JOSS WHEDON has had a curious career. He broke into movies by writing the script for the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, was something of a disaster. Five years later, Whedon brought the Buffy concept to television, where it met with enormous success and established him as a first-team TV talent. In 2002, Whedon launched a series called Firefly; it was cancelled after only a few episodes. And now Whedon has taken the Firefly concept and turned it into his big-screen directing debut with the movie Serenity. If Serenity succeeds, then good for Whedon. But the question remains: Why in the world would Universal hand a small fortune ($40 million) to an unproven film director for a project based on a failed TV series?
The answer–please grab hold of something solid–is simple: merit. Firefly was an underappreciated gem which felt more cinematic than serial. The translation to the big screen only improves an already exceptional product. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Serenity is an ingenious commercial creation which, for devoted fans, serves as a series finale and, for the uninitiated, serves as an enticement to buy the Firefly DVDs.
It is a difficult balancing act, appealing to both of these audiences. As M.E. Russell reported in June, the producers have been very conscious of caring for their base, holding dozens of screenings for the die-hards even while the movie was still a work in progress. Then this past week, Universal tried a slightly gonzo marketing attack by giving free screenings to bloggers in an attempt to build word of mouth among non-fans. We’ll know by Saturday afternoon whether or not Universal has made the sale.
What we already know is that Serenity is an uncommonly good movie.
FIRST, SOME NOTES for those who blinked and missed Firefly during its brief run on Fox. Firefly and Serenity are space Westerns, set in the distant future after man has left Earth and colonized another solar system, terraforming a gaggle of planets and moons. As the settlement progressed, some of the outer planets wanted to break away from the central government, the Alliance. These Independents eventually went to war with the Alliance–and lost.
Firefly begins in the waning days of this civil war with the Battle of Serenity Valley. Whedon’s galactic civil war parallels the American Civil War down to nearly every detail. The Alliance is more urban and wears gray; the Independents are a rag-tag bunch called Browncoats. The Battle of Serenity Valley is like Gettysburg–the high point of the rebellion; after the Independents are defeated there, the war turns quickly against them. Most important, however, is that the Alliance isn’t an Evil Empire–they’re the good guys.
So naturally Whedon made the show’s protagonists a group of defeated confederates who, being on the losing side of Reconstruction, decide against joining respectable, unified society and take to a life of petty crime out on the frontier planets.
The leader of the gang is Mal Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion), a former sergeant in the Independent army who captains a smuggler ship he christens Serenity. At first glance, Mal has the air of Han Solo, but he’s a more direct descendent of Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy: He has something approximating a heart, he would rather run than fight, and, when the issue is forced, he prefers not to fight fair.
Along with Mal is his first mate, Zoe, who fought with him in the war, her husband Wash, who pilots the ship, Jayne, their hired muscle who exists in a state of perpetual near-mutiny, and Kaylee, who’s a cross between Scottie from Star Trek and Julie from The Love Boat. It’s an interesting mix, but that’s just the crew.
In the first episode of the series, Mal, looking for extra cash, picks up some passengers who become part of the regular retinue, including a “registered companion” named Inara (Morena Baccarin) and a brother and sister, Simon and River Tam (Sean Maher and Summer Glau). It is this last pair who become the dramatic engine for Serenity.
THE MOVIE opens with an inventive bit of exposition to bring the audience up to speed on our players. We learn that as a young girl, River was a prodigy with psychic abilities. She was packed off to a special Alliance academy where, in the tradition of Alias and The Pretender, she was poked, prodded, and generally abused by government scientists interested in her potential as a military asset. Simon rescues her from her tormentors and the two of them go on the lam by falling in with Mal and the other miscreants on the Serenity. As the movie begins, the Alliance, which has been haphazardly pursuing River up to this point, realizes that she poses a serious security risk because a self-important bureaucrat paraded her in front of government officials who carried some ugly state secrets. In general, it is bad form to put these sorts of men in the same room as a psychic.
It is out of this desire to keep River quiet that the Alliance dispatches an unnamed operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to find, and silence, her at all costs.
It may not sound like much–stripped to its plot elements, Serenity might well be a sci-fi version of The Bourne Identity–but Whedon has created an incredibly detailed and layered world. It’s a universe where horses coexist with spaceships and Frank Gehry-style metropolises are surrounded by tent-city suburban slums, where dusty, bar-room brawls are the norm and everyone speaks at least passable Chinese.
Whedon’s world has its own culture and subculture, all of which is carefully composed. People speak in fully formed slang, with expressions such as “shiny,” “gorram,” and “humped.” After making his bread and butter on Buffy with witty, knowing, pop-cultural asides, Whedon has stripped Serenity of all cultural references save the spare allusion to Christianity.
(Another point which distinguishes Serenity from the rote, corrupt-government-agent-on-a-rampage genre is Chiwetel Ejiofor’s scene-stealing performance as the Alliance operative. Like all good villains, Ejiofor struts around like he’s the hero of the piece, and, since the Alliance isn’t much more evil than the European Union, his swagger is grounded in rational, if misguided, belief, not the simple evil of psychosis.)
Alternatingly funny and sorrowful, Serenity is packed full of ideas, intelligence, and heart. It’s exactly the movie one would have hoped for from Joss Whedon. In return, we can only hope that once more for Whedon, the second time’s the charm.
Jonathan V. Last is film critic for The Daily Standard and a contributor to the blog Galley Slaves.
