Serenity

Along with our Netflix membership, we are also members of a couple Movie Gallery video stores here in town, due mostly to our TDTVS addiction. Every once in a while one of them will call us and leave a message on our phone answering machine to say they haven’t seen us in a while and to bring us back we are entitled to a free movie rental. We got one of those calls on Thursday. A while? Ha! The last time we were in any of their stores was when Season 3 of Lost was released or the last time they offered a free rental.

Having just finished re watching the Firefly DVDs on Friday we decided to see if we could get the Firefly based movie Serenity as our freebie. Luck was with us as Movie Gallery had a copy on the shelf, so today we had “Lunch and a Movie.”

Well, both the Mrs and I love Firefly, but were disappointed with the movie — there goes our nominations for the Browncoat Hall of Fame… Part of the appeal of the show was the character interaction among the crew with the plot of each episode serving as a vehicle to move the developing relationships along. The movie, as I explained to someone (Hi Rae), was too movie-ish. Everything had to be bigger, faster, more and it was jarring. On TV they used what they called the mule, basically a tarted up ATV, to get around planetside. For the movie they had some sort of hovercraft with giant jet engines and seated four comfortably. Why? During the run of the show when ever there was encounter with another spaceship it was always just one, for the movie they pulled a George Lucas – Industrial Light & Magic with a final battle consisting of hundreds of vessels crisscrossing and dodging and weaving. Why, when a dozen would have done the trick? There were several other instances with over the top gun battles, hero vs bad guy one on one epic hand to hand battle on the edge of a precipitous drop and and some sappy feel good Hollywood romancing.

Fortunately the movie, when it was released in 2005, didn’t make a lot of money (according to IMDB it almost made back it’s $40 million budget), so they didn’t make any sequels. Unfortunately, it didn’t make enough at the box office to revive the TV series.