the lighting and stuff in movies, but here we’ve got a situation where the same environment has been lit in two completely different ways, so it’s impossible to miss. And that’s a major part of the mood and ambience in each.
So feeling cheated is the point? I suppose that makes sense, but I’m not really convinced that this was the best tack to take. I’m sure not going to think “Man, I feel so cheated. Joss, you the man!”
I suppose, though, it’s something he could get away with only in this situation. Fans of the show will have become diehard enough to forgive Joss for killing off Wash so callously, and people who have never seen the show haven’t formed enough of an attachment to Wash to let the death affect them so much. If he’d done that with a character that the newcoming audience had come to be attached to, that cheated feeling might be enough for them to tell others the movie was lame.
And for those of us who can’t get over it, there’s always War Stories to fall back on. 
If it had been, though, this thread would have people complaining that they spent $8-$10 on a movie that was essentially just a two-hour TV episode.
Probably. You can’t please everyone.
I’m still in pretty much the same place I’ve been since last Friday night: loved the series, loved the movie, but in very different ways.
Hah. Amusing, but no. I was offended by it in an external context - one based on a review of the film, remember?
In my ideal world, I’d split Joss Whedon into two halves - his sense of humor and his drama queen side, and ignore the output of the drama queen entirely.
Heh. “Kill us both, Spock.”
I think that once some of the hard-core fans get over their shock at Wash’s death, they’ll come to see it differently. I know I did.
Basically, having Wash die makes the entire universe more real. It underscores the point that the life aboard ‘Serenity’ is dangerous. And guess what? Not all deaths are heroic. In fact, very, very few are. Death can be senseless, and mean nothing. Take the episode ‘Out of Gas’. Joss put those characters in mortal peril, but a last minute Deux Ex Machina saves them all. Zoe’s decision to go back to the ship was only correct in hindsight - if they had come back and found everything as it was, it would have just made them all the more likely to die.
That episode *should have resulted in the deaths of the entire crew. And not heroic deaths saving the system, but pointless death as the result of a nondescript piece of equipment breaking.
The thing is, the longer you go on putting characters into that kind of danger and then pulling them back from the brink, the less believable it all becomes. And then the only way to heighten the dramatic tension is to raise the stakes even higher. This is what happened to ‘Star Trek’. As soon as you stop believing that the main characters can ever die, then the only way to get dramatic tension is to have plots that involve saving worlds, then saving galaxies, then saving the universe. It gets more and more unbelievable over time. Next thing you know, you’re travelling in time and meeting galactic energy beings, because it’s the only way to keep the drama moving.
But not so in Firefly. Now we KNOW that no one is safe. We feel it in our bones. If the show continues, then every we’ll know, deep down, that every little mechanical failure, every run-in with a low-life, could possibly result in the death of someone we’ve grown to really care for.
That’s just one reason why Joss’s work carries such an emotional wallop. If you know everything is on the line, then you are not only more scared during the scary parts, but the humor is sweeter as well. The lows are lower, and the highs are higher. Much the same is true in real life.
It might be worth pointing out that the best of all the Star Trek movies had maybe the most beloved character in the series die. Sure, they brought him back later, but I still remember the shocked people walking out of the theater going, “Oh my God! Spock is dead!” But it’s also worth pointing out that by then the Star Trek universe had been so polluted with basically fantasy elements that the emotional impact was dulled by the knowledge that they could bring Spock back easily enough just by invented some technobabble explanation for it. And so they did.
After seeing it again, can anyone explain how the vault door seperating River and the rest of the crew suddenly opened with no one still breathing on either side near the controls?
I just got back from my second viewing, and paid particular attention to this scene because of this thread. Here’s what happens: Serenity lands on the runway and loses all its landing gear. It skids into a hangar, clips a support pillar of some sort and loses one of it nacelles. This spins the ship about ninety degrees. It keeps skidding, sideways now, until it gets to the end of the runway, where there’s some sort of large hole in the deck. A freight/small craft elevator, I think. Serenity’s aft is slightly leading, and drops into the hole first, turning the craft around completely, so that the cockpit is facing the way they came in, and is pretty much the only part of the craft visible above the deck.
Inside the bridge, everyone is speechless for a beat. Wash says, “I am a leaf in the wind. Watch me-” and gets skewered. Zoe leaps out of her chair to go to him. Cut to the view out the windshield, where we see a Reaver ship with two large, obvious cannons floating in front of them. Inside, Mal grabs Zoe and throws her to the floor as another harpoon smashes through the glass and into the wall behind them. They flee. Next scene, they’re in the hallway they play Alamo in. There’s no other shot showing the position of a Reaver ship in relation to Serenity, or even a shot of Serenity until the end of the movie.
I also counted the number of times we saw Reavers use spikes as weapons. Aside from the smaller one that hits Jayne in the leg at the beginning, we see the two Reaver ships pulling apart another ship during the approach to Miranda. At the beginning of the Alliance-Reaver fight, we see another Reaver ship, maybe half the size of Serenity, latch on to a similar-sized Alliance ship, and the two start spinning around eachother like a bolo. Then, at the end of the big fight, we see two Serenity-sized Reaver ships fire grapples into a much larger Alliance cruiser. We also see them using the same sort of weapons when they rapple down on the village at the very beginning.
I seriously have trouble seeing how they could have made exactly what happened in that scene any clearer.
A wizard did it?
Another instance is the gun battle at the beginning of “Our Mrs. Reynolds.” Bullets were flying every which way, but somehow the bad guys’ shots were just a little high. Like you say, if the Good Guys always have a lucky escape, the viewer’s gonna see the results of every crisis as preordained, and take the whole thing less seriously. Per the chorus in Jesus Christ Superstar, “You know what your supporters feel, you’ll escape in the final reel.”
I’m still bummed that Wash died, because I liked Wash. But like you, I have no argument with Joss over it.
River’s programming included a subroutine on “dramatic posing”, including hitting a door control and hastily getting into a cool position when blood-drenched weapons and mood lighting.
Either that or she cut the last Reaver’s head off, it went flying and hit the door control.
Actually, I thought it was a result of the Alliance troopies coming through the wall. By the time River had finished with her batch of Reavers, the Operative’s boys had cleaned up outside, set up their Mark XII Wall-Opener (now in chrome!), and hit an override switch to open any doors their quarry might be hiding behind. I figure they had to come in through the wall because Jayne’s grenades kinda made the first door…messy. 
I’m willing to assume that:
A) River was hamming it up and took a dramatic pose
B) A Reaver (or part of one) fell on the button to open the door as he fell over dead
C) River used some not-seen-before teek trick to trigger the button
D) Dripping Reaver-gibs shorted out the controls, opening the door
E) The doors in the installation are all equipped with Dramatic Timing Devices (DTDs) which determine when to open and close based on dramatic importance (this is how doors invariably close immediately after a good guy’s coat tails have transited through, and immediatly before any villians (Darth Vader, etc.) can get to the doors.
Has anyone heard how Serenity did at the box office after the first weekend? Well enough to raise hopes for more movies?
Not good. Total box office in the first two weeks is around 18 million dollars. It dropped 51% from week one to week two, and will probably drop just as much next week as it is pulled out of theaters.
It baffles me why, to tell you the truth. It’s one of the best reviewed films of the year, and it’s an action-adventure. It’s also got phenomenal word of mouth and internet buzz. Why can’t this movie find an audience?
Like the TV series, it’ll probably do only so-so in the theater, and then be a huge hit on DVD.