Serenity: Immunity Mal
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 22, 2010 00:26
VIEWED: 3947
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Hello,
There's something that's been bothering me since I saw Serenity, and I wondered if it has bothered any of you. Perhaps I missed a crucial detail that would make sense of it.
At the end of the film, I thought I saw the Operative shoot Mal in the back. I also thought I saw Mal comment on this fact before shrugging it off.
Now, normally one might imagine this to be a critical event, but Mal just shrugs off the experience and goes on to engage in a Determinator fight scene that starts with him out-drawing the Operative, and ends with him using a clever un-telegraphed war injury ex machina to defeat the operative.
Between the two events, Mal is treated no better than hamburger by the Operative.
Is there a cut-scene or out-of-universe explanation for Mal's immunity to harm in this scene? Was there something about the gun that I should have noticed to explain its bizarre ineffectiveness? Did the war injury get foreshadowed at some earlier point in the film? Are we supposed to assume that Mal is wearing body armor?
What did I miss that makes this scene more sensible? Despite being Mal's big hero moment, it has stuck in my mind as a thorn since I saw it, as one of the least believable sequences in the film.
--Anthony
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He shoots Mal with some sort of stun weapon, which causes Mal to fall. The Operative has a killing weapon of choice. A sword. He won't shoot when he can stab.
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I think the foreshadowing is in Ariel when the alliance weapons are silly stun gun things. They seemed to only temporarily stun people. That was a whole big gun. Larger than a shotgun even. In the movie he just had a little sidearm. It might do nothing more then shock a person and make them not want to be shocked again.
It's kind of weak, but that's the best way I can understand it. Plus Mal is a human pin cushion. In case you missed it he gets run straight through with a sword (they took out the shot showing him standing there with a sword straight through him after people balked at it during the prescreenings) and continues to fight. So, it seems like anything less than decapitation won't really slow Mal down.
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"He shoots Mal with some sort of stun weapon, which causes Mal to fall. The Operative has a killing weapon of choice. A sword. He won't shoot when he can stab."
Hello,
This doesn't precisely work for me because the weapon doesn't stun him much at all, within less than 10 seconds Mal has enough motor control to perform a quickdraw. And the Operative DOES shoot him. It seems the only reason the Operative doesn't shoot him a second time is because the gun was shot out of his hand. (Not that the gun appeared to be even as effective as a 1980's era taser... if it WAS a stun weapon. Is that stated somewhere? The Operative pulled the sidearm from a dead bridge officer.)
--Anthony
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"I think the foreshadowing is in Ariel when the alliance weapons are silly stun gun things. They seemed to only temporarily stun people. That was a whole big gun. Larger than a shotgun even. In the movie he just had a little sidearm. It might do nothing more then shock a person and make them not want to be shocked again."
Hello,
Well, that may be, but it's a big problem for that information to not be in the movie. It's what I keep telling myself- that the weapon is implied to be utterly ineffective. However, since that's not set up anywhere else, I'm bothered by it.
"Plus Mal is a human pin cushion. In case you missed it he gets run straight through with a sword"
I didn't miss it. I remember when I was a kid and Rambo used gunpowder to cauterize a gunshot wound that passed clear through his torso the day before scaling a cliff.
"So, it seems like anything less than decapitation won't really slow Mal down."
It seems so. I had hoped that I missed a critical detail in the film, but apparently we're just supposed to swallow it without sugar.
It's a bit of uncharacteristic bad writing from Joss. Mal shrugs off gunfire because the plot requires it. Mal has a secret immunity war injury because the plot requires it. These things will come without any set-up or foreshadowing. We are expected to swallow them, and we do swallow them because we love this world, but it wouldn't be tolerated from strangers.
--Anthony
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The Alliance weapons in Ariel and in the movie are sonic guns. When Simon and River are escaping at the beginning of the movie, we see someone trying to shoot at them, but the sound wave can't get through the glass, so they start banging on it with the otherwise-useless pistols. The Operative has a similar weapon. The sonic blast hits Mal in the back, spreads across his body, and the force knocks him down. It doesn't stun him because it's not, in fact, a stun gun, it's the force of sound waves.
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Actually, the war injury was foreshadowed in Objects in Space of all places. Jubal Early tries to use the same kidney shot on Mal to incapacitate him, only for Mal to unexpectedly fight back.
Watch that scene very closely. :)
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Per the Serenity Visual Companion, and the novelization, it's a laser. That's all it says, laser.
Like someone said before, must have been on a low setting. Or, just another piece of crap Alliance hardware.
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"The sonic blast hits Mal in the back"
Hello,
I must agree with Mutt that this isn't a sonic weapon, as it had some illuminated sparky effects that would be hard to explain with sound waves. Also, the only times I can remember someone getting shot with an Alliance weapon, it was highly effective. The only times Alliance hardware was NOT effective in the series was when it was used against inanimate objects, it failed to fire entirely, or it ran out of juice at a critical juncture. It's the saving grace of the stuff that when it works, it works well. Otherwise it'd be hard to explain why they have it at all.
Moreover, without some foreshadowing about ineffective Alliance hardware in the movie, it's just- I stress again- bad storytelling. A gun that mysteriously doesn't do much, sharing a scene with a deus-ex war injury.
If I remember correctly, Wash died (per Joss) so that there would be a sense of real jeopardy and danger throughout the remainder of the film. If Wash dies, especially so suddenly and unexpectedly, anyone can die.
This is such a sharp contrast with the later scene with Mal, where the character inexplicably avoids death and defeat, not through mere cleverness or determination, but through means hard to grasp in the context of the film: He is gun-proof for no reason, and he has a magic immunity to paralysis. In the former case, the gun-proofedness is just ignored. In the later case, it is hand-waved away after the fact.
There's not even, near as I can tell, an establishing shot of Mal where we see old scars on his back or anything of the kind. Not even a single second of time is used to establish his imperviousness. It’s just stated after the fact. "Oh, by the way, did I mention I spent the past several years developing an immunity to Iocane powder?" That sort of thing belongs in a comedy that makes fun of itself, not as the climax to a piece of drama. But if we are going to accept after-the-fact explanations, can we at least get a brief nod for the Operative's Sad Gun? Perhaps a counter-point to the Operative's earlier statement in the same film? "You're not the only one who wears body armor" Mal might say, or "And people ask me why I carry a sword," the Operative might lament.
I love Firefly, and I love our Big Damn Heroes, but I see problems with Serenity that go beyond the creator offing Wash. The climax of the film suffers from bad storytelling.
"Jubal Early tries to use the same kidney shot on Mal to incapacitate him, only for Mal to unexpectedly fight back."
Well, I'll have to re-watch that. I suppose it would be a small comfort. Of course, it doesn't fix the bad storytelling angle in that nothing within the context of the movie prepares you for it.
--Anthony
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
nothing within the context of the movie prepares you for it.
Except for the opening escape of Simon and River, where the gun is shown to be unable to actually penetrate something.
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