How could such a good start go so wrong?
Serenity.
For some people, this will bring to mind a quiet brook, gently babbling over rocks in a depression filled with grass of a quite vibrant shade of green. For others, it will cause them to envision a slow massage by knowing hands lit only by the flickering glow of a candle.
As for me, I think of a spaceship and the loss of something great.
Quite some time back, a friend of mine introduced me to the television series “Firefly” which had a half-season run on Fox before being canceled. I’m not big on most television shows. In fact, when it comes to spending my money on DVD entertainment, I’m a mite hesitant to spend it on something that comes in episodes. To say that I’m skeptical of episodic television as a legitimate medium for telling compelling stories is surely an understatement.
Why? The answer is simple – it is very difficult to tell a story that needs telling in the space of a half-hour. It is easy to build the typical sitcom. Throw some wacky one-dimensional characters into a room together and let the hijinks ensue. Action sequences, and simple-minded jokes may be entertaining for a spell, but they get mighty old, mighty fast.
In the show “Firefly,” I found something that I thought was worthy of being seen… stories that deserved to be told. The episodic nature of it still bothers me, but running deeply underneath the brief hour-long vignettes ran a very emotional and intense journey into the hearts of human relationships. Each character had a history that humanized them, hopes and dreams, fears, and secrets that they weren’t quite ready to reveal. It was a humbling experience to realize that I actually cared about some of the fictional characters. No matter how much you may want them to win a contest, no singer on a stage or pretend businessperson in a boardroom can command your heartstrings or strip away the carefully tended defenses we all erect to keep the vulnerable parts of us hidden away.
Yet, this is precisely what the series “Firefly” did, and did on a masterful level that I’ve only rarely seen in television or cinema. The series was a case-study in varying types of powerful love that can exist between people. There existed an undercurrent of selfless and protective sibling love, newly blossoming and still tentative love, tragic and unspoken love, and playful and well-established love between a married couple, along with many other forms of friendship, care, and compassion to boot.
While my praise for the series is quite high, there exists a dark side to this story known as the movie, “Serenity.” Created as a way to cash in on the growing popularity of a television show that never made it through a season, “Serenity” did what I thought no movie could possibly do. It killed “Firefly.”
“Serenity” was not a movie driven by the force of the characters that inhabited the world. Instead, it was a low-quality action film with more than enough explosions, aerial dogfights, and gun battles to fill up a sizeable portion of the movie. Secrets that were closely held throughout the full 14 episodes of “Firefly” were revealed without fanfare on “Serenity.”
There are people who like to not know the answers to mysteries, finding that the solution inevitably robs the mystery of its beauty and power. I am not one of those people. I am the guy that not only wants to know the answer to the questions, but denies that the mysteries are somehow beautiful in and of themselves. However, revealing the secrets all at once seems vulgar and hurried. Whereas the television show languorously revealed the delicious truths that I wanted to know, the movie version simply ripped the secrets out into the open making me wonder why they needed to be hidden in the first place. Think of it like disrobing in front of a lover… There may be some added ardor for the things that are hidden when they aren’t simply handed out from the beginning for free.
Perhaps one of my largest problems with the movie version of the show that I found so compelling was that it altered so much of what I found truly compelling about the show to begin with. In the television show, characters each wrestled with various internal dilemmas and external relational dilemmas which defined their roles within the small community of the ship. The character of Malcolm Reynolds was a paragon of chaotic goodness (see a DND character typing chart for explanation) – the equivalent of the roguish Robin Hood – complete with all of the hallmark traits of people that live in that mindset. He was carefree, willing to meet people on his terms, and always seeking to live his own life freely. In the television show, he epitomized this archetype by commenting that no matter how long the arm of the alliance (his enemies) got, he could just fly his ship a little farther away. As said by Henry the V in Shakespeare’s play, he did not seek a fight, but neither would he shun one if it came to him. In the movie version, he ceased to be the carefree and independent rogue with clever banter and instead became a serious man on a mission, willing to die in his attempt to win. Where did the restless space cowboy go and who was this dark, brooding David seeking his Goliath?
