Serenity

Written by Cool Hand Luke

Friday, 23 September 2005

First there was the Trenchcoat Mafia and the Church of the Subgenius. Now there are browncoats. Didn't anyone tell them that brown doesn't cut it as a color?

It seems browncoats is the nickname for fans of Firefly, a show which hit Fox in the States in 2002 for a whole eleven episodes before being cancelled. The man behind Firefly was Joss Whedon, who achieved some kind of fame amongst feminists and nerds for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (no letters please, if you're a Buffy fan you have to work out what your addiction to strong women and the dom lifestyle means to you - for that matter don't bother to explain why you felt a similar strong urge about being thumped around by Xena).

Now these browncoats started web sites and petitions and charity events demanding that Firefly be cranked up again - one of the alarming features of the interweb being the way all the geeks can get to feel good by creating little cult movements that shake the world.

The end result of all this browncoating is that Universal decided that if Fox wouldn't re-commission the show, they'd turn out a feature film, dubbed Serenity after the famous space ship, though peace of mind seems a long way removed from the subject matter (opening in the US 30th September).

And if you haven't heard already, the show's been the subject of wild speculation and intense adoration already, since it adopts a wild west tone for its sci fi melodrama. Universal has been very careful nurturing the show, staging sneak previews of the feature for the fans in 35 US cities in June 05, followed by the Sci Fi channel re-airing the aired eps - along with previously unseen eps - in July. Why Universal even aired a cut on the Gold Coast in Australia.

At the same time the studio's got heavily into viral marketing and getting the geeks all excited, and there's nothing so amazing as seeing a geek in a brown coat slobbering at the mouth about a mix of cowboys and space. If you go to Imdb to read the comments, you'll find it heavily infested with geeks pleading for an understanding of this masterpiece.

Trouble is, sci fi was doing that way back when George was homaging The Searchers at the start of Star Wars, or Westworld was getting its jollies by merging a sci fi Disneyland robot with sharp shooting, or Trekkies were doing it in a more naked way, just like Back to the Future.

Well the Browncoats have got their way, and Whedon proves once again that while it's okay to do good television, it's a helluva lot harder to do a standalone feature film. Better if you think of Serenity as a kind of telemovie of the week, like those X File standalones that limped onto the big screen.

This is television with a budget. For what it is, it will please the fans - Wheedon knows how to look after his followers. Outsiders might wonder what the fuss is all about.

The show opens with a bit of exposition about terraforming and new worlds and frontiers, reasonably well buried in the action, but announcing the television source. The story gets going when a psychic with Buffy tendencies (Summer Glau), is snatched away from her fascist school training camp by a caring brother.

Cue Mr. Rock Jaw (Nathan Fillion) as the captain of a smuggler/pirate/rough trade kind of ship (no legal action from Harrison Ford, puhlease). He snatches up brother and sister and helps them flee from a fierce Alliance operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) with the fanaticism and general incompetence required to keep the plot alive and working. Next thing you know they're knocking over a bank and visiting an Asian like city like they'd just seen Blade Runnery, and even picking up an ex girlfriend from a kind of Indian town high on the cliffs, like you would if you were Indiana Jones.

Whedon does a slightly grungier world than Lucas, but there's nothing here that wasn't being thought about in sci fi way back in the golden age, or looted and pillaged from sundry shows since.

Now the tone of the show is that rock jaw and his crew are good ol' folk, who speak in courtly Southern fashion, as if recently sprung from the American Civil War, roaming the wilds of outer space like Cantrell's Raiders, pulling the odd bank job and generally getting by, with guns that look suspiciously like eighteen sixties technology given a spruce up.

Rock jaw likes to ramble on about how people are people and are sinners and maybe there's nothing wrong with the seven deadly sins, but you have to swallow your Freudian side to accept a show where the baddie is a black with a clipped English accent, and the goodies are a bunch of good ol' boys 'n gals, even if they speak plumb dainty. Rock jaw gets to have several debates with the Alliance hit man about the nature of good and evil, and the way the universe should be, and of course the Alliance proves itself to be fiendish and callous, its seemingly rational behaviour leading to the most animalistic of results. If this is how America gets its philosophy, you can understand why intelligent design is promoted as a scientific theory.

Along the way the team bump into a shepherd, given to endorsing the incomprehensible metaphysics on offer, and a signals freak, who apart from marrying his mechanical doll, plays a key part in revealing the new universe has overcome problems of time and space to saturate it with a kind of galactic interweb. Of course the Alliance takes an attitude to these fellow travellers and plot functionaries.

Throw in a couple of set pieces where the Indies take on the Alliance functionaries, and where the psychic shows her Buffy skills, and you pretty much have a standard television storyline. Outsiders will wonder why the Buffy clone only gets to do her thing a couple of times. Reality check. If this human dynamo was set loose up front, it would all be over at the end of the first act. Better to keep her looking all weird and pale and subject to strange kinds of flash cut psychic fits.

Oh, and almost forgot to mention a bunch of wild animal types who like nothing better than to string up human skeletons on their wild ships as a bit of space set decoration. The fiends. But explaining how they fit in would involve too many spoilers, not that you can't see the ending coming from the start of the show. And not that these ersatz refugees from zombie land get up to much.

The result's competent enough, at least if you like this kind of indie versus the empire re-tread, but it isn't cutting edge. Like the best television, it shows its sources, and there are many. The bottom line is the usual American nonsense about people resisting evil forces wanting to transform them into puppets of the state, and about the need to resist. If only this was a thinly disguised metaphor for Iraq, as opposed to the usual freedom loving guff. Still if you want democracy loving southern Coke and freedom fries with your popcorn ... now what was that Civil War all about. Can't rightly recollect.

Whedon directs with energy - he even does some swirling 360 degree tracks to show he can really direct, along with odd angles and quick cutting to keep things on the move, and a respectable amount of CGI work to evoke these future worlds. The CGI's - and the humans - are designed to be relatively impervious, in the 'with a leap and a bound he jumps free from the crash landing, or wrenches the spear from his leg' school of action. The effects look okay, if sometimes obvious, up on the big screen, and you just have to accept these characters are one step shy of comic book heroes in terms of invincibility.

The music deploys guitars to give it a vaguely alternative big score feel, almost hippie in intent, and performances are solid, though inclined to telly mannerisms. On the downside, there is a truly wretched romance between the brother of the pyschi and a ship mate, involving the two weakest actors and proving you can sell romantic drivel to geek- and nerd-ettes, while another sub plot involving the ship's pilot and his partner proves once again the truth of Galaxy Quest's law regarding secondary characters.

End result - fine if you're a fan, but others would have found the trailers for Peter Jackson's King Kong and the Rock doing Doom more interesting. Being a young nerd or geek will help since Whedon services his fans with insider knowledge and they have already responded with fanatical loyalty, proving you can fool some of the geeks all of the time.

The nerds are ranting about the show because they want a sequel, but unless you have collected a dose of soma along the way (the show gives it a much more technical name) you can easily afford to wait for the DVD.

So far as the browncoat stuff goes, the guy who invented the name should cease and desist. As Frank noted a long time ago, brown shoes don't make it, why fake it. And brown doesn't cut it in general. Black's the go. Always was, always will be. Check out Darth Vader for a sense of dress style while planning world domination. He knew how to rip off the Japanese in style. The short Samurai sword deployed by the assassin in this show is like the rest of it - not quite the full dress sense, but heavy on the borrowing.

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