It was nice to be able to share it with two people new to it, who both enjoyed it. Now, I just need to sell them on Naruto.

Wow. Well first off for those of you not familiar with this movie, it’s based off of Jos Whedon’s TV show "Firefly". "Firefly" like so many brilliant shows died a horrible death on FOX, but has accrued a cult following in a very short time. The series is about a group of characters that travel on a firefly class spaceship called Serenity, which is for all practical purposes, is a smuggling vessel. It is a thoroughly enjoyable mix of archetypical western themes set in a solar system far, far away. There is the daring captain (ex-sheriff, doing what’s right after being on the wrong side of the war), the beautiful companion (soiled dove), the goon with a heart of gold, the doctor, the preacher… you get the idea.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS SERIES I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT BEFORE SEEING THE MOVIE.

With that said, I’m going to break my review of the movie into two parts. The first part is for those who haven’t seen the series, and the second is for those who have.

Part 1: Watch the series! Beg, borrow or steal it! O.O… OK if you really can’t see the series before the movie you will still probably enjoy it (especially if you like the idea of a space western). There are some things you will be missing as far as back story is concerned. They didn’t go into detail about things that happened in the series, but they do reference them. You will be able to follow, and as you are all very bright, you will be able to interpolate what is going on when they get vague. The other big reason I would say for seeing the series before the movie is that the movie answers most of the mysteries brought up in the shows. Watching them in reverse will take some of the surprise out of the series (if you are planning on watching it in the future).

Part 2: I would like to use the analogy my boyfriend had in the car coming home last night. ***Disclaimer*** this is not a straight line analogy, don\’t try to draw lines to the actual plot of the movie!

"You know how I feel? I feel like I waited all summer for the season premier of \’The Power Puff Girls". I was sitting on my couch turned on the TV and in the first five minute the Professor was tortured and killed and the elementary school was blown up with all the children inside!"

This movie will make you cry. Flat out. If you love the characters be prepared to be very upset. Jos Whedon is a sucker for bringing dark things into the lives of characters he’s already made us love ("Buffy" anyone?). In the movie you get to see the gang at their best. They are fantastic! There are scenes where I was cheering out loud and clapping! They are wonderful, they are witty, the banter is all there from the show; but again, referring to something my boyo has said, "The best victories are those that cost something." I was supposed to go see it again with my parents this evening, but I had to bail, because I need to assimilate it before seeing it again. With that said. You should still see it. Your questions will be answered, and answered is a way you weren\’t expecting. Because there was a bigger budget for the movie, the effects are better, but they didn\’t loose the feel of sparseness and utility that was prevalent in the series.

I highly recommend this movie. I haven\’t been this moved by a show since "Last Samurai." I can\’t say more without giving things away .

It is now 2004, and this has been self labeled as the much antisipated sequel. I was suspicious, to say the least. Could they create another masterwork? I went into the movie with low expectations, but I should have lowered them further. In terms of visual work, I have never seen such realistic computer generated backgrounds in my life. They were amazingly detailed, awe inspiring, but they also were disconserting. On many occasions the backdrops fell into the Uncanny Valley, which made your brain look specifically for flaws and then eccentuating them.

Within these near perfect computer generated backdrops the hand drawn characters lived. The use of hand drawn animation for anything that was alive was a great touch for two important reasons. 1) The characters didn’t fall into the Uncanny Valley, so you could empathize with them. 2) They looked similar to the characters in the original, so you could connect them to the first movie. 95% of the time they did a good job of near seamless integration with the backdrop, but during that 5% of the time where it wasn’t near seamless made me nauseous. It wasn’t the action scenes where this was a problem, it was the walking scenes that they didn’t put the effort into.

Now, you might be thinking, Stephen, you said that you should have lowered your expectations further than you did, but so far it doesn’t sound that bad. The problems were with the plot and the dialog. The directions the plot went seemed forced and had little to no explaination. The connections drawn between different groups seemed to be done as an afterthought in a half-assed attempt to make the plot seem more intricate than it actually was. The dialog that did occur was often tedious and seemed to be something you would expect from a freshman level philosophy course. If you removed the bullshit half thoughtout discussion on what is life, or put more effort into not making it seem pompas and immature, and concentrated on the style of dialog that defined Bato and his partner, it wouldn’t have been bad.

