Joss Whedon is a rarity, a television writer/producer who is as popular as his creations. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, a screenwriter for Toy Story, and the power behind the short-lived series, Firefly. The comedic wit that distinguishes his dramatic fantasies is the attraction that has made Whedon a brand name in television. So much that Firefly, a 2002 science-fiction adventure series canceled before its first 13 episodes had aired could be green-lit for production as a feature film, Serenity, which opened this past weekend. I can’t think of a precedent for a series canceled so soon finding a movie afterlife, but this is how hot Whedon is.
I never watched the series even though I am generally drawn to this kind of genre. Firefly was set in future era when the powerful Alliance dominates a star system but has little power over the worlds on the edge of the system, a less civilized culture meant to remind us of the wild west with the crew of the Serenity as a band of rogues and mavericks who pull capers and evade the Alliance, sort of a whole shipload of Han Solos.
The film has had an unusual pre-release strategy of preview screenings, many more than the usual marketing plan for a film and this tactic successfully built positive word of mouth among the fanbase. One viewer wrote glowingly in USA Today that not only did she like the movie, the audience was quiet and attentive as well, a rare experience in these days of noisy and thoughtless audiences. So I was intrigued, yet the trailer had done nothing for me. I just didn’t get whatever it was that fans were attracted to.
So, I thought I’d give it a try and saw it Sunday afternoon. During the feature I heard male laughter on the other side of the theater and figured it must be fans of the show who knew the characters and thus were primed for the quips they made. The story itself was pretty good, involving the pursuit by an Alliance operative of one of the crew’s passengers, a teenage psychic whom the Alliance had subjected to a cruel form of conditioning in their attempt to turn her into a “weapon.” This being a feature film the production values were bigger than television and the story involved more of a stake than the standard television episode, but I felt that I never got to know the crew very well and thus had trouble caring that much about what happened to them.
Many of the characters speak in a semi-formal sort of old West style (“I aim to misbehave” says Mal, the captain of the maverick ship.) This mixing of the western and space opera either works for a viewer or doesn’t. The same goes for the hip quips. As the trailer had indicated, it was filled with clever one liners that seemed too precious to be credible. That is a trait of Whedon’s writing and while sometimes amusing, it also pulled me out of the story at such on-the-nose remarks that seem to point back at the screen writer since I found it hard to believe these people would talk like characters in a sitcom.
In terms of the film’s themes, there was an interesting plotline on the utopian aspirations of society in a better-living-through-chemistry scheme that, naturally, backfires horribly. Again we see what happens when humanity attempts to eradicate sin without redemption.
The box-office total for the film was reported to be just over $10 million, a disappointing amount for a film with this much buzz. It seems that a short-lived series with a cult following, though given a feature-film status, won’t be able to leverage that rare opportunity into big-screen success.
