Serenity Again.
Oct. 4th, 2005 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckI've spent most of the day smearing red ink all over my students' exam papers. For once I managed to keep my hands clean. That's quite funny as the exam text is an excerpt of Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth including these lines:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Now wasn't that a sneaky way of doing the Shakespeare meme?
I'm still processing Serenity. I've had some more thoughts about the film and I found a very helpful review that I will use to explain my feelings about the film. I'm not very good at coming up with original ideas, you see, so I need somebody else's words to help me state my opinion. And writing about it helps me see things more clearly. The writer mentions a couple of spoilers, so don't read the whole thing if you wish to remain unspoiled.
I don't wholeheartedly agree with him, but he makes several valid points.
Gary Westfahl is an expert on science fiction (both on paper and on screen) - he is a published author in this field, so he knows a lot more about it than I do.
He explains that Serenity is a film that "will appeal to two distinctly different audiences": the fans of the Firefly series and also the newcomers like himself. Westfahl goes on to say that the fans "would have been satisfied by a mediocre exercise meeting the minimum requirements - the return of all the original cast members and the reappearance of all the original sets" (and here he makes a stab at the Star Trek motion pictures), but Serenity delivers more than that.
A long quote from the review - minus the spoilers - sums up what I consider the flaw of Serenity:
"Serenity somehow contrives to be an engaging, even exhilarating film even though, upon sober examination, it is guilty of many of the flaws so conspicuously observed in other contemporary big-budget science fiction films, such as clichéd scenarios [...], contrived chase sequences and battle scenes that uncomfortably recall video games [...], and preposterously illogical plotting [...]."
I wouldn't call it 'preposterously illogical' though. I'm not mean like that.
So, why am I not like Westfahl "inclined to give Whedon a free pass and confine myself to singing his praises"?
Well, I agree with Westfahl's statement that Joss Whedon manages to do science fiction right and I'm sure that Whedon's love for the material outshines all the flaws.
My problem is that I can't comment on Westfahl's biggest compliment to the film (and this is something that is immensely important to me): "Whedon also wins a critic over because he cares about words as much as he cares about visually stimulating action sequences." I didn't get to hear these words because [insert whine] I saw a dubbed version. I didn't get to hear what another critic has described as a "kind of weird future slang that is still perfectly intelligible but is different, with snatches of foreign languages and obsolete English words". Instead I was left wondering whether Kaylee would really call her nether regions Tiefgarage ('underground car park'). [I still laughed at most of the funny lines which is an indication of their quality.]
Westfahl also compliments Whedon on his use of literary references (I agree), that he gives his audience something to think about (I agree) "even if the issues involved may seem profound only in comparison to what passes for issues in other contemporary big-budget science fiction films" (I don't quite agree as I think that most contemporary big-budget films - not only science fiction - are definitely lacking in the profound department).
And here's where I disagree:
Westfahl argues that Serenity shouldn't have a sequel, that Whedon has said "all that he can say through the medium of this universe" and that a continuation "would be sterile and repetitive". Quite contrary I believe that now that Whedon has shown that he can do mainstream sci-fi, he can also show us that he is able to do much more and take the genre conventions, rip them apart and make something new and beautiful with them.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Now wasn't that a sneaky way of doing the Shakespeare meme?
I'm still processing Serenity. I've had some more thoughts about the film and I found a very helpful review that I will use to explain my feelings about the film. I'm not very good at coming up with original ideas, you see, so I need somebody else's words to help me state my opinion. And writing about it helps me see things more clearly. The writer mentions a couple of spoilers, so don't read the whole thing if you wish to remain unspoiled.
I don't wholeheartedly agree with him, but he makes several valid points.
Gary Westfahl is an expert on science fiction (both on paper and on screen) - he is a published author in this field, so he knows a lot more about it than I do.
He explains that Serenity is a film that "will appeal to two distinctly different audiences": the fans of the Firefly series and also the newcomers like himself. Westfahl goes on to say that the fans "would have been satisfied by a mediocre exercise meeting the minimum requirements - the return of all the original cast members and the reappearance of all the original sets" (and here he makes a stab at the Star Trek motion pictures), but Serenity delivers more than that.
A long quote from the review - minus the spoilers - sums up what I consider the flaw of Serenity:
"Serenity somehow contrives to be an engaging, even exhilarating film even though, upon sober examination, it is guilty of many of the flaws so conspicuously observed in other contemporary big-budget science fiction films, such as clichéd scenarios [...], contrived chase sequences and battle scenes that uncomfortably recall video games [...], and preposterously illogical plotting [...]."
I wouldn't call it 'preposterously illogical' though. I'm not mean like that.
So, why am I not like Westfahl "inclined to give Whedon a free pass and confine myself to singing his praises"?
Well, I agree with Westfahl's statement that Joss Whedon manages to do science fiction right and I'm sure that Whedon's love for the material outshines all the flaws.
My problem is that I can't comment on Westfahl's biggest compliment to the film (and this is something that is immensely important to me): "Whedon also wins a critic over because he cares about words as much as he cares about visually stimulating action sequences." I didn't get to hear these words because [insert whine] I saw a dubbed version. I didn't get to hear what another critic has described as a "kind of weird future slang that is still perfectly intelligible but is different, with snatches of foreign languages and obsolete English words". Instead I was left wondering whether Kaylee would really call her nether regions Tiefgarage ('underground car park'). [I still laughed at most of the funny lines which is an indication of their quality.]
Westfahl also compliments Whedon on his use of literary references (I agree), that he gives his audience something to think about (I agree) "even if the issues involved may seem profound only in comparison to what passes for issues in other contemporary big-budget science fiction films" (I don't quite agree as I think that most contemporary big-budget films - not only science fiction - are definitely lacking in the profound department).
And here's where I disagree:
Westfahl argues that Serenity shouldn't have a sequel, that Whedon has said "all that he can say through the medium of this universe" and that a continuation "would be sterile and repetitive". Quite contrary I believe that now that Whedon has shown that he can do mainstream sci-fi, he can also show us that he is able to do much more and take the genre conventions, rip them apart and make something new and beautiful with them.
