PlatKat.com: Serenity... Ow

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Serenity... Ow

My feelings about the movie, Serenity, are on par with how I felt about Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace and The Matrix Reloaded: I'm glad I didn't wait in line, and I'm glad I didn't pay.*

Sure, the movie had its high points: pretty cool special effects, buff leading male actors, and a few funny one-liners. But those were overshadowed by some extremely TERRIBLE acting, a few poorly executed "futuristic" concepts, and a broken storyline where the characters' motivations changed for no reason to make way for more misplaced dramatic fodder.

Spoiler details follow, so stop reading if you still want to see the movie.

There's this part toward the end where the lead, Malcolm, and his arch-nemisis, the leader of the Alliance, are engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the central nervous system of the world's communication trasmitter. Malcolm is trying to make public some information the Alliance wants to keep secret. So they're fighting to the death. After getting the living shit beaten out of him, Malcolm manages to break this guy's back and lock him against the guard rail. Malcolm gets the info out to the world and goes back down to help his crew fend off their other enemies, some nasty little blood-thirsty creatures called Reevers.

Anyway, River, the psychic brainchild the Alliance is trying to capture, runs out to put some killer knife-dancing moves on the rest of the Reevers. When she finally gets rid of them, the Alliance soldiers are right behind them ready to kill the whole gang. But since they're soldiers, they need orders to kill, so they ask the leader, via headset, who is pinned to a railing with a broken back, whose life's work has been destroyed by Malcolm, and he says something like, "Hold your fire. It's over."

What the fuck!? Any normal person would have wanted to kill them. Or he would have at least said nothing. Or committed suicide from the excruciating pain of getting into a long fist fight and having his back broken in 20 different places.

But no, in the next scene he's fine. And he and Malcolm stand before each other, speaking their parting words in an excruciatingly awful exchange.

"If I see you again, I'll kill you."

No! No, you won't!! You've been seeing him throughout the whole damn movie! If you were serious at all, one of you would have killed the other one when you had the chance.

I understand that there are certain realities you must accept when you watch a movie, particularly a sci-fi. There are no such things as Reevers. If a ship had as many electrical fires as Serenity, the jalopy for which the movie is named, the entire crew would have died before the movie started. You can even touch upon the more abstract (but vaguely explained) concepts like planetary colonization followed by sweeping genocide and we the audience will generally accept them as a part of that reality.

But human nature is the control group. That's what the viewer can relate to and appreciate: people being real when facing unreal situations.

This movie failed in that area, causing a decent story idea to unravel into a messy string of events peppered with uninteresting B plots and pointless twists. The lackluster acting by at least half of the major roles didn't help either.

Although it wasn't as horrible as it could have been (has anyone seen Bats? there's a reason to claw your own eyes out with your bare hands), it could have been a whole lot better. So once again, I'm glad I didn't wait in line, and I'm glad I didn't pay.

*That's right, Kat doesn't like to pay for movies. For Star Wars, a friend who worked at the local theater helped me jump the line and the ticket booth. And I saw The Matrix as part of a company outing to the Alamo Drafthouse. The only thing that made that movie tolerable was downing an entire bottle of wine thanks to half of Gus's group passing me their drink tickets.

posted by platkat @ 9:24 AM