The way I came to Joss Whedon's motion picture Serenity diverges from the path traveled by most Browncoats. I never caught a single episode of Firefly during its abortive span on Fox. I saw its televised trailers and dismissed it as another shallow Hollywood amalgam of the science fiction and action movie genres. Its opening fell on the day before I was set to take the LSAT. Serenity had all of that going against it, yet I still ended up going to see it on Sept. 30, 2005. (And with the way law school and the bar exam worked out, it was the last movie I'd see for the next three years. Not that it would have mattered; no movie in that time - or since, really - has come close.)
Why? Because after months of LSAT prep, I was craving a really well-crafted story - and OSC himself had vouched for it:
I'm not going to say it's the best science fiction movie, ever.
Oh, wait. Yes I am.
....
If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.
Like most of his fictional recommendations, he wasn't wrong.
*
It's precisely because I wasn't familiar with the characters, milieu, and goings on of Firefly heading into the theater that I felt well situated to assess it as a self-contained story. The introduction provides everything you need to understand the core dynamics of Serenity's 'Verse, and the central conflict that drives the entire movie forward. The first scene with Serenity and her crew proper - along with being a technically impressive minutes-long no-cut take - is a masterclass in showing rather than telling: it gives the audience an immediate and intuitive understanding of who each crew member is, their role, and their relationship with one another.
In part the clarity of exposition - a true achievement in either the sci-fi or action genres - is the product of Joss Whedon's airtight writing. The man is one of the sharpest dialogue wordsmiths working the silver screen today (though he did lapse on some parts of the generally sharp and witty banter in Marvel's The Avengers, Exhibit A being Hawkeye's lead-weighted clunker in the midst of the Manhattan climax: "Captain, it would be my extreme pleasure." (emphasis added). If the line couldn't stand without the unhelpful adjective, it should have been rewritten from the ground up). Whedon is in top form in Serenity, where the 'Verse's eclectic English/Mandarin vernacular allows for a certain verbosity and playfulness that allows him to play to his strengths.
But fine-tuned banter is, in the end, merely icing on the cake. The heart of any story is meaning - the deeper, subtler doppelganger to the "theme" label that English classes often bandy about and slap ad-hoc onto a story like a price tag - in particular the meaning directly derived from the actions and interactions of the characters. In Serenity, the central meaning of the story resonates not only for its core conflict, but for the life stories of its main characters, and even - though I had no idea at the time - for the entire roller-coaster, underdog, and polemical experience of Firefly's fans themselves. It's meta on a whole other level, if you're inclined to go down that rabbit hole, but doesn't do anything to call attention to its depth. It doesn't need to, because it works at whatever level the viewer approaches it.
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