Chrononautic Log: C30, C60, C90, Go

C30, C60, C90, Go

1 o'clock, October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the ~~Oracle~~ old black guy some more lines. Give us enough ~~Union~~ Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the ~~Confederates~~ Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

There's also the fact that we only ever _see_ them in their killer-bloodlust-must-kill-must-eat times. I would guess they are not eating each other when Serenity passes through the big belt just outside their old planet where they all hang out. And, in fact, they seem to be mostly interested in eating other people.

Anyway, I'm told these are basically ripped out of a Dan Simmons book, so how did they make sense there?

I don’t know what Dan Simmons book that would be, but having read Ilium a few weeks ago, I’m not sure I’d bet on them making sense there.

I’m starting to come around, though, to the idea that the Reaver concept (as verbally explained in the film) isn’t nonsense, it’s the two-dimensional way they’re portrayed in the film that’s my problem.

I suspect Reavers and their ships have very short shelf-lives.

Otherwise, there's much wisdom in what you say. I understand why Whedon made the movie he made, but I now wish he'd decided to leave us Firefly fans frustrated and done something that was more self-contained. I keep thinking he missed a chance with the preacher. This movie could've been about his past catching up with him, and the rest of the crew having to deal with the consequences. And then they fly on.

Even for the movie Whedon made, there should've been more romantic resolution with the courtesan. It could always have been undone in the next movie, if need be, 'cause I suspect trying to settle down with someone whose job is sex could raise some issues.

I guess I don't see any of these proposed scenarios making a better standalone movie, if it's still going to have anything to do with the series. David's various revisions would all have made the movie longer; it's reasonable to assume that the studio made Whedon keep it under two hours (there were already cuts made from the original screenplay), so adding scenes would require more cuts elsewhere, and where would they come from?

And I don't see what advantages a movie about Shepherd Book's past catching up to him would have had over the existing one about River's pursuers coming after her. The story of a peaceful man's violent past is always a good one, but if this movie is going to have anything to do with Firefly, you still have the problem of trying to advance the stories of nine different characters in just two hours. Whedon knew this movie might be the last chance to use this cast of characters; he couldn't count on any sequels. If you have to pick one storyline from the series to finish up, I think River's is the best choice.

Given the Mal/Inara chemistry comma lack of (and the unaired episode whose name shall not be spoken), I'm really really glad they didn't go for that romantic resolution.

It would be hard to like a movie that made me shove my car keys into my eyes.

“It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show,” he said. (Emphasis added.)

The rest I can’s speak to, having never seen the series, but it does occur to me that it’s not necessary for a film based on a TV show (any more than it is for an individual episode of a TV show) to be centered on any of the TV show’s ongoing storylines.

Hm. If the film hadn't addressed any of the ongoing plotlines from the TV show, it would have been bizarre, I think. But, clearly the film didn't work for you on several levels, and that's cool. I do feel a little bit, though, as though your comments don't address so much what the film was as what you might have liked it to be. Which is fair to an extent, but is also tricky. Just sayin'.

So, I can only address what the film was from the point of view of someone who’s never seen the TV show, and in a vacuum, without the TV show, the film falls flat. It’s watchable, but it’s in many ways not a particularly good film. The best thing you can say for it, taken as a whole, is that it’s not bad in the ways most bad SF films — which is to say, most SF films — are bad.

One could, of course, argue that having not seen the series I was not in the target audience for the film and shouldn’t have gone to see it in the first place.

Here’s what it comes down to, I think. My personal take on tie-ins and adaptations and translations to other media is that you should put the new work and the new medium first. If being true to the original means compromising the new work, the new work should win every time. (This goes for things where I am familiar with the original, too, so don’t get your hackles up.)

But that’s just my personal preference, and I’m not going to try to convince anyone of it who believes the opposite.

Regarding Jewel Staite -- "the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen" -- who was my favorite thing about Firefly and who was criminally under-represented in film, you oughta pick up the DVD of Wonderfalls, where Jewel Staite has a pretty good guest role for the last few episodes, which were never aired on TV. Wonderfalls ain't a perfect show, but it's funny and snarky, and it doesn't have that body-without-a-head feeling that a lot of canceled shows have (that is, the first-and-only season actually tells a contained, complete story).

As someone who's more or less a fan of the series (though not as much of a fan as many), I pretty much agree with your criticisms of the movie.

I'll post a review sooner or later, but for now, just a couple quick comments:

1. I always hated the Reavers in the show, and I was sad to see them so central to the movie's story, and I totally agree about the silliness of there being dozens of Reaver ships just floating out there in space waiting for people to come by to be eaten.

2. The series was a transplanted Western, and I liked it a lot more once I started thinking of it in those terms, and understanding that the goofy Western stuff (the saloon fight, the train robbery, the whorehouse, etc) was part of the genre. The movie, though, imo, wasn't a Western. It kept a few Western bits (the guns, the accents) but not enough of them to make sense. The movie, imo, was essentially a zombie movie.

3. The show's audience wasn't big enough to support the film, so I think Whedon was trying to make a film that worked both for fans of the series and for those who'd never seen it. He clearly succeeded with the former—the fans of the series I've talked with mostly loved the movie—but I suspect that won't be good enough to get him a sequel movie or series unless enough people who didn't know the series liked the movie too.

It's worth noting that most reviews of Serenity have been positive (81% on Rotten Tomatoes), and the vast majority of those reviewers had no knowledge of the TV series, so obviously the film does succeed as a standalone work for many people.

Chrononautic Log

C30, C60, C90, Go

1 o'clock, October 11, 2005

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