The character of Simon Tam always resonated strongly with me (perhaps because we are both such lawful characters at heart). Simon’s character was gifted in his field of medicine and could deal with human beings in incredible ways… so long as they weren’t actually humans to him. The moment that he is forced to deal with people qua people, rather than people qua objects, he falls apart. He is madly head-over-heels in love with a woman who loves him, but can’t find a way to tell her even when she’s dropping hints to him left and right. His shy, boyish charm and hopelessness when it comes to being brave are part of what made his character so compelling. The movie version radically altered this as well. Instead of the inwardly strong, but outwardly weak character that I had come to know and find so compelling, I found a man with a strong spine, ready to stand up to the captain of the ship (or anybody else that crossed his path, for that matter).
What’s just as bad is that the people that made the movie version even sacrificed Simon Tam’s lawfulness. Simon’s character on the television series was always concerned about propriety, and while he may want to show his more-than-friendly affection for the character of Kaylee, he finds that he can’t because of the social roles that each is expected to play. At one point, Kaylee sadly remarks to Simon that he shouldn’t always have to worry about being so proper, because out at the edges of civilization, it doesn’t really matter quite so much. Simon’s response is the hallmark of lawfulness when he sadly replies back that, in fact, out at the edges of civilization, it matters even more. Simon’s love for Kaylee is made difficult by his commitment to lawful good and hers to chaotic good in the television series, but in the movie, they simply did away with Simon’s lawfulness (thus negating his entire backstory and conflict) and had him sleep with Kaylee at the end. If Simon is to keep his character from series to big screen, he should have ended the movie by legitimizing his relationship with Kaylee by asking her to marry him, not heading off for a romp in the ships bunkroom.
And then, of course, there is the Kaylee character. I identified myself with the Simon character, and found myself developing a faux-crush on the character of Kaylee, just as surely as did the Simon character. In the television series, Kaylee couldn’t be captured by a word any less than the following: joy. As the ship’s mechanic, she frequently gets dirty (something that both the Simon character and I usually dislike), but on Kaylee, it somehow looked right. Kaylee reminded me a lot of a girl that I used to know (one of the few Miss Perfects out there). I wrote about her once before and remarked that the beautiful thing about her wasn’t that she saw the silver linings on all of the dark clouds, but rather that she simply didn’t see the dark clouds to begin with. Well, the Kaylee character took that mentality and ran with it, and as much as it probably reflects poorly on me, I love it. I’m a sucker for sweetness and cuteness, and any woman in real life who could bat gigantic doe-eyes at me like that… Well, let’s just say that it would set my heart a’fluttering. The movie version stripped most of the force of her character away, though, and made her simply a sex-starved secondary character with few lines. Just like Mal and Simon, Kaylee had been so radically altered as to be an entirely different character with very little in common with the character who touched my heart in the television series.
Nearly on par with the destruction the movie version visited on the quite powerful love story between Kaylee and Simon was the seemingly random loss of two very powerful characters from the television series. One of the passengers on board the ship Serenity was a quiet man who went by the name of Book. Book is a religious figure (his title is ‘Shepard’) and seems a quiet and unassuming preacher/monk. Virtually nothing is known of his history, though, and the mystery surrounding him grows more and more palpable as the television episodes progress. He is clearly a man with a quiet and contemplative wisdom, but knows/does things that a clergyman simply ought not to know or do (quickly identifying types of weapons, being a handy shot with powerful guns, identifying enemy fightercraft, and being in possession of an ID card which grants him immediate access to enemy alliance resources while being treated with utmost respect). In the final episode, a bounty hunter who seems to know everything about the crew of the ship even casually remarks that Book isn’t a Shepard at all.
For absolutely no apparent reason, Shepard Book practically spills his secret in the movie version, which makes the mysterious wanderer character far from compelling. What’s even more bizarre is that he is summarily killed off for little reason. Trying to top itself on the ‘who can make the most wacky production choices’ scale, the movie even has him being killed off (well, nearly killed off) while his character is entirely offscreen.
