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Serenity |
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Malaya or I had ever seen a second of Firefly, during its brief
TV existence, and I had never heard of it until the Serenity publicity
began rolling along. I hoped the movie would be some fun and not too
stupid, and was surprised when it started off with a great intro
sequence, jumped right into more action, worked in character info
smoothly, had good dialogue, and so on. It dragged a bit about halfway
through, but really improved as the plot thickened and there were even
some huge action sequences near the end that were just great.
To the scores: Serenity, 2005Seems to be a lot of 7s there, eh? I didn't plan it that way, but quite a few elements of the movie were very good. Not quite great, but certainly better than average. I was pleasantly-surprised by the clever script, interesting characters, plot twists, and especially by the action scenes. The trailer shots of the pixy-sized girl kicking ass weren't especially convincing, and she was far from perfect in the film, but she moved well (past training as a dancer comes in very handy for fight scenes in film) and the scenes were choreographed and shot nicely. Especially compared to the chop chop chop style most directors use to ruin fight scenes/disguise their actors' complete inability to fight. The other action elements were fun too, and much larger scale than I expected. The huge space battle near the end took me completely by surprise, and damn was it a lot of fun. You can't help but compare the scene of "one small ship darting through a massive space battle" to the opening of Episode III, and the fact that this one is far better, and that it cost perhaps 1/20th what Lucas' did, is actually sort of depressing. I highly recommend
Serenity in the theaters, if you have a chance to see it before DVD.
Enjoy the special effects and visuals on the big screen if you can; it
was far and away the best sci-fi film I've seen in years, and you don't
need to know anything about the original Firefly series to appreciate
it. It's very well written, you get to know and like more than a dozen
speaking part characters, no one does anything stupid just to advance
the plot, everyone has their own ideas about what to do next, and even
the bad guys have reasons and logic and the ability to change their
minds. Very much an adult movie, in terms of character behavior, and
that's very refreshing after the mindless video game behavior of the
leads in the Star Wars films. For example. |
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