Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Yes, I couldn't resist: I went back to the multiplex and saw "Serenity" again yesterday afternoon, and I couldn't be more pleased with the way it held up to repeated viewing. Not only did the pleasure and excitement remain, but I was able to pick up on and interpret many of River's supposedly "insane" comments from earlier in the film, now that I could put them in a larger, meaningful context. I'd actually go again this week, if I could steal the time.

I'm kind of disappointed that "Serenity" wasn't the biggest box office draw over the weekend, with "only" 10 million dollars in ticket sales, compared to the poorly reviewed "Flightplan" at 14 million dollars in its second weekend. However, I know I did my part, at least. And I don't think the theater chains have had a lot of confidence in "Serenity" -- at least, it's only playing on one screen (as compared to two or three for other current films, including "Corpse Bride") at each of the multiplexes I go to, and with no extra matinees or anything. Oh, well.

Hopefully, it'll still do well enough to justify further films, 'cause this is a franchise I'd definitely be interested in following, now.

A friend on a mailing list forwarded a review of "Serenity" written by some "Hollywood Reporter" who apparently never watched the series Firefly. Besides mostly very positive comments on the film and its cast, the review's second-to-last paragraph had this to say:

'Whedon's theme of outcasts resisting the intrusions of an omniscient law-and-order government is ever-timely, and his ideas come across with more subtlety than those in "Star Wars" or "Star Trek." Even more timely is a revelation concerning behaviour modification gone awry that resonates in this age of Zoloft. But, arriving late in the story, it remains a plot point rather than a developed concept.'

Well, I agree about the timeliness of the message about the Alliance's attempts at behavior modification (shades of The Initiative in BtVS season 4), but I don't agree about it coming too late in the film.

After all, my impression (which was confirmed on second viewing) was that the over-riding message of the film is "love" (what keeps the ship flying when she should fall out of the sky, etc., and what motivates a man to give up everything for the sake of his sister, or to stake his life for something he believes in). Which means that all that relationship-working-out stuff among the crew in the first half of the film is very much to the point and quite necessary. Otherwise, why would we (especially those of us in the audience who might not be familiar with the TV series) care about what happens to everyone in the oh-so-riveting and brilliantly-done climactic scenes near the end?

Of course, that's just my opinion. But this film was exactly to my taste, in that it allowed me to get a sense of the souls of the people involved, and especially of Mal Reynolds, with every bit of action or humor being in one way or another revelatory of the internal life of the characters, rather than just feeling like an arbitrary adrenalin-rush or overly-calculated laugh line, inserted into the film at regular intervals to keep the audience awake when the people on screen are showing themselves to be tiresomely two-dimensional (yes, "Matrix" films, I am talking about you, among others).