Finally, I have to address the burning issue that has been screaming at me in the back of my head while I’ve written the rest of this quasi-review. “Serenity” killed off Wash! While I identified myself with the character of Simon Tam, in the entirety of the television series I really felt connected to two of the characters on the ship. I don’t hide the fact that one of them is the mechanic Kaylee. Kaylee’s character is so sweet and innocent that it is hard not to want to be the hero to rush to her rescue when she bats her doe-like eyes. The second character, though, is the pilot of the ship, Wash. Wash’s character is the paramount example of the grown man who never gave up being a little boy. Treating every day like he’s on a vacation, when everyone else is dressed in leathers and work clothes, Wash is in a Hawaiian shirt. In the first scene from the television series where you see him, he is sitting at his control station in the ship, surrounded by blinking lights, readout panels, and a sort of sensor screen (which he is supposed to be watching for incoming alliance ships), but what is he doing? He’s playing with plastic dinosaur toys, complete with dialogue for them, and an apparently epic battle between an herbivorous Stegasaur and the wily betrayer, the T-Rex. Just like Kaylee, Wash seems to be the classic example of simple goodness. He’s the sort of guy that you’d love to have as a best friend or roommate. He’s insanely talented, but you just know that given the opportunity, he would spend every day playing with plastic dinosaurs and the like.
When the movie is nearly finished, after Wash has just piloted the ship through a warzone (with ships and ordnance exploding all around him), he crash lands the ship on a planet. As he exults in the fact that they all made it to the ground, for seemingly no good reason, he is suddenly impaled. That’s right – impaled. A gigantic spear or bolt fired from a spaceship (that has somehow landed right in front of the window he is facing without anybody noticing) flies through the windshield of the cockpit, and impales Wash. He’s instantly killed. Aside from his wife being overcome by battlelust during a fight just moments later, his death has absolutely no impact on the remaining story. If all you saw was the movie version, you never even got to know the Wash character, since he had very few lines, and was relegated to a very one-dimensional role as talented pilot. For someone like me who enjoyed the Wash character, his sudden (and pointless) death should have merited a little bit of grieving time to make his death poignant and give full effect to his loss. We were denied even that in the movie.
I’m always one who can come up with tragic endings to stories, and I revel in my own sense of tragedy from time to time (much to the aggravation of others, I know). But in the Firefly television series, my favorite characters were Simon and Kaylee, Wash, and Book. Of the four of them, two end up dead for no apparently valuable reasons for the story, and the other two of them are so radically different as characters that I couldn’t find their story nearly as powerful or touching.
Serenity? Hardly. This movie brings me nothing but discontent.
For some people, this will bring to mind a quiet brook, gently babbling over rocks in a depression filled with grass of a quite vibrant shade of green. For others, it will cause them to envision a slow massage by knowing hands lit only by the flickering glow of a candle.
As for me, I think of a spaceship and the loss of something great.
Quite some time back, a friend of mine introduced me to the television series “Firefly” which had a half-season run on Fox before being canceled. I’m not big on most television shows. In fact, when it comes to spending my money on DVD entertainment, I’m a mite hesitant to spend it on something that comes in episodes. To say that I’m skeptical of episodic television as a legitimate medium for telling compelling stories is surely an understatement.
Why? The answer is simple – it is very difficult to tell a story that needs telling in the space of a half-hour. It is easy to build the typical sitcom. Throw some wacky one-dimensional characters into a room together and let the hijinks ensue. Action sequences, and simple-minded jokes may be entertaining for a spell, but they get mighty old, mighty fast.
In the show “Firefly,” I found something that I thought was worthy of being seen… stories that deserved to be told. The episodic nature of it still bothers me, but running deeply underneath the brief hour-long vignettes ran a very emotional and intense journey into the hearts of human relationships. Each character had a history that humanized them, hopes and dreams, fears, and secrets that they weren’t quite ready to reveal. It was a humbling experience to realize that I actually cared about some of the fictional characters. No matter how much you may want them to win a contest, no singer on a stage or pretend businessperson in a boardroom can command your heartstrings or strip away the carefully tended defenses we all erect to keep the vulnerable parts of us hidden away.
Yet, this is precisely what the series “Firefly” did, and did on a masterful level that I’ve only rarely seen in television or cinema. The series was a case-study in varying types of powerful love that can exist between people. There existed an undercurrent of selfless and protective sibling love, newly blossoming and still tentative love, tragic and unspoken love, and playful and well-established love between a married couple, along with many other forms of friendship, care, and compassion to boot.
While my praise for the series is quite high, there exists a dark side to this story known as the movie, “Serenity.” Created as a way to cash in on the growing popularity of a television show that never made it through a season, “Serenity” did what I thought no movie could possibly do. It killed “Firefly.”
