Tomorrow Elephant

I’ve neglected to mention that last week I saw Serenity, the long-awaited film sequel to the excellent Joss Whedon TV series, Firefly — perhaps best described as a western in space. Appropriately enough, since it was “horse operas” that inspired Wilson Tucker to coin the term in 1941. According to David Hartwell, there was even once a publication called Space Western Comics!. So it was long past the time that somebody took the genre back to its whisky-and-grit roots.

Seeing Serenity was quite a roller coaster ride. If you’re a fan of the show who has a rapport with the main characters, the emotions get so intense that you’re left gripping the seat and gnashing your teeth. The film is relentlessly paced — out of necessity, having to stand in for an entire season of excellent Joss Whedon TV — but its narrative structure is so well put together that it could be used in a screenwriting textbook. A Festival reviewer described Whedon’s writing as “Howard Hawks in space”, and that’s not far from the truth. Whedon worships at the altar of the Story, and said so at the Reel Life session: he cut more than half an hour from the original version to make the story run more smoothly.

And boy, it does. The first minute yanks the carpet from under you feet at least three times, and it gets better from there. There are incredible set-pieces, yet they’re perfectly logical given their context. There are great character moments. There are fresh glimpses of the universe all these wonderful characters inhabit. Yet none of these things get in the way of the narrative that comes at you like a train and exits through the back of your head.

Even wearing my objectivist hat, I really can’t bring myself to fault anything in this film, except that I’d rather have had it as the finale for Season 2 of Firefly. “Summer blockbuster with a heart and soul”, as the Scotsman review put it. Darren has more to say — I’m quite content to float stunned for a while, an object in space.

Oh, and Jayne shook Isabelle’s hand!