My plan for yesterday was to go the Maryland Renaissance Festival in company with old college buddies. Unluckily, eastern Maryland was under the spell of Tropical Storm Tammy. Last year we went to the Festival in the rain and didn’t have to prove anything by reprising the performance. Instead, we saw Serenity, the Firefly spinoff movie that has been buzzed very favorably by both SF-oriented and mundane bloggers.
I’ve seen two episodes of Firefly, the two that were nominated for Hugos. One was pretty good; the other was the umpteenth Seven Samurai remake, with a true touch of absurdity: bad guys shooting their lasers from horseback. So I entered the theater with a slight bias against what I was about to see – and came out with feelings pretty much unchanged.
Serenity is basically a series of high-tech shoot-’em-ups, mostly exciting and all well-done, around which are draped hastily sketched characters and a preposterous, government-conspiracy-driven plot. Well, that’s too harsh. The action sequences display a high degree of imagination, and the characters have the limited, but real, virtues of space operatic commedia dell’arte. Within the confines of their types, they can be striking: As a cynical trader/smuggler/mercenary, Mal Reynolds (Natan Fillion) makes Han Solo look like a soft-hearted sissy.
In fact, realizing that not every movie can be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I’d give Serenity a hesitantly upraised thumb. What cuts the thumb off at its joint is the plot and, particularly, its political subtext. The basic outline is ho-hum: a Terrible Secret that the Evil Government doesn’t want exposed. The twist is that the Evil Government is a parliamentary democracy, which seizes one of the heroines right after she criticizes its “meddling” with the uncivilized parts of the galaxy. While one could, of course, develop a believable setting like that, the movie takes it for granted that barbarism and civilized society are moral equivalents (except that the barbarians are freer and nobler) and that democracy is an illusion. In my boyhood, those prejudices were harmless. In the midst of a war against barbarians, it is surprising, to put it mildly, that they are part of the mental furniture, too ingrained to question, of someone making films for distribution to civilized audiences.
During the Cold War, there were pro-communist motion pictures, but they weren’t innocently and unconsciously pro-communist. Their auteurs knew what they were doing. I’m quite sure that Joss Whedon doesn’t.
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