This beautiful sunny afternoon, a good ol' friend of mine lent me the boxed DVD set of producer-creator Joss Whedon's television series Firefly. He knows I ultimately prefer 'character' over special visual wanking effects, so he thought I might be interested. I am; and will check out the opening episode tonight on my break.To tell you the truth, I don't know, or know of, anyone in my circle of friends, outside of the owner of these discs, who is a Firefly fan. As I know virtually nothing about the show (although I did read the brief series-description on the back of the box just now; sounds a bit like the series Blake's 7), this will allow me to go in fresh...
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I've only seen the film. I remember thinking that it looked great for what surely must have been a limited budget. And it was "good fun" as the kids say.
I don't believe Wheedon is some sort of wunderkind. For me he's hit and miss. His run on X-Men was average (made far better than it really was thanks to John Cassiday's always-amazing art), Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was quite amusing and, for a musical, the songs were catchy, but has there been a worse show than Dollhouse on TV in recent years (okay, yes, there has--the U.S. version of Life on Mars for example) but Dollhouse is an A-1 stinker in concept and execution. Still, kudos to Wheedon for his work ethic.
The good thing about the Firefly movie (simply titled Serenity) is that you can go in without having seen the show and get it right away. The bad thing about it is that it's forgetable; at no point did it inspire me to get the series.
It's more the other way around; the film was meant to wrap up a prematurely-cancelled series. It is watchable if you haven't seen the show, but it's an ending rather than a start, and it has much less emotional punch if you don't already know and like the characters.
Whedon is definitely hit-and-miss (Alien Resurrection did fatal damage to the franchise; Buffy revitalized another). Tim Minear, who worked on Firefly as lead writer, had a major hand in the short-lived series Drive (also kooky and intriguing but ultimately unable to grab a big enough audience).
I watched the first twenty minutes of "Serenity" (the premiere ep) and noticed -- being a set designer guy myself -- that the show has a cobbled-together look, and lots of vacuum-formed sets pieces.
The problem is, and I find this is often the case with SF television today, Firefly feels like an inside joke; that I cannot penetrate. And, like most SF shows today, it feels so contemporary that I never feel like these people are really in space, operating sophisticated machinery, or walking on a certain planet... just actors wearing costumes and going through the motions.
However, and it's a big one, I have a little way to go before I decide on 'yes or no', and whether I "truly believe".
Thanks for the notes, dear commenters.
Oh, God, I forgot that Whedon had something to do with Alien Ressurection. What an awful cinematic detritus.
And good point about SF feeling less futuristic, Smight. There seems to be a real failure of imagination on the part of sci-fi desingers to create gear that doesn't look iMac inspired. Too many of these films share the same aesthetic now. When I saw STAR TREK, there were previews for G.I. JOE, TERMINATOR: SALVATION, and TRANSFORMERS 2. I couldn't in all honesty tell you where one trailer ended and another started.
Oh, and I did know that Serenity took place after the series; I'm just saying the characters and setup didn't grab me enough to make me want to see what had come before.
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