What is Digg?Sponsored by Double Your Dating
Meeting Women Online "On The Cheap" view!
doubleyourdating.com - Here’s some killer free ways to stand out from the crowd if you're online looking for a lovely lady...
66 Comments
- momerath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I just saw it. It was totally shiny!
- gpig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2to those in the uk with sky, the sci-fi (channel 130) is showing all of firefly from tommorrow (sat 1st oct) from 1pm - 8pm and then on sunday from midday - 8pm. Have never seen, but had recommended, so will absord all of that as long as my sky+ dvr doesnt go on the blink, before ponder serenity though. But have a friend whose been into firefly since day 1 who says that the trailers have each given the film a different spin.
- SmeRndmGy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2firefly was a great show, and this movie looks like it will be awesome also. The people at fox were stupid to cancel this show, but im not surprised. most really good shows are cut short by idiotic tv producers who just want to make more advertising money by putting on some mindless crap where girls in bikinis eat fried donkey penis for $500. or some sort of dating show where people compete to out-whore each other. good shows arent profitable on tv, so i guess they'll have to stick to the dvd market.
- jimb0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Going to see it tonight, cannot wait. I think people who aren't familiar with the firefly/serenity 'verse' will be pleasantly surprised. But it really is pretty easy to convert someone to be a fan of the show. All they have to do is watch it, and see how it outshines almost any television show.
- slapout, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I hope that "Serenity" is great. But watching paint dry is more fun than the last three star wars movies.
- Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very nice. I like the Times, but sort of expected them to snub this like they often do for sci-fi. It's nice to seem them give Joss his due.
- NGC6656, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1To Firefly fans,
Is it better to see the series first, then the movie, or is the stand alone movie good enough? - numtin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was lucky enough to catch a screening of it last month.
The movie stands on its own, its not another TV episode, it doesnt require you see the TV series to understand whats going on, or care about it.
In my opinion its the best Scifi movie I have seen.
(and no I am not a Firefly fan, though after the movie I ordered the DVD to see what I missed) - sgtstadanko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1cough...cough....at work but i feel a mid afternoon "Dr's Appointment" coming on.
- G1ZM0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Husky I found a shirt for you.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/pvp/77da/ - aggies11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The movie was excellent. The series was amazing.
The movie was definitely not "another episode" (although that would have been equally good).
It definitely had a different feel to it. The show has a very strong "Wild west" feel to it, and is very heavily a comedy. (It's friggin hillarious).
The movie is much more slick, and dark, having a definite "Sci-fi" feel to it. It is definitely not a comedy (although some good one liners), as the plot is much more serious.
To understand the seriousness of the plot of the movie, it'd be better to watch the show first. That being said, it does stand on it's own, as the movie is different.
If you haven't seen the series: Serenity is a good movie.
If you have seen the series: Serenity stops being a movie, and becomes a 2hr "Experience", where you forget that your in a movie theatre, and are sucked into that world. You even stop noticing the passing of time.
During the last 20minutes, I had to force myself to remember to breathe ;)
Aggies - Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1NGC6656: I haven't seen the film yet, but everything I've read has said that it's better to have seen the series, but not required.
- dentz1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have to agree with spirion (0), comparing it to I,II and III is not saying much.
Should be good based on what I saw from the TV series. - Mirth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The folks posting here aren't anything like rabid fanboys. I saw the series on DVD, liked it very much, and plan on going to see the movie tonight. I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
- gattmolson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Firefly is brilliant, the series that is, haven't seen the movie yet but going tonight. To me it has the spirit of the first Star Wars and blows away anything I've seen since Babylon 5 and DS9.
- olorinpc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Saw 2 episodeds for the first time a couple of days ago followed by the making of on the scifi chan. First intro into the firefly verse... dived into the community online to learn what i could.
Reactions: Instantly loved the show... its just got something different about it that the scifi scene needs. The movie is going to be a great addition to it from what ive seen. The fanbase is amazing. Wheatons dedication to this fanbase is as equally amazing. - acemilo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Going to see this on sunday, can't ***** wait. I'm a browncoat and have been waitin for this movie. God I hope they bring firefly back because of this movie.
