Anyone else disappointed?
POSTED BY: sagrilarus
UPDATED: Thursday, October 20, 2005 10:05
VIEWED: 41679
PAGE 9 of 14
Wow, I am surprised it took me so long to find this website. Hey everyone :)
I loved the movie. The only problems I had were that there was so much left open after the series ended (damn you FOX!) And that there were more questions I would have like answered, as far as Book's past. And at least there was a bit of closure!
As far as the whole Wash ordeal. It upset me alot. Not even so much that he killed off my character. Characters die, it happens and I understand that. When it comes down to it, had Serenity been a movie first before the Series of Firefly it obviously wouldn't have been AS dramatic. But for fans of the show, who had invested weeks (or years for those of you who may have recorded each episode off your tv.. and watched them 5,000 times over) into these characters, and to have such an abruptness to the death, it felt more like a bad horror movie whose only purpose in even having an ensemble is to pick them off.
I will continue to be a fan of this show, obviously, because I do believe in Joss, and I do believe that Serenity has SO much potential to become the "Next Big Sci Fi Adventure" as I read somewhere.
SO overall was I disapointed? Not at all. I think its a great movie. Did some things really suck. Absolutely. But I guess thats why it IS such a great movie. Obviously if youre fired up about it, it got the job done. I know I was emotional, It was funny, the action rocked, and Now I'm even more interested to see other installments, be a movie, continuation of the series, whatever.
We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero. - Wash
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@GiantEvilHead:
Ok, I read the first 2 sentences of your post and stopped. You, aren't getting the point.
You can make all the assumptions that you want. But, if they completely contradict prior knowledge, established norms, for the character. Then they are acting out of character. Period.
Your assumptions are and contrary to known facts.
Just go back and look at how many times you've used the terms, "I assume", "I think", etc. Look at how many times I've brought up actual events that happened. Actual known peronality norms. Actual behaviour.
I am basing what I think on prior knowledge and you are basing yours on fabrications.
Continue in this way and you're not going to convince me of anything.
I highly recommend (again) that you re-watch the series. Then and only then, will you realize the error of your ways. Because, it is clear, you have forgotten what is in the series.
Accept it, deal with it, move on.
P.S. If you aren't going to actually bring up actual events that happened in the Firefly 'verse then don't bother replying to this post. I have not interest in invaidating your baseless conjectures anymore, nor do I have the time.
----
"We're in a giant car heading into a brick wall at 100 miles/hr and everybody's arguing about where they want to sit."
-David Suzuki
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BTW- I don't think I was disappointed as much as thrown off-balance. I knew enought not to expect Firefly, but Serenity was off my personal radar. I'll prolly have to watch again to view the movie on its own merits, not in comparison to FF.
Please don't think they give a shit.
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Hey Signy, good to hear from you.
I have this image in my head of all of us who were disappointed in the BDM quarantined in some cyber-spatial infirmary. I see you walk through the door and I'm both happy to see you and sad that "it" has claimed yet another in our ranks.
Glad you brought up the issue of political naïveté. I kept thinking that Mr. Universe's real name would be Noam Chomsky. The whole "can't stop the signal" plot is like something out of 80's cyber-punk. And for most people, the catastrophe itself would never be a problem, it was an experiment gone awry is all; the only thing most good Alliance citizens might have a problem with is the cover up, but affluent citizens everywhere tend to relish their ignorance when it comes to their government's dirty secrets. I can easily see the general public feeling sorry for the "poor scientists" and the "poor government" that had to deal with the aftermath of a disaster "no one could have seen coming."
"If I was the Parliament, I'd cover it up too, who wants to know about such a tragedy when the damage is done?"
"But the reavers kill thousands of people on the outer rim every year."
"There's a lot more than reavers out there can kill a man, kid. It's a tough life on the rim."
Or to paraphrase ScifiNut's reply to Howard on this thread, "That's just anti-Alliance propaganda!" And Howard was talking about the pentagon papers where the genocide was intentional, not just an unforseen side-effect of an onstensibly harmless drug.
In short: no scandal, no political upheaval.
T'other thing about the River plot that bugged me right off the bat was how slipshod the Alliance psi-ops department would have to be not to keep their psychic subjects away from anyone with sensitive info. How lame was that? Made me wonder for a second if Joss was telling us that River's psychic power was a fluke or something (the only possible way the Alliance wouldn't have kept her quarantined). Another unanswered question: was she psychic to begin with and the Alliance was enhancing her gift, or were they "making" her psychic? And whether they were enhancing it or inducing it, why would they do such a thing? What exactly are the applications of psychic sensitivity to being an assassin? On the face of it, seems a secret government would want to render their assassins less sensitive, not more. Seems it would create more problems than it solves for a secret government agency unless they had proven methods of mind control. So many plot holes, gonna have to close the road!
