Outlaw Vern reviewed Serenity

POSTED BY: Evans
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 02:17
VIEWED: 5102
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EVANS

Wednesday, October 19, 2005 12:06 AM

Excuse me if this has already been posted.

Outlaw Vern reviewed "Serenity" for readers of his Reviews on the Films of Cinema. Vern is a specialist of Badass cinema.

http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern/
Vern's Front Page, 10/1/2005

or, I quote it all here. WARNING. Contains spoilers and bad language:

Quote:

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SERENITY

It's all Laremy Legel's fault. I know, sounds like a made up name, but this is apparently a real guy, a fellow Seattle movie reviewer who emails me all the time. As you know I am one of them lone wolfs they got, so I don't want any part of no critical community or nothin. So I've made kind of a sport of dodging this guy's kind offers to go to critic's screenings with him. He sees alot of the same movies I do, but weeks early and for free. So I really oughta go but I told him look bud, I like to see the movies with my man Joe Public. (Joe Public actually is a made up name, it is symbolic of regular individuals such as you or I and not critics. Just to be clear. I think you knew that though sorry)

Anyway, Laremy gives me a heads up on alot of these, and he has a pretty good track record. He told me about 40 Year Old Virgin, he warned me that Lord of War was not as good as hoped, and a couple other ones. So I took him seriously when he said "SERENITY will be HUGE. Nice flick, nice laughs, nice action, well done all the way around. Summer Glau is highly doable as well." When I asked him if that was that one space ship movie he got a little more thoughtful and warned not to get too excited because "it's better with no expectations, like peyote."

Well I gotta agree with Laremy again although I'm not sure which one it was that somebody was gonna "do." This is a well put together space movie, all made out of familiar elements but not feeling like your typical hollywood space picture you would expect to see in a theater these days. The story is about the crew of one medium sized spaceship (a little smaller than Hans Solo's ship) which is called Serenity. That is why the movie is also called Serenity, it is the name of the spaceship. Anyway there's maybe 7 or 8 people on this ship but the important ones are 1. the captain, who will serve as our rogueish hero and 2. a babbling/maybe retarded teenage girl named River who is wanted by the space government because they made her into a psychic/kung fu killing machine and she may or may not know their secrets.

And then the other most important character actually doesn't have a name for me to forget, but he is a super secret black ops type deadly assassin motherfucker who works for the space government. And he has a sword. Not a light saber, a sword. He's trying to kill the retarded psychic but they won't give her up on account of morals so he starts massacring everybody they know. Alot of innocent people die in this movie.

This is a weirdly old timey kind of future. Yeah they got spaceships and planets and what not but they still use bullets and knives. They punch alot. And they talk this kind of cowboy talk like "reckon" and what not. But it's also kind of current because they still have silk screened t-shirts, vibrators and other modern conveniences, not space-ified. This is maybe the first ever non-porno space movie to have a reference to a vibrator. Unless I missed something in 2001.

Also this story is based on the civil war, only in space, and not about slavery, so the south are the good guys. The captain and another member of the crew were veterans of the war, on the losing side, before they became smugglers or whatever it is they do now when not running from the nameless space assassin sword guy.

I like the idea behind this movie because it's real different from the STAR pictures. Unlike STAR WARS it's not a huge epic. No princesses or chosen ones. I admit they do take on the government and accomplish something big, but they really do seem like regular space joes. They just stumble upon it. And it's not like STAR TREK because the "federation" (I think it's called the alliance here) is the bad guys. Not comic book Darth Vader bad

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