- jnorris441, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1wolfeus, you saw Episode I right?
- Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"...but it also had more substance than firefly's comparatively escapist popcorn fare."
Escapist popcorn fare? Whedon based an entire episode on Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea," for pete's sake. - mrhaines, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Everyone see this movie!!! This is going to be as popular as Napolean Dynamite!
- FuzzyBunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"That review is a little biased."
How can a review be biased? By deffinition it's a subjective opinion. - mrbass, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0going to see it at noon today. Can't wait.
- wolfeus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0LoL....what a joke.....the statement "Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments" is just preposterous...I enjoy Firefly and I am sure the movie is not bad but that is a little overboard compared to a Lucas film
- greensky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'll be there tonight. I tried to get the day off but that didn't work.
- dperrin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it just sounds biased to me. does it really matter? he could be a firefly fanboy and/or a star wars hater. who really cares.
- scarper86, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0>That review is a little biased.
Umm, that's why those people who write movie reviews are called "critics" and not PR schills. Reviews are opinions that's the point. - pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I hate links to that site :(
- bouvi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0THE MOVIE WAS GREAT A MUST SEE
- spade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Taken the wife tonight, she's like what's the big deal? I hope Joss & Co. can make her laugh at the least. She has high movie standards, she doesn't like it, she falls asleep. She's my, "will this movie do well" barometer.
- Brutusfly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Saw it. Loved it. Can't stop thinking about it. Want to see it again right now! If it had a long term story arc, I'd say Whedon's 'verse tops the best of Babylon 5.
- gnarly717, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0:)
I agree on posting the NYT text. Probably not a good idea, though I doubt NYT would actually raise a stink about it (read: would anyone from NYT even read these comments?) - male73, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I must underscore the fact that 20th Century Fox is evil. Here's why: http://male73.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/09/my_serenity_my_.html
Twice already! There has to be a special hell reserved for them. - yodarocks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Full Text
It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.
Enlarge This Image
Sidney Baldwin/Universal Studios
Morena Baccarin and Chiwetel Ejiofor in "Serenity."
Forum: Movies
Enlarge This Image
Sidney Baldwin/Universal Studios
Nectar Rose and David Krumholtz in Joss Whedon's "Serenity."
As the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," writing the original movie and producing the television series, Mr. Whedon has enjoyed an exalted position in the pop stratosphere. Over the years he has lent his talent, sometimes without credit, to screenplays for "Toy Story," "Speed" and the last and least successful "Alien" film, "Alien: Resurrection." He also writes comic books, including an "X-Men" line. But Mr. Whedon, the son and grandson of television writers, is principally a natural-born small-screen auteur, graced with a quick, idiosyncratic wit and a facility for serial storytelling. In addition to "Buffy," he created that show's spinoff, "Angel," and in 2002, a curious genre hybrid called "Firefly" he had pitched as "Stagecoach" in space.
Fox aired just 11 episodes of "Firefly" before pulling the plug. The network refused to commit, but not so the fans who, as they did with "Buffy," turned this patchwork of fan-boy love and recycled parts into a cult. Evidence of their passion was later reflected in the DVD sales of "Firefly," which were impressive enough for Universal to pony up for a big-screen version. Named after the ramshackle spaceship that hauls Mr. Whedon's characters from one far-out adventure to the next, "Serenity" picks up where the series left off, with these plucky, shambling outsiders fighting oppression against impossible odds. As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.
The story so far: Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Mal for short, is zipping around 500 years in the future trying to make ends meet by scrounging for freight and hauling passengers. A veteran of a war of independence, Mal fought on the losing side and has yet to cross over to greener, more lucrative pastures. Along with his second in command, Zoe (a ferocious Gina Torres), Mal runs the Serenity with honor, guts and a touch of panic. He is the kind of leader who barks out a rhetorical question - asking if any of the crew want to run the ship - only to be flummoxed when he receives a resounding yes in return. (Mal then stammers to Adam Baldwin's thuggish crew hand that he can't.) Mal's iron glove covers a velvety soft fist.