So, River Tam's psychic power amounts to nothing more than being the wrong girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. I agree with Signy, seemed the series was building to something slightly more significant. The Operative killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people just to shut up a witness--a witness to a scandal that would have had less impact on the Alliance than East Timor has had on the USA. Grrr. Arrgh.
Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
To think that everyone including the Operative will rise up... or at least wake up... from a one-time airing of damning evidence shows a political naivete that I don't expect from Joss. After all, look at how many intelligent fans on this board STILL think that Bush is doing a good job. They haven't woke up yet!Again, I know he had to compress the story into movie-length, but that sort of trivial resolution just doesn't match the weight of the issues that he raises.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Quote:
Originally posted by TheSomnambulist:
Thing is because Mal pretended he was paralysed he kinda won through chicanery anyhow.
Notice that he knew the effect a hit on that cluster was supposed to have; there's a lot of Eastern culture in the 'Verse, and odd are this particular tactic has become, if not widely know, at least familiar to someone with combat experience.
On the main point of this thread: No, I was not disappointed. To my mind, and allowing for several months of poor luck and worse paydays, everyone's characterization was dead on.
Specific points:
Simon wasn't an incompetent. Check out "Ariel" if you doubt; his plan is smooth and well thought out, and he sells it with panache. What he is in the series is a fish out of water. Simon Templar in Mayberry. By the BDM's timeframe, he's gotten a bit more seasoned to the frontier -- and good enough to clock Mal with a sucker punch.
Kaylee's vibrator line was perfectly in character, IIMHO, and brought down the house all four times I've seen the film.
Jayne's willingness to go in harms way despite the risk and lack of profit: this is the part of Jayne that tried to make itself known when the mudder boy died for him, the part that helped storm Niska's Skyplex for Mal's sake. (It's well forshadowed in the Comic story, too, in his reaction to a similar scene of random, large-scale death.) Quite simply, it takes a lot to make Jayne take the moral high ground--but Minerva qualified.
"She's tore up plenty. But she'll fly true." -- Zoë Washburn
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"Disappointed" isn't the word... "disgusted" is. I originally posted this over on Browncoats in a thread called, "To Joss the Firefly Slayer"
I'll start on a positive note... this movie got two things right:
- Inara is back aboard, where she belongs.
- The Miranda / Reaver / River backstory was excellent, though not without flaws (I'll get to that).
Unfortunately, in every other way this movie got it completely wrong. Let's start by working backward, from the least to the greatest of offences:
THE MUSIC
The opening theme... yeah, not bad... I can definitely live with it. It had a FIREFLY-ish feel to it. Unfortunately, that's where it ended. Now, I'm NOT a fan of country music, but the odd country-western/asian blending we had in FIREFLY *REALLY* worked for me. There was just nothing special about the SERENITY soundtrack. Like the visuals, it was cold, flat, generic and unimpressive.
REWRITING HISTORY
What can I say? The character of Simon was simply not the character from FIREFLY. Too bold, too brash, too aggressive. Worse, the account of River's escape directly contradicted what we saw in the series pilot. Revisionist history is a horrible way to tell the story you want to tell... it may seem to be only events and happenings but when it is so integral to our understanding of, not one, but two characters, it's a fatal mistake.
SERENITY
Serenity herself... there are things I like and dislike. I'm glad the ship didn't change radically. Kaylee's stenciled flowers in the kitchen were there, the mish-mash of chairs and the worn table were there. The problem was that while the Serenity of FIREFLY had warm brown, yellow and rust tones, the Serenity of SERENITY had cold blues and greys. One thing I *DID* like was the rebuilding of the bridge -- the bridge of FIREFLY always seemed a little TOO beaten up to be functional. The bridge in SERENITY was clearly functional, but again... in cold blues and greys... I know this is a small thing but it changed the whole feel of the ship from one of being a comfortable and welcoming coccoon to being a cold and sterile container. This touches on the whole sci-fi/western element. The cold sci-fi element was present in spades but the warm western element was gone...