I would like to rent it and hear what the director has to say about it. It could very well be that he purposefully put the entire film into the uncanny valley and then flattened the characters for the expressed purpose to accentuate the “questioning of reality” theme that both films put forward. If that effect was purposeful, then I commend his amazing execution of it, but I somehow doubt that is what he was going for.

In the end, I think that a lot of people who read this forum would love this film. It was amazing visually, it had some great action scenes and was, in general, entertaining. It was not on par with the original, nor will it be the defining anime of the 2000′s.

… Completely Disappointing.



Warning, spoilers ahead.

Warning, spoilers ahead.

Warning, spoilers ahead.

Have you got the picture yet?









The concept had potential, the plot did not.  This movie is
designed to look and feel like a 1930′s style comic book, and it does
that very well.  The problem came about when the plot moved away
from a 1950′s style Superman meets Buck Rogers of the 21st Century and
headed towards something that would appeal to pop culture.



Pluses:

The choice to wash out the color by leaning towards sepia and grey was done wonderfully.



The technique of over blurring the female leads to increase beauty,
developed a long time ago but not used in recent time, was done very
effectively.



The robots and technology was excellent.



All of the scenes where they actually tried to look like a 1930′s superhero comic were flawless.



Constumes looked very period.



—————

Detractors:

Their attempts to give depth to the characters by discussing the
history between most of the characters failed for many reasons. 
It felt like the director was so eager to show that he had developed
characters that he forgot to write good or appropriate scenes to
discuss those backstories, or constantly pushing it down our
throat.  There were many scenes, up to 45 minutes in my opinion,
that the director could have cut to produce significantly more profound
scenes to develop the characters.



He would get to a point where I would expect that there would be some
character development.  It would be the perfect time to pull back
and give the audience a chance to get to know and understand the
characters, and give the actors a chance to act, but he squandered it
every time by cutting to an action scene.  The scene would start,
the actors would begin to act (when given the chance they did quite
well), my hopes would rise, and then the alarms would go off and
another action scene would take over.  ARGGG!



The plot.  This could have been salvaged about halfway through the
movie.  The first half wasn’t bad, the second half made me want to
walk out on it.  How does Shangri La help forward the plot? 
Or the Tibetian monks?  Or the dinosaurs?  WTF?  I went
to see Sky Captain and the World of TOMORROW, not Sky Captain and the
Lost World. *Twitch* *Twitch*  I don’t want to ruin the HORRIBLE
surprise for all of you at the end of the movie, but all I have to say
is, WHY?  Why, for the love of Darwin’s finches, WHY?



Treating the audience like little children.  Okay, so the techie
managed to pin-point the location.  Does the director really need
to keep showing you that he has that piece of paper?   First
time, cool.  Second time, somewhat necessary.  Third time, it
has now become unnecessary, but yet he shows it ONE MORE TIME. 
This sort of thing happens multiple times.  In some cases he
spends a lot of time specifically pointing out Easter Eggs in his
film.  There were several cases where the director could have left
a wonderful surprise for anyone listening to the commentary track (of
course, that would assume people would buy this piece of…) to see how
much effort he put into a scene.  Unfortunately, HE RUINS EVERY
ONE OF THEM.



The dialog needed a lot of work, when there was significant
dialog.  He spent way too much time rehashing the same backstory
the same way, whether it was appropriate or not, in a vain attempt to
get some tension between the main characters, dialog that was
completely negated by the character’s actions.  What was left was
spent trying to explain his reasons for doing his wild goose chase or
adding more characters.  Things he needed to explain he
didn’t.  Things he didn’t need to explain go rehashed over and
over.



Did I mention the repetativeness of the dialog?



I’m okay with some predicatibility, but this went too far on many
occasions.  The main character isn’t going to die, we all know
that.  So why even try to put tension in scenes where he, or she,
is going to be saved by person X is a forgone conclusion?  The
original Batman the TV series did a better job of adding tension during
scenes where Batman could die.  At least with Batman you couldn’t
predict that he actually had Bat Shark Repelant, or Carousel Reversal
Spray.



Did I mention the repetativeness of the dialog?





I don’t want my money back, I want my time and the brain cells this movie took up.