Mr. Whedon sketches his characters with quick brush strokes, leaving his appealing cast to fill in the holes with banter and serious-looking busywork. Everyone takes to their task well, though only Mal and a fierce Whedonesque creation called River (Summer Glau, a pint-size Barbara Steele) take root. Hot-wired to kill and on the run from her government masters, this spooky beauty floats through the ship in a series of fetching shifts that make her look like an errant Martha Graham dancer, every so often going entertainingly berserk and wreaking Michelle Yeoh-style damage. Underlying River's murderous power - and perhaps her government-induced psychosis - is a lost little girl trying to carve out a place and a self to call her own.
As this scrap of boilerplate narrative suggests, Mr. Whedon is too much of genre savant to take his film anywhere genuinely surprising. He may also be too much of a movie novice to exploit his material as boldly as you might hope. What made "Firefly" stand apart from the usual television dross, beyond Mr. Whedon's chatter and characters, was his fusion of science-fiction tropes with those of the western. Mal wears a gun strapped to his thigh, while a lariat necklace circles Zoe's throat. He peppers his speech with "y'all," and together they travel to dusty towns that look as if they might have been built for a Roy Rogers oater. And just to bring this science-fiction fantasy up to geopolitical speed, every so often somebody spits a curse in Mandarin.
Transposing a western to outer space presented a calculated risk, the stuff of either "Star Trek" legend or kitsch. Yet what was most beautiful about "Firefly" was that Mr. Whedon wasn't afraid of looking silly. Taking its cue from the famous first words of "Star Trek" - "Space, the final frontier" - his show reinvigorated Gene Roddenberry's premise with the sincerity of a true believer. "Star Trek" was born at a time when space travel was cloaked in optimism and cold-war anxiety. "Star Wars," meanwhile, born out of Saturday matinee clichés and in a time of political cynicism, trafficked in a gee-whiz escapism so strong it survived even a recent swerve into realpolitik. In the years since, and for myriad reasons, science fiction, at least in film, has turned Dystopia into a boomtown.
Mr. Whedon shows little interest in recycling the gloom-and-doom scenarios that have become ubiquitous in science-fiction cinema over the last few decades. Mal is no Neo redux; he's closer to Indiana Jones, if absent Harrison Ford's rakishly handsome looks and star magnetism. Like the rest of the cast, Mr. Fillion is a charming performer, but he borrows rather than owns the screen, which dovetails with Mr. Whedon's modest aspirations for this film. As both a writer and a director, he isn't staking a claim on genre; he's just using it for a short while to tell a story about some decent men and women struggling against both the tyranny of bureaucratic control and their own very human failings.
"Serenity" works nicely as a movie, although in blowing his television series up to the big screen, Mr. Whedon has lost some of the woolliness that made "Firefly" such a pleasant oddity. (Alas, he also lost most of the banjos and twangy guitars.) Even with a bigger canvas, Mr. Whedon doesn't do much with the camera. His setups are generally perfunctory: a means to a storytelling end for what is, at heart, a $40 million B-movie. It's too bad there isn't one image here as striking and resonant as the shot that closes the opening-credit sequence in "Firefly," the one with the horses galloping toward the camera as they're buzzed overhead by a spaceship. With this single image, Mr. Whedon announced he had reopened a frontier some of us thought long closed.
"Serenity" is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Despite some fight scenes, this is a relatively clean PG-13 with little graphic violence and no sexually exploitative snark.
Serenity
Opens today nationwide.
Written and directed by Joss Whedon; director of photography, Jack N. Green; edited by Lisa Lassek; production designer, Barry Chusid; produced by Barry Mendel; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 119 minutes.
WITH: Nathan Fillion (Mal), Gina Torres (Zoe), Adam Baldwin (Jayne), Alan Tudyk (Wash), Jewel Staite (Kaylee), Morena Baccarin (Inara), Summer Glau (River), Sean Maher (Simon), Ron Glass (Book), Chiwetel Ejiofor (the Operative), David Krumholtz (Mr. Universe) and Nectar Rose (Lenore). - S1ay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm going Sunday to see it. I can't wait.
- Yoda716, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Im going to see it tonight after school. Me and all of my friends are going. I can't wait either.
- Grandfinale1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oh right stupid me. I'm dead serious, because I didn't read his comment because it was to long. My bad! Oh yeah The Grandinale part 1 never kids my friend. What you want to fight about it. On serious note don't post the Links in a comment section on digg.
Sign,
The Legend of the Grandfinale part 1. - kindrobot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I saw this a few months ago and it was amazing. I can imagine it's about 500 times cooler in it's finished state. Go see this movie!!
- toekneebullard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Plain and simple, the Serenity IS better than the last three SW flicks.
It really hit me during a scene of a large scale space ship battle. I remembered how nearly every large scale "action" scene in the last three SW films were little more than badly CGI'ed guy walking at each other with some 3explosions going on, and realize how much MORE thrilling the stuff in Serentity was. I was flinching, wincing, and even ducked a couple of times...haven't done that in a movie in a while.
Anyone who wants to say I'm wrong, you're just in denial. Lucas dropped the ball, and Whedon picked it up and kicked it out of the stadium. - gnarly717, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Grandfinale1
You are kidding, right? I'm sure you realize A Yoda Rocks was copying the NYT text for those who didn't want to follow the link. - rookworm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What ticks me off about this review is the position of authourity that the reviewer (manhola dargis) arrogates for herself. It is pure pretension to rank a film in terms of its "greatness" without providing any supporting evidence. To write for the Times does not an expert make. Firefly the tv show was awesome, and so was ep. iii (in my mind it was better than eps. 1,2 and 6). But comparing the two just shows her ignorance about "sci-fi". She also has an annoying tendency to comment on how sexy the female actresses were-- this reveals her crude political agenda. Sexyness is something we can judge for ourselves, thank you very much!
- Grandfinale1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I haven't seen the movie yet, going to see it soon though. I love the show and wonder does the movie has the TV theme music. I love that song...lol. Just kidding I hate that song. Oh yeah you can't take the sky from me. You can't take the sky from. My goodness Lucas has firefly beat with a better score if that songs in the movie. But other than the song I love the entire show, which bring up the question why was this show cancel?
Fox is Stupid, they also cancel Family Guy too. I'm out!!! - Huze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0According to Box Office Mojo, the film will finish #1 this weekend!
http://digg.com/movies/Box_Office_Forecast:_Serenity_is_1_ - Tommy_Gun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I saw Serenity opening night, it was awesome! Highly recommended, even if you haven't seen Firefly. I hope it does really well. I'm seeing it again in a few days.
- SmeRndmGy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Everyone see this movie!!! This is going to be as popular as Napolean Dynamite!"
terrible comparison. Napolean dynamite was pure worthless crap intermixed with unfunny punchlines to make the 14 year old MTV viewer crowd laugh and throw away their money on "vote for pedro" *****. firefly was an excellent, well thought out show that can be enjoyed by people with an IQ higher than 9, and im sure the movie will also be excellent. - Yoda716, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This movie was awesome and much funnier than the tv series.
- junkyinny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0its a real good tv show .. movie must be kewl too i hope.. gonna watch it ;)
- Tyler.H, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0OMG I LOVE THIS MOVIE they should bring back the tv series
- Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I saw it tonight. It was well done, though I expected a few less of the sci-fi cliches from someone as creative as Joss. The dialogue was snappy, and with unexpected punches. The fight scenes were not as predictable as some of the Buffy stuff. And the plot twists were surprising. Good stuff.
The Doom movie trailer, OTOH... just kill me now. - guybaxter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I liked this one alot. I wish I had seen the series.
- motionblur, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Damn. Self-powned.
-
Show 51 - 66 of 66 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is