Serenity
I went to see Serenity this weekend. Mr. Bsag was away, but I just couldn’t wait, having heard great things about it. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m keen to see it again with him, because I think I would get even more out of it second time around.
I should say at the start that I’ve never seen the series Firefly on which the film was based. I’d queued up some of the DVDs on LOVEFilm, but they haven’t yet come to the top of my list. I’m sure that I would have experienced another level of depth if I was already familiar with the Firefly universe and characters, but I still found it an amazing film. In fact, I’m now keener than ever to get into Firefly. I am however, a big fan of Farscape; another highly original and unusual Sci-Fi series that—-like Firefly—-had a passionate cult following, but was dropped by the network after they treated it badly, and was then granted a brief, feature-length reprieve, partly because of its vocal fan base. So I have some inkling of what it must be like for a Firefly fan, who has a built up an understanding of the characters and their backstory, to watch Serenity.
The plot concerns a bunch of mis-fits aboard a ship called Serenity, trying to pull off heists to pay for repairs to their clanky old ship, and sheltering a girl called River. River’s brother, the ship’s doctor Simon, rescued her from an Alliance facility where she was being subjected to horrific brain experiments which made her psychic and a bit—-well—-mad1, and now they are all being hunted by an Alliance assassin known as The Operative. Oh, and they all speak rather like characters from a Western, with chunks of Chinese thrown in for good measure. If that sounds cringe-worthy, it really isn’t.