RIVER THE REAVER SLAYER
This was one of the truly low points of the movie... why do American TV and movies insist on producing pulpy shows and movies where a 90lb waif of a girl can easily defeat wave after wave of 200lb males intent of savagely killing her? Let's be honest, this was a cow-tow to the BUFFY fans with the Reavers in the part of Vampires and River in the part of Buffy. This is such an overplayed and ludicrous idea that it cheapens the end product. Even if this had not been in the movie, there's still a serious flaw in making River into an ASSASSIN !?!?! What were you thinking? Anyone with a steady hand can squeeze a trigger and kill someone. Someone with River's intellect and ability to read minds would be WASTED in the role of an assassin... she'd be SO much more useful in a diplomatic environment where she could simply walk around a room reading minds and reporting information back to her handlers.
KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS
First of all, I am *NOT* averse to killing characters. In some situations it works very well. Some of the most memorable shows I've seen have done it at some point or another.
When your show is story-driven, killing characters has the effect of furthering the story you want to tell. The characters are a function of the story. FIREFLY, though, was NOT story-driven... it was CHARACTER-driven. When you kill characters in a character-driven show, you change the dynamic, disrupting the balance you sought to achieve in the first place. The ensemble of characters in FIREFLY had some of the greatest on-screen chemistry ever filmed. Killing Book and Wash has destroyed a significant portion of that chemistry. So much so, in fact, that it can not be recovered and the show itself ceases to be.
I've seen people argue that the character deaths made the re
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
To think that everyone including the Operative will rise up... or at least wake up... from a one-time airing of damning evidence shows a political naivete that I don't expect from Joss. After all, look at how many intelligent fans on this board STILL think that Bush is doing a good job. They haven't woke up yet!
I don't think there was anything politically naive from Joss. That airing is gonna run way more than once. Every man and woman who wants a seat on Parliment but needs to weaken their opponent will make sure it does. There will be protests, hearings, scapegoats, news reports, political infighting, and then everyone will slowly forget. Nothing in the movie suggests otherwise. Even the Operative says that Parliment is weak right now, but that they may come at them later. That's how it works. People lose power from scandals, and they they either fall away or rebuild.
It would have been nice, however, to have seen these lines that were in the script but not in the movie:
(from the last scene with the Operative and Mal)
OPERATIVE
Do you know the uproar you've caused? Protests, riots -- cries for the recall or Parliment.
MAL
We've seen the broadwaves.
OPERATIVE
You must be pleased.
MAL
'Verse wakes up for a spell. Won't be long 'fore she rolls right over and falls back asleep. T'aint my worry.
Wish that had been there, 'cause that's exactly how it works. There is outrage, politicians do their spin (maybe a couple lose their jobs), and then everyone rolls over and falls back asleep.
Of course, 30 million died, so it'll be a bigger scandal than some, but it'll run its course...
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@Kestrel:
Bang on!
And as Rue wrote, there was no "quirky, intimate, indefinite plot-lines and character development."
That was what Firefly was. It was all about the characters. And Joss took that away.
I weep for what we have lost.
But, at least we still have the DVD set.
EDIT: Why aren't people questioning that the Operative is still alive at the end of the movie? He went through the entire thing speaking about falling on ones sword when one screws up, etc. But, at the end of the movie, he has failed to do so himself.
Even if you consider him not being allied with the Alliance anymore, it's still his code. Why wouldn't he fall on it for just having failed to see the truth for so long?
Grrr.
----
"We're in a giant car heading into a brick wall at 100 miles/hr and everybody's arguing about where they want to sit."
-David Suzuki
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Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
Why aren't people questioning that the Operative is still alive at the end of the movie? He went through the entire thing speaking about falling on ones sword when one screws up, etc. But, at the end of the movie, he has failed to do so himself.
I have two competing theories on this.
The first is that he intends to kill himself once he sees off Serenity. When he tells Mal "you won't, there is nothing left to see" in reference to the possibility of Mal seeing him again, my first impression was that he was going to kill himself since he had nothing left. (The only reason to see them off first is because they were wronged by the thing the Operative once believed in so deeply. Helping them is an act of contrition.)
The second theory is that now that he's turned away from the Alliance, he doesn't see failing them as a something worth dying over. His belief in falling on the sword is not for any screw up, but for failing the institution to which he had unwavering faith. He no longer has the level of devotion to the Alliance that would warrant that sacrifice. In this case, "nothing left to see" is a way of saying "the man you met no longer exists" and may not be the precurser to a suicide. He may be leaving to find a new path.
I tend to lean toward the second theory because of the other dialogue in that scene. Mal suggests the Alliance may try to kill the Operative and the Operative seems to accept it as a possibility, which wouldn't be a concern to a man planning to kill himself.
(Lines from the script that didn't make the screen also have the Operative asking Mal how he carried on after losing everything in the battle of Serenity -- which suggests to me a man looking for a new path.)
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