6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had

-- Tears for Fears

Science fiction's dystopias have glutted the market over the last thirty years. Whether it's Blade Runner's dark, crabbed, and misunderstood amorality, Robocop's unsubtle call for the destruction of civil society, or Gattaca's vision of a Kafkaesque world marred by eugenics-ad-absurdum, some of the genre's most powerful works on the big screen have tended toward bleak expressions of the future. Even George Lucas, whose Star Wars series at first gave us riveting if empty-headed remakes of Flash Gordon and other serials, has succumbed to the dark side, plunging his later films into increasingly arcane (some would say, impenetrable) political intrigue in setting up the Old Republic's backstory.

With that in mind, we turn to Serenity, a smart and hard-nosed film that tries to extrapolate the oft-made observation that Star Wars was a space western. Westerns, of course, are morality plays with horses, and Serenity's creator, Joss Whedon, is no stranger to stark ethical dilemmas. His TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer featured some of the best writing on television in recent years, not only for its keen emotional and moral insights but for his uncanny and Preston Sturges-like ability to produce writerly dialogue that nevertheless comes off as authentic.

The movie's universe directly arises from Whedon's short-lived TV show, Firefly. It's a good thing he had that practice run, too, because it took Whedon a while before he softened some of the show's more annoying tics, in particular his insistence on trying to get the characters all to sound like they had come out of an old Western. The show's supposed to be set 500 years in the future, not in post-Civil-War America; trying to figure out what the characters were saying often required a DVR, or watching the show on DVD, or some rewindable media. Henry V might get performed in its original, Elizabethan English form, but Whedon's contrived dialogue, not to mention getting actors to deliver it convincingly, made for some difficult episodes early on.

Captain Malcolm Hodges (Nathan Fillion) runs Serenity, a small lightly-armed cargo ship, a tramp steamer in space with gun turrets and a turbocharger. Like so many Confederates after the Civil War, he found himself in a quandary: unwilling to join the forcibly assembled Universal Alliance (for terribly obvious reasons, we quickly discover), he and his crew scurry along the margins of civilization, engaging in piracy, robbery, and the odd smuggling job thrown in to leaven the mix. His crew, who appear to have been assembled from the back pages of a role-playing game, have wildly disparate backgrounds. All of them depend, whether they like it or not (and at one point or another, they don't), on Mal's quick wits and sharp yet enlightened sense of self-interest, just as he depends on them to keep the ship running, pull off heists, and put food in the galley.

The film's key characters are the ship's doctor, Simon (Sean Maher), and his psychotic/psychic sister, River (Summer Glau). Both recent acquisitions as the crew goes, River quickly turns into the ship's albatross, as we learn she's carrying a secret that the Universal Parliament wants kept quiet. Flipping a writing convention that's existed since the First World War, the Alliance turns out to be a Machiavellian government exclusively interested in its own survival, sending an assassin -- The Operative (Chiwitel Ejiofor) -- after River to execute her and anyone who knows about her. Ejiofor breathes perfect life into a character so ruthless in his pursuit of death, he nearly appears to have walked off the set of Goldfinger.

Along the way to deciding whether to save or unload their strange cargo, the crew has to keep the power on, the Reavers -- a kind of berzerker space zombies -- in the rearview mirror, and away from the Alliance and The Operative. Juggling all three tasks makes for some of the most rattling on-screen adventures we've seen in years, resonating all the more because of the film's unflinching morality, one that Reason reviewer Michael Valdez Moses observed as forming part of the zeitgeist. Just as Dr. Strangelove threw a klieg light on the fears arising from mutually assured destruction, Serenity highlights our era's fears of corrupt, self-interested, or even tyrannical government flowing out of some precipitating event -- 9/11 in particular. It is well that Whedon is an obvious optimist: Serenity's captain and crew have the courage to face their future down. As with Buffy, the film shines brightest when his characters make brave, difficult choices in the face of mortal danger.

Labels: offtopic, reviews