Bleeding Fiction

I went out tonight and saw Serenity. I know I haven't gushed about it on the blog, but I'm a pretty big fan of Firefly, or at least as big a fan as I get for things that aren't the Three Kingdoms or Adventure! or have been part of my life since childhood. It's good. Really good. As I said coming out of the theater, "this movie is twelve, seventeen, no! A hundred and ten different kinds of awesome!"

That's a lot of different kinds of awesome.

It was funny, hard-edged, touching and visually keen. It has bits that make you think they're doing something familiar, some trope you've seen a dozen times in movies or tv, but they twist it and surprise you. In other words, it really was like the show, Firefly, brought to the big screen.

I was a bit concerned, before seeing the movie, that it was going to go in one of two bad directions. The first would be in treading over too much familiar ground; in essence making it a rehash of one or two episodes of Firefly with a more cinematic and final ending tacked onto the end. The second would be in not covering enough of the old ground and leaving people who hadn't seen Firefly floating out in space and wondering who these people were.

I feel that there were several elements in common with the way Firefly worked, a few of the standard plot tropes, but the story itself was different enough that it didn't feel done before. I think, too, that they did a good job of introducing us to all the little character bits that were essential to the relationships; that the relationships may have mattered more to me, as a viewer of Firefly who already had more than ten hours of familiarity with these characters, but that non-Firefly fans would understand them, as well.

The only problem is that I don't know for certain; no one I went to the movie with hadn't already seen and enjoyed Firefly.

Not that the movie was all sweetness and light. I'm not, for example, as huge a fan of "kung fu uber-River" as everyone else in the theater seemed to be. I'll also mention that there was something I disliked about the movie, something that honestly came very close to ruining it for me, a specific ten seconds or so. However, I won't mention what it was here, because it's a spoiler and I don't want to give away spoilers. I remain too conscious of my long-ago FFVII snaffu for that.

Let me say, though, that it's the sort of thing that will really only bother me and one or two other people - the vast majority of people reading this probably won't care. I mention it solely for posterity.

So, in summary: excellent movie, for both fans of Firefly and those who've never seen it before (I think - if you haven't seen Firefly and do see Serenity I am especially curious to hear your opinion), with but one moment that made the movie very, very hard for me personally to take.

I'm going to see it again with Lukas on Monday.