Serenity

[jmtorres]

I had a good boob day, and niqaeli braided my hair while I was watching House at her place, so I'm feelin' pretty. (By the way, I love how easily Mal uses the word pretty.) We went to see Serenity for my third time, and I think I'm finally ready to post about it.

Back in June, niqaeli and I went to one of the not-so-sneak previews, and Nathon Fillion was at our showing. That was very fun. He said some things which were spoilers and some which weren't, so I'll leave the ones that weren't spoilers outside the cut to intrigue all you people who haven't gone to see it yet (what's wrong with you?).

The sneak previews had an intro by Joss Whedon that ran before the film, saying how amazing it was that he got to make this movie after the show was cancelled and how important the fans were. He said he was relying on us to tell everyone we knew, because the film didn't have a lot going for it, in terms of not having any big stars or anything. From halfway up the theater, Nathon Fillion shouts, "WHAT?" Hee. niqaeli and I hope Joss's intro gets on the DVD.

Fillion did a question an answer session after the movie, as well as a signing. I was trying to come up with a good question, and failed. What I did say to him--I had to say something, you know me, brazen--well. Someone asked him what it was like to see himself up on the big screen, and he said it was great and all but was his nose really that big? Amidst the laughter, from the third row, I called out, "Well, you know what they say about a man with a big nose!" He gave me a faux dirty look and protested that his family was there. I am a bad girl. Also, a bad lesbian. He also pulled out the "Hey, I have family here!" defense when people asked him about naked scenes, such as in Trash. People who were not me, truly.

The question I might have asked him if I weren't quite so brazen was were there any pranks on set. Someone else asked it, and his answer was that he didn't have any time for pranks this time around, but due to his previous shenanigans, every time anyone was a victim of a prank, everyone assumed it was him and got him back. Once he came out to find gummi worms melted all over the windshield of his car, stuck in the wipers and all. Adam Baldwin had done it, and the ironic thing was, Fillion informed us, he'd never done anything to Adam, even during the series.

Fillion talked about his gaming, he's big into Halo 2. Someone asked if Adam Baldwin had a controller named Vera, and Fillion said Adam didn't, but he did. His four controllers are Vera, Sticky, Rosie, and Preparation H, and he quoted the bit from Austin Powers (I believe) about how preparations A through G were just not good enough. He gave us a typical day in his life: Gaming, getting a call from his agent, "They said what? But I can play a strong, black woman! ...Oh, fine, never mind," and back to gaming.

This is a borderline spoiler, but it mentions a shot by style rather than content, so I'll leave it outside the cut. They had two major sections of the ship set that were all connected because there was a very long steadicam "oner" shot in the beginnning of the film. Fillion talked about how hard it was to see the Serenity set get torn down again, at the end of the shoot, and how on the last day of shooting, they had already torn down half of it while they were shooting on the other half, and how sad that was.

Alright, now we're into spoiler territory. *shuffles through notes from first screening* Mostly, I don't have anything intelligent to say, any grand theories. Some more stuff Nathan Fillion said, a lot of summary... I'm trying to sort out all the summary and "I like X!" stuff and just leave Nathan's commentary from the preview screening and my more interesting brainwaves of analysis from last weekend and this afternoon.

River's teacher's opening narration about the history of the Alliance reminded me of Lord of the Rings and Galadriel's narration about the first war with Sauron. niqaeli caught it too.

When they first show River being experimented on, it looks like she's naked under the drool catcher, because her body suit is teal, and the shots are tinted. I think it's a way of showing how exposed she is to them, though the exposure is mental rather than physical.

I think River is actually a Slayer, considering the scientist's comments on how while all the subjects were trained physically, River had this incredible, unnatural grace. niqaeli says it's different, she's an assassin. I, heh, disagree. I'm also inclined to think that her original prescience/empathy, before the Alliance amped it up, was in line with Slayer dreams. There were some parallel shots as well--everyone's commented on the shot with the knife? sword? and the axe after she kills all the Reavers, versus the shot in "Anne." Has anyone commented on River's arrival on Haven after the Alliance has shot it all up, versus Buffy in the desert in her dream in "Restless"?

You know how River keeps clinging to ceilings? I don't know how she keeps her hair up--so that it comes down under her armpit instead of right across her face. If that were me? My hair would be hanging straight down, tickling the tops of people's heads.

Today, niqaeli told me this theory she'd read, that Book (whose history we're presuming Joss told us through the Operative), Jubal Early, and the Operative, are all clones. I said that smacked of "Hey, all black men look alike!" So, not really down with that theory. Nathan mentioned that he knew some things about Book's history, but didn't want to tell us in case it ever became the topic of future sequels, knock on wood.

niqaeli and I disagreed over whether the Operative lies to himself. She thinks he's perfectly honest about what he does; I said it was a big symptom of denial that he thought of himself as helping people commit honorable suicide rather than murdering them. Because really, the whole paralysis/fall on my sword scenario is a pretty complicated way to kill somebody. I also think that he's been lying to himself in thinking that his actions, and a government that would create him and order him to his actions, would ever lead to some kind of utopian world. Firstly because why would they ever stop doing shit like that if they don't think they're wrong, and secondly because the ends do not justify the means--which was something the Operative never really got, I think, he just got that imperfect means cannot bring about a perfect end with which to justify anything.

Someone suggested to me that Mal is a junkie, because he gets this shot from Simon at the beginning. It's actually a vaccination, I think. It's hard to hear, but just before that he says he needs his "inoc." I'm starