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Part of your likely reaction depends on what you think of Joss' style of storytelling. Do you enjoy following the story, no matter where it leads? Do you need the cliches? How do you react if a movie takes you in a direction you didn't expect, didn't want, and now has you watching breathlessly because you realize, deep inside, that you can't assume anything at all for the next 15 minutes?

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I saw Serenity last night in Columbus, along with fiazko and a friend of hers. As I said on the other side, there have been few movies I've been as receptive to as I was this one, but I was disappointed by the movie. There were a few things that bothered me about the plot, but I won't be going into those, because I'm not interested in posting any spoilers.

Much to my surprise, my chief objection during the first half hour or so was the dialogue. Can you believe that? One of the things that stood out in Firefly was the near perfection of its dialogue, and yet here it had a clumsy feel to it. There were two main problems with it, in my opinion.

First, the "westernisms" were laid on pretty thickly--much more so than in the show. The reason for this, I'm sure, was to establish the whole western feel of the show. After the characters had been introduced and the plot was moving smoothly the overuse of westernisms ceased.

Second, I felt like the character's unique voices got lost. You know how Chris Bridges just absolutely nailed all of the characters' voices in his Wash and Zoe Get Married thread on Hatrack? In the first half hour or so of the movie (they made us leave all cell phones in our cars to prevent people from taking shots of the screen with camera phones, so "half hour" is a very rough estimate here. It felt like about a half hour to me), there were a couple of places where I noticed characters delivering lines that felt like they'd been written for another character to say--Kaylee saying a Zoe line, that kind of thing. I don't remember any real details of who said what in whose voice--I'll have to see it again before that kind of stuff will start to stick--but you get the idea I'm sure.

The other thing that really bugged me about the first part of the movie was the clumsiness with which the exposition was handled. Exposition is necessary, of course--most of the movie's viewers won't have seen the TV show--but I felt like it was much more clumsily done than it was in either Serenity or The Train Job. I'm curious to see if people who haven't seen the show will find it to be too much as well, or if that's more of an artifact of my not needing the information myself, and so having more time than intended to pay attention to the way it's put together.

Speaking of exposition, I worry about the fact that backstory is presented right at the opening of the movie, before the audience has had reason to become engaged in the world. I found this section of the film interesting, since it fills in blanks in what we know of the history of the 'verse, but that was because I was already invested in the story. I don't think that it's an introduction that is going to grab people who haven't alredy been grabbed. I'd be happy to be wrong on that though.

When I'm describing Firefly to people who haven't seen it, I often refer to it as character driven SF. I didn't feel like the movie lived up to the show in this respect either. Questions about some characters' pasts were answered, and characters necessarily changed as a result of events in the movie, but there was (for me) little deepening of my understanding or love for any of the characters. In the TV show, I fell in love with everyone a little bit more deeply with almost every episode, and felt like with each episode their characters unfolded a bit more for me, showing me aspects of them that rang absolutely true. I didn't find that to be the case with the movie. It was much more action oriented, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, and will probably help it be more successful commercially, I didn't care for it.

Now, you should probably take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I haven't heard anyone else, in all of the non-spoilerish things I've read about his movie, level similar complaints against it. It may be that I went with in with unreasonably high expectations, and that wherever I saw a deviation from the show I just thought "that's not how that should be! It's supposed to be like X!". I don't think I'm doing that--the changes to some of the characters'...well...characters were evident almost from the beginning, and most of those didn't really bother me--but I could be.

I'll be seeing this movie again, probably several more times, once it's released in the theater. It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm sure that there is all sorts of detail that completely slipped past me the first time through. I'll be supporting it financially, and I wish it luck, but I'm not utterly convinced that it's going to be the astonishing commercial success that is currently being predicted by the studio. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it is though. I definitely want this to be part of a trilogy at the very least.

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