an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Last wednesday, i had the pleasure of being one of the lucky bastards that attended the pre-screening of Serenity in Lisbon – thanks to a hard-working fan. ;) For all you Portuguese-speaking fellows, there's a great post about this movie and its director over at Nuno Markl's blog.

Anyway, here is what i thought of the movie...

Right from the beginning i realized they were going to explain everything so the people who hadn't seen the tv series would understand the story and enlightening us – the fans – on several issues while they're at it. So for all of you who are dismissing this movie simply because you haven't seen any episode, think again, because the odds are you'll like it – i haven't heard a negative opinion on this movie. And if you're one of the fans, i don't need to tell you to go watch it, but i will tell you it didn't disappoint me — at all.

So, with that out of the way, let me plunge into the movie itself.

The interaction between the characters was pretty much the same, which was kind of hard to do because they had to re-build the characters from scratch for all the non-viewers of the series. Capt. Malcom Reynolds, played by the great Nathan Fillion, kept his humour intact and Jayne kept his love for Vera – his gun – and all of her friends, like grenades. So that was nice to see, because i was afraid they would be too worried to explain things so clearly that would affect the way the characters behaved. I was glad it didn't happen.

I will try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, so i'll just say the screenplay for the movie was very well written with unexpected turns and daring decisions. The remarkable jokes spit by Capt. Tightpants Reynolds at complicated moments of the movie made it feel a whole lot more heroic and badass. I believe the humour of the script is a big reason for why the movie works so well on-screen. I was laughing my ass off on more than one occasion and that's not a usual thing in a sci-fi movie. Joss Whedon did a wonderful job in writing up this movie. He should be given more credit as a writer.

The Operative: Do you know what your sin is?
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Oh, I'm a big fan of all seven... but right now, I'm gonna have to go with wrath.

The action unveils itself at astounding pace, without any dull moment and filled with exciting filming and well-thought camera angles. It actually made me think that it's unusual to have such great cinematography in sci-fi movies because they tend to focus more on the CG fx than on the angles and forgetting to work on leaving a deep sensation on the viewer. Visually, this movie was a delight. As i mentioned previously, they were very aware of the sci-fi movies and some of their flaws, so they worked around those and created a very plausible futuristic world, where even the smallest detail is taken into consideration and even if you take a while to examine it, it won't strike you as exaggerated or impossible. For these and other reasons, i have no problem in stating that it's way better than Star Wars: episodes I through III, and just as good as episodes IV through VI.

Now i got to dedicate a couple of lines to River Tam, wonderfully played by Summer Glau. I'm sure you've seen the trailer some scenes in which she's kicking ass in a bar, so i can write about her fighting without spoiling you. She puts a hell of a show when she fights. Just like it's widely known in the series and is repeated in the movie, right at the beginning, she have always loved to dance, so if she has any fighting style, it would dancing-fu. She moves so gracefully and so smoothly, that one gets the impression she's dancing. Besides that, Summer is River, and River is Summer.
Despite loving Summer's work in this motion picture, I can't pick one actor/actress out of the bunch to praise, since all of them did a terrific job, but i will mention that Ron Glass as Shepard Book was a disappointment. I remembered his acting as good, but maybe i misunderstood it, but in the movie he felt fake at certain times.

What more can i say, besides, go watch it? If you want to have a good time – you'll be laughing half of the time – and you can endure watching a sci-fi movie – even if you're not a fan of the genre –, i'm sure you'll love it. Pretty much everyone were raving over it, saying they loved it, even those who hadn't seen the tv series. It's an overall great movie and i might be going over the top giving this rating, but i got that feeling of a movie that will stand the test of time, like Big Fish, even though they're completely different.

In a sentence: It's a very intelligently written sci-fi movie, with excellent, realistic visuals and laughable lines.

Don't forget... It premieres in Portugal on October 6th and if you're in the US, what are you doing here? Go out and watch it! It premiered on September 30th. It didn't steal the show at the box-office, gathering $10M while Fightplan got $14M. Despite all this, I still think it has the potential to become a big success, being that the word of mouth has managed to create quite a following of the series, i'm sure it will do the same with the movie. Lots of people are raving about it all over the web, so more and more people will start heading out to the theatres to check it out. Seeing how it's ranked on Technorati's search terms (#2) and the rating on imdb.com (8.6/10), i think it's pretty safe to say it's being appreciated by the audiences.

I'd be glad to hear what you guys thought of it. Both fans of the series and non-fans.