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Orson Scott Card Reviews Serenity!

POSTED BY: NynaeverRahl
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 5, 2005 21:45
VIEWED: 648
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Wednesday, October 5, 2005 9:45 PM

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2005-09-30-extra.shtml

Uncle Orson Reviews Everything


Serenity

For some of you, 30 September 2005 has been circled on your calendars ever since the release date of Serenity was announced. That's because you have seen the TV series Firefly and you love these characters and can't wait to see them again.

Some of you have no idea what all the hooplah is about.

Some of you didn't even know there was any hooplah.

And it's true that there hasn't been some massive hype campaign. Instead, the producers and the studio did something different.

They held special screenings of Serenity starting much earlier in the year, letting diehard fans of Firefly see the feature film and then talk about it.

And talk they have. I've been hearing buzz about how great the movie is for months.

But here's how much the fans love this movie and want it to succeed. Some massively important things happen in this movie, things that are emotionally devastating, things that it would be almost unbearable to know about without telling.

Yet as far as I know, nobody has told. I walked into this movie reasonably aware of the advance word-of-mouth (though not obsessively so) and only as the film actually began this afternoon, the day of its premier, did it occur to me that I had not heard a whisper of a breath of the actual plot of the movie. All I heard was, "It's great, you'll love it."

Well, guess what.

It's great.

I'm not going to say it's the best science fiction movie, ever.

Oh, wait. Yes I am.

Let me put this another way. Those of you who know my work at all know about Ender's Game. I jealously protected the movie rights to Ender's Game so that it would not be filmed until it could be done right. I knew what kind of movie it had to be, and I tried to keep it away from directors, writers, and studios who would try to turn it into the kind of movie they think of as "sci-fi."

Because I know that science fiction doesn't have to be all mindless action. Or even mindful action. I can praise a movie like I, Robot and mean it, without for a second thinking that what I'm seeing is great sci-fi.

I can enjoy the first Matrix and see it as a kind of magic sci-fi, but recognize that in the end, it's all about the mystical quasi-religious ideas and the special effects, and not about human beings at all.

Because for me, a great film -- sci-fi or otherwise -- comes down to relationships and moral decisions. How people are with each other, how they build communities, what they sacrifice for the sake of others, what they mean when they think of a decision as right vs. wrong.

Yeah, even comedies. Even romantic comedies -- it's those moral decisions.

Wow, that sounds so heavy. But great film is heavy -- out of sight, underneath everything, where you don't have to be slapped in the face by it. On the surface, it can be exciting, funny, cool, scary, horrifying -- all those things that mean "entertainment" to us.

Underneath it all, though, it has to mean something. And the meaning that matters is invariably about moral decisions people make. Motives. Relationships. Community. If those don't work, then you can gloss up the surface all you want, we'll know we've just been fed smoke. Might smell great but we're still hungry.

So here's what I have to say about Serenity:

This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar).

And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be.

And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.

I'd rather just watch Serenity again.

Now, I'm fussy about my science fiction movies. For the past few years I've been telling people that there are only a handful of truly brilliant sci-fi movies, and most of them are by Charlie Kaufman. (I almost don't care who the director is -- Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of th

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