DVD Review Flashback
Ask yourselves, all of you, this question: What is possibly the best genre mash up there could be? And if you answer supernatural romance as part of that, you’d better watch your backside.
Well, Joss Whedon, whom you may know from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the comic book epic, Marvel’s The Avengers, with the sci-fi epic Firefly, created a show that combined the lawlessness and anti-heroes of the old west against the backdrop of the interplanetary vastness of space. The show starts out as a battle for resistance against the central planets that is called the Alliance, but they want to annex the outer planets to their civilized planets. The rebellion ultimately fails and the planets fall to alliance control. However the main focus of the show revolved around the crew of the firefly class starship Serenity.
The show ran in 2002 for only 11 of the 14 episodes that were originally supposed to air. “What the heck happened?” many people asked themselves. Well, if you could believe it, the show was aired on Fox, the same idiots who cling to shows like American Idol and pulled Family Guy from the air twice, if you can recall that little tidbit.
I mean, really! Did these morons not know what they had in their grimy little paws? This was Joss Whedon, a guy that would become the biggest name in Geekdom, and maybe help you grow a couple of brain cells you stupid [due to the length and profanity of this anti-Fox rant, the editors must apologize to the author’s need to air out his rage. Thank you for your time]. Got that out my system, finally!
After the unfortunate cancellation, however, the DVD sales showed large popularity, and a large fandom of the show. So, three years later, Whedon and Universal Studios (too bad, Fox!) came together to bring the Brown Coats* Serenity, a movie based on Firefly, which was also a means to tie up the loose ends that were left from the original series that Fox had deprived us of. I’m really showing a severe hatred to Fox today aren’t I?
The movie starts out with an exposition of the original series, and the premise of the movie via an outdoor classroom, where we meet a 17-year-old genius prodigy, who explains the reason the outer planets had wanted to secede. Then we cut to a laboratory where she was apparently sleeping.
After some more exposition we finally get to what the show had been mostly about: bank heists and thievery. All in a day’s work for Captain Mal Reynolds; his second in command, Zoe; her husband and Serenity’s pilot, Wash; the power hungry muscle of the group, Jayne Cobb, who always looks for a way to be captain of his own crew; Kaylee, the cute and bubbly engineer of the ship; Simon Tam, a former med school student who spent all his money and resources to save his sister, River; an unstable girl who had been experimented on to be used as a weapon.
The CGI effects of the movie are really impressive, and kept close to the show’s design. The story was written by Whedon and, although it is quite unpredictable, it ties in things we thought were just minute. Being the genius he is, Whedon throws us on plenty of loops with the plot, not too much that we can’t follow, though, and he also works well to somehow answer questions that were never realized, like how did Simon break River out? How would the series tie itself up? Why hasn’t Fox [once again we would like to apologize for this other anti-Fox rant]? The best part is that you don’t even need to see, or even be a fan of Firefly to follow the story, and it keeps to the show’s original spirit, characters, and humor, however it was never a big a blockbuster as it was hoped to be. Never the less it is worth watching.
Final rating: 89%
