(originally posted here∞)


Saw it again yesterday night. I've reserved some skepticism after the first viewing left me wanting ever more Firefly-crack and the criticisms here piled up. But there's no more doubt in my mind: Serenity is the best sci-fi movie to date.

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Blade Runner is rightfully called one of the great sci-fi movies, but that says more about the genre than the movie. It's a good film at best, not among the "greats." The books are better.

Alien is a very well-crafted horror movie that pays homage to Kubrick, but it's not really sci-fi.

The Matrix was an entertaining flick. I don't think you can take it as seriously as it portends -- and if you do, then it becomes either an epic or an allegory (depending on the degree to which you accept the sequels). Regardless, it's not of the same caliber as the other films listed.

Star Wars is more fun than any of the above and occupies a more important place in our collective psyche, but it's first & foremost an adventure movie, not a sci-fi. Moreover, the writing/acting/directing clearly aren't on par with Serenity (or 2001, or Alien).

Don't get me wrong, Serenity isn't about to displace Kane or Amadeus or Godfather. Neither is it a particularly important film in its genre, like Metropolis and Star Wars were to theirs. I do think it is a superb example of sci-fi: it sits comfortably alongside 2001 and Being John Malkovich as the best of its kind.

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I don't disagree with any of that. What I meant was that books (PKD's, and many others) have done a better job with the philosophical premise -- "if AI exists, what does humanity mean?" -- than Blade Runner, or frankly any movie has. Exploring this premise is the crux of Blade Runner's success as sci-fi...and it does pretty well, far ahead of the average movie, but in the end not particularly special. Of course, it's a fantastically successful film in other ways: as a visual conception brought to life onscreen, as a blend of old-school noir conceit into the future, as the genesis of diverse new art forms ranging from Brazil to Neuromancer to the Matrix.

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This deserves an answer. I don't pretend to have all of them, but here are the things that stood out on my second viewing:

1) The Miranda dilemma is unquestionably sci-fi. "Should we tinker with life?" is probably the only issue that's gotten even more treatment in the genre than Blade Runner's existentialism. Just referencing a popular conceit isn't enough, of course: in fact, what keeps BR from greatness in my mind is that it banks too much of its success on doing just that. It's nice for a film to raise questions, exploring them enough to convince you "that's deep, man," but unless it's breaking new philosophical ground I don't find that approach ultimately satisfying. (Which is why sci-fi films whose legitimacy relies completely on that approach are usually confining themselves to "decent" -- alongside The Matrix, or The Truman Show -- unless they become truly novel, like Being John Malkovich. Similarly, Phil Dick succeeds as an author despite having far more ideas than writing chops because those ideas are plentiful, intruiging, and told fearlessly. Unsurprising then that I prefer his short fiction, a medium where the strength of one idea can make or break the work but you're rarely expected to fall in love with a character.)

Serenity treads on common ground, probing a classic question from an interesting new perspective, but it doesn't pretend that its revelations are anything Huxley wouldn't have seen a century ago. Instead, it focuses on the interplay between the sci-fi archetypes in its plot premise and the characters...the humans, you know, without whom speculative fiction (any fiction) is irrelevant.

2) The themes about belief are amplified by quintessential sci-fi elements. The Operative believes overarchingly that the ends always justify the means. Mal usually lives in the moment, where "you do what you gotta do" based on a balance of ethics and practicality. That's traditional drama-fiction between characters and ideas. Meanwhile, an enduring trend in sci-fi literature is to take a dialectic like this and see what happens at its logical extremes, which usually requires bending the rules of the present day. It's easy to find Machiavellian figures lionized in movies, but the stakes change when they're capable of destroying an entire planet and breeding a race of over-the-top bogeyman. This, in turn, causes Mal to change: after what he's gone through it's unlikely any of today's petty struggles would affect his commonsense nature, but the scale that the setting lends to the Alliance's evil brings out a Wrath that the sympathetic viewer is hardly ready for. It's still drama, sure, but it's decidely sci-fi.

3) The use of language is one of the easiest ways to spot speculative fiction, and often a good barometer for its success. LOTR doesn't work as fiction because Tolkein is an obsessive linguist, but the myth of Elvish tongues helps him remain eloquent where his novelistic pacing fails. On the flip side, hindsight shows us that Heinlein's revolutionary Stranger was hardly strange at all, just another mock-Jesus draped in 60's zeitgeist. Correspondingly, the supposedly Martian dialect fit all too easily into pop lexicon: "grok" is widely accepted, and "share water" is in reality no more meaningful among its cult followers than "the Dude abides" to its 90s' demographic equivalent.

What of Serenity? I went to my second viewing a little skeptical of Card's comparisons to Shakespeare∞. (I'd lived in the Firefly universe for weeks before the premiere, so the topic hadn't crossed my mind at all during the first viewing.) The dialogue onboard Serenity is deceptive because it's so easy to follow and glibly scripted, but when you listen closely, it's downright foreign. And I'm not talking about the Chinese. I don't know how to describe it nor what to compare it to -- I'm not an English professor like OSC -- but I don't have to. Hearing Mal's archaic, lilting prose as you're constantly immersed in his gritty reality makes you yearn for older, simpler times where the good guys always rode into town wearing white hats. Then the Operative comes back onscreen, speaking of "civilized" ages past and future in perfect present-day English. The effect is profound: a literary (nay, sci-fi) device becomes a gut feeling. Clever writing, entirely disguised at first sight, helps turn Mal into a hero that cynical geeks who don't believe in anything would willingly follow.

(In case it's not obvious yet, I don't think this film was about River at all. Her part is wonderfully woven into Mal's story, and acted convincingly enough that you don't notice, but she's no less a Buffy Device than Mr. Universe was a Geek Tribute.)

4) Whedon's gestures of ridicule at the importance of spaceships and fancy lasers only prove to me that he "gets it." I've mentioned a few films that to me are unquestionably sci-fi but don't take place in the future (Truman, Malkovich). Likewise, Whedon knows perfectly well that the forms his hero's mule and six-shooter take don't matter, so he may as well use them as best fits the story. Suck in the casual viewers with a cool hovercraft chase, but keep the heroic pistol around as a stereotypical foil to the even more storied sword. Envision a tavern of foreign scum to rival the Mos Eisely Cantina, but keep them human, because this is a movie about humanity's scummy tendencies. Serenity may be a spaceship, but if it's going to be the titular element that binds our part of that universe together, it's no accident that it looks & dances even more organic than it did in Firefly models.

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