The Approximated Season Two

It’s been a little while since I watched Firefly. I covered the series around this time last year and after watching that series I knew I was going to go in and follow it with the movie, Serenity. But I didn’t feel like I wanted to watch it immediately. The film came out three years after the series, and functionally acts as a shortened “season two” for the series, and possibly as a series finale. It wasn’t meant as a series finale; creator Joss Whedon wanted to do more, but the film does end things in a good enough place that if the series never continued, at least we could all move on.

Not that Firefly fans moved on. They hoped and prayed for years that the series would get a revival. After the film failed to light the world on fire, making only $40.4 Mil on a $39 Mil budget, any hopes for a sequel were dashed, and yet the fanbase still hoped and prayed for another anyway. For a while Whedon had a continuation comic series going, and the fans accepted that but it didn’t stop them from wanting all the actors back for another big run of episodes or a movie. The fanbase really needed the show to continue.

But, of course, many of those demands have tapered off in recent years, all because Joss Whedon was outed as a massive creep. Every project he worked on went through a cultural reevaluation, and Firefly was no exception. People went back, watched it, and started questioning how the female characters were treated and whether Whedon’s weird and gross proclivities (he was also known as a bit of a harasser on set, and he had to be kept away from young actresses during production). Hell, in my review of the show I couldn’t help but note that the depictions of Kaylee, River, and Inara weren’t particularly great. They felt like fetish objects for the creator.

All of that made me wait on going back to Serenity. I did want some time so I could see how the film felt on its own, and not just as another episode of the series. Time had to pass after my rewatch of the main series. But I also wanted to be able to go in clean and see if what I felt about Firefly and its treatment of the characters carried over to Serenity without it feeling like I was just dumping on Serenity simply because I was watching them in close succession. So I waited a bit before coming back to it and… well, yeah, I can see why this film struggled in theaters, and it’s not just because of its treatment of its female characters.

Serenity picks up some indeterminate amount of time after the end of Firefly. The crew of the ship, the Serenity, is still trying their hardest just to keep their ship in the sky. They do dirty jobs for dirty people, but between Captain Mal’s tendency to do the just thing even when it’s not the right thing for the job, as well as the crew keeping River and Simon Tam secret and out of the hands of the Alliance, it’s forced them to work lesser jobs, harder jobs, and jobs that keep them on the raggedy edge of existence.

But then the Alliance comes calling. An Operative (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), is set on the Tam case, and he is focused just on capturing River, no matter the cost. She’s a weapon, a psychic, designed by the Alliance, and they want her back. They send a subliminal signal out across every wavelength, and when it finds River it sets her off, causing a ruckus in a bar and alerting the Alliance to the crew’s whereabouts. Now they have to run to ground, stay hidden, and plan, as a much bigger threat, and a more dangerous opponent, works to burn their whole world down.

There are aspects of Serenity I like, and they come as someone that has watched the series first. It is nice to get another round of adventure with the crew of the Serenity. The series only got fourteen episodes (not all of which aired), and it felt like it was just finding itself when it was canceled, so a return to the universe is nice. One more adventure, one more time seeing this crew of browncoats fight a seemingly unwinnable battle. It’s everything we wanted from the show, in that regard, and the movie does at least give us more of what we expected, as fans.

For the most part the actors do bring it. The whole returning crew (with one exception) are solid in their roles, from the funny and lawless Mal (Nathan Fillion), the solid and caring Zoe (Gina Torres), her comedic husband Wash (Alan Tudyk), the silly muscle of Jayne (Adam Baldwin), and the sweet and fun Kaylee (Jewel Staite). The crew falls back into the roles as if three years hadn’t gone past. It’s the crew we loved, and we absolutely wanted more of, so having the actors deliver so well in the film is a treat.

With that said, not everyone from the original crew really gets to shine here. Sean Maher’s Simon Tam doesn’t get a whole lot to do in the movie despite being part of the main crew. He gets a solid introduction right at the opening of the film, has a couple of decent scenes early, and this is basically forgotten afterwards, and it feels like Maher recognizes he has nothing to do and phones it in from the halfway mark on. Morena Baccarin comes into the film halfway as Inara Serra and while she, too, gets a good intro, soon after the film forgets about her as well and it feels like Baccarin struggles to do anything interesting with what little she’s given.

The worst, though, is Summer Glau as River Tam. Joss Whedon loved his thin and waif-like warriors girls (see also: Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and River perfectly matches his archetype. She’s in a ton of scenes in this film, with the plot effectively being all about her, but her character never comes together. The writing for her isn’t great, both underwritten and somehow overwrought, but Glau also doesn’t do a great job with the material. She’s a dancer, not a warrior, and it feels like she struggles any time the film has to lean on her for heart, for drama, or for action. She’s distractingly bad at times, which doesn’t help the film at all.

And let’s be clear: the women in the film don’t really get treated that well. Kaylee, the sweet and kind engineer, is reduced to a woman thinking about nothing but sex for the duration of this movie. Inara has nothing to her character beyond the fact that she’s a prostitute. River is a prize for people to win, or protect, and she doesn’t even come into her own until the end of the film. Hell, even Zoe, the one female character I felt the show treated well, ends up losing her shit after her husband dies and it feels like she loses all of her agency in the process. It really sucks.

From the perspective of a new audience member, the film also doesn’t really give you a good on-ramp point. The intro tries to show you the ship and the characters while telling you where they are at in their adventures… but then it starts adding in more plot, and more new locations, all while bringing in characters, old and new, many of whom are only of importance if you know the show. When Shepherd Derrial Book (Ron Glass) comes in late in the film, he only really matters to the movie if you know the series. Then when he dies, you only really care if you know his history. Otherwise he’s just a guy that appears in a couple of scenes and then dies.

Not that the film really looks like a film either. The production budget was higher on this film than it was for any single episode of the show, but it still doesn’t look like an interesting, blockbuster sci-fi film. Trying to get people interested in what is, effectively, a slightly larger episode of a series that ended years before (and that not a lot of people watched) was a hard sell. This film doesn’t do a good job selling itself.

Deep down Serenity is a love letter for the fans. When I first watched it I did love it because it was more Firefly and I really wanted that back in 2005. But the last twenty years haven’t been kind to this film and now, all this time later, I have to admit that this film was flawed. I can understand why it failed at the Box Office, and while the series has, functionally, been dormant ever since. Maybe we’ll get that animated revival in a couple of years, maybe we won’t, but Serenity did act as the finale for the series in all the ways that mattered. For good, and for ill, this was Firefly distilled into film format… and maybe that’s how it should be left as well.