“Serenity” was not a movie driven by the force of the characters that inhabited the world. Instead, it was a low-quality action film with more than enough explosions, aerial dogfights, and gun battles to fill up a sizeable portion of the movie. Secrets that were closely held throughout the full 14 episodes of “Firefly” were revealed without fanfare on “Serenity.”
There are people who like to not know the answers to mysteries, finding that the solution inevitably robs the mystery of its beauty and power. I am not one of those people. I am the guy that not only wants to know the answer to the questions, but denies that the mysteries are somehow beautiful in and of themselves. However, revealing the secrets all at once seems vulgar and hurried. Whereas the television show languorously revealed the delicious truths that I wanted to know, the movie version simply ripped the secrets out into the open making me wonder why they needed to be hidden in the first place. Think of it like disrobing in front of a lover… There may be some added ardor for the things that are hidden when they aren’t simply handed out from the beginning for free.
Perhaps one of my largest problems with the movie version of the show that I found so compelling was that it altered so much of what I found truly compelling about the show to begin with. In the television show, characters each wrestled with various internal dilemmas and external relational dilemmas which defined their roles within the small community of the ship. The character of Malcolm Reynolds was a paragon of chaotic goodness (see a DND character typing chart for explanation) – the equivalent of the roguish Robin Hood – complete with all of the hallmark traits of people that live in that mindset. He was carefree, willing to meet people on his terms, and always seeking to live his own life freely. In the television show, he epitomized this archetype by commenting that no matter how long the arm of the alliance (his enemies) got, he could just fly his ship a little farther away. As said by Henry the V in Shakespeare’s play, he did not seek a fight, but neither would he shun one if it came to him. In the movie version, he ceased to be the carefree and independent rogue with clever banter and instead became a serious man on a mission, willing to die in his attempt to win. Where did the restless space cowboy go and who was this dark, brooding David seeking his Goliath?
The character of Simon Tam always resonated strongly with me (perhaps because we are both such lawful characters at heart). Simon’s character was gifted in his field of medicine and could deal with human beings in incredible ways… so long as they weren’t actually humans to him. The moment that he is forced to deal with people qua people, rather than people qua objects, he falls apart. He is madly head-over-heels in love with a woman who loves him, but can’t find a way to tell her even when she’s dropping hints to him left and right. His shy, boyish charm and hopelessness when it comes to being brave are part of what made his character so compelling. The movie version radically altered this as well. Instead of the inwardly strong, but outwardly weak character that I had come to know and find so compelling, I found a man with a strong spine, ready to stand up to the captain of the ship (or anybody else that crossed his path, for that matter).
What’s just as bad is that the people that made the movie version even sacrificed Simon Tam’s lawfulness. Simon’s character on the television series was always concerned about propriety, and while he may want to show his more-than-friendly affection for the character of Kaylee, he finds that he can’t because of the social roles that each is expected to play. At one point, Kaylee sadly remarks to Simon that he shouldn’t always have to worry about being so proper, because out at the edges of civilization, it doesn’t really matter quite so much. Simon’s response is the hallmark of lawfulness when he sadly replies back that, in fact, out at the edges of civilization, it matters even more. Simon’s love for Kaylee is made difficult by his commitment to lawful good and hers to chaotic good in the television series, but in the movie, they simply did away with Simon’s lawfulness (thus negating his entire backstory and conflict) and had him sleep with Kaylee at the end. If Simon is to keep his character from series to big screen, he should have ended the movie by legitimizing his relationship with Kaylee by asking her to marry him, not heading off for a romp in the ships bunkroom.
And then, of course, there is the Kaylee character. I identified myself with the Simon character, and found myself developing a faux-crush on the character of Kaylee, just as surely as did the Simon character. In the television series, Kaylee couldn’t be captured by a word any less than the following: joy. As the ship’s mechanic, she frequently gets dirty (something that both the Simon character and I usually dislike), but on Kaylee, it somehow looked right. Kaylee reminded me a lot of a girl that I used to know (one of the few Miss Perfects out there). I wrote about her once before and remarked that the beautiful thing about her wasn’t that she saw the silver linings on all of the dark clouds, but rather that she simply didn’t see the dark clouds to begin with. Well, the Kaylee character took that mentality and ran with it, and as much as it probably reflects poorly on me, I love it. I’m a sucker for sweetness and cuteness, and any woman in real life who could bat gigantic doe-eyes at me like that… Well, let’s just say that it would set my heart a’fluttering. The movie version stripped most of the force of her character away, though, and made her simply a sex-starved secondary character with few lines. Just like Mal and Simon, Kaylee had been so radically altered as to be an entirely different character with very little in common with the character who touched my heart in the television series.
Nearly on par with the destruction the movie version visited on the quite powerful love story between Kaylee and Simon was the seemingly random loss of two very powerful characters from the television series. One of the passengers on board the ship Serenity was a quiet man who went by the name of Book. Book is a religious figure (his title is ‘Shepard’) and seems a quiet and unassuming preacher/monk. Virtually nothing is known of his history, though, and the mystery surrounding him grows more and more palpable as the television episodes progress. He is clearly a man with a quiet and contemplative wisdom, but knows/does things that a clergyman simply ought not to know or do (quickly identifying types of weapons, being a handy shot with powerful guns, identifying enemy fightercraft, and being in possession of an ID card which grants him immediate access to enemy alliance resources while being treated with utmost respect). In the final episode, a bounty hunter who seems to know everything about the crew of the ship even casually remarks that Book isn’t a Shepard at all.
For absolutely no apparent reason, Shepard Book practically spills his secret in the movie version, which makes the mysterious wanderer character far from compelling. What’s even more bizarre is that he is summarily killed off for little reason. Trying to top itself on the ‘who can make the most wacky production choices’ scale, the movie even has him being killed off (well, nearly killed off) while his character is entirely offscreen.
Finally, I have to address the burning issue that has been screaming at me in the back of my head while I’ve written the rest of this quasi-review. “Serenity” killed off Wash! While I identified myself with the character of Simon Tam, in the entirety of the television series I really felt connected to two of the characters on the ship. I don’t hide the fact that one of them is the mechanic Kaylee. Kaylee’s character is so sweet and innocent that it is hard not to want to be the hero to rush to her rescue when she bats her doe-like eyes. The second character, though, is the pilot of the ship, Wash. Wash’s character is the paramount example of the grown man who never gave up being a little boy. Treating every day like he’s on a vacation, when everyone else is dressed in leathers and work clothes, Wash is in a Hawaiian shirt. In the first scene from the television series where you see him, he is sitting at his control station in the ship, surrounded by blinking lights, readout panels, and a sort of sensor screen (which he is supposed to be watching for incoming alliance ships), but what is he doing? He’s playing with plastic dinosaur toys, complete with dialogue for them, and an apparently epic battle between an herbivorous Stegasaur and the wily betrayer, the T-Rex. Just like Kaylee, Wash seems to be the classic example of simple goodness. He’s the sort of guy that you’d love to have as a best friend or roommate. He’s insanely talented, but you just know that given the opportunity, he would spend every day playing with plastic dinosaurs and the like.
When the movie is nearly finished, after Wash has just piloted the ship through a warzone (with ships and ordnance exploding all around him), he crash lands the ship on a planet. As he exults in the fact that they all made it to the ground, for seemingly no good reason, he is suddenly impaled. That’s right – impaled. A gigantic spear or bolt fired from a spaceship (that has somehow landed right in front of the window he is facing without anybody noticing) flies through the windshield of the cockpit, and impales Wash. He’s instantly killed. Aside from his wife being overcome by battlelust during a fight just moments later, his death has absolutely no impact on the remaining story. If all you saw was the movie version, you never even got to know the Wash character, since he had very few lines, and was relegated to a very one-dimensional role as talented pilot. For someone like me who enjoyed the Wash character, his sudden (and pointless) death should have merited a little bit of grieving time to make his death poignant and give full effect to his loss. We were denied even that in the movie.
I’m always one who can come up with tragic endings to stories, and I revel in my own sense of tragedy from time to time (much to the aggravation of others, I know). But in the Firefly television series, my favorite characters were Simon and Kaylee, Wash, and Book. Of the four of them, two end up dead for no apparently valuable reasons for the story, and the other two of them are so radically different as characters that I couldn’t find their story nearly as powerful or touching.
Serenity? Hardly. This movie brings me nothing but discontent.
posted by The Academian | 9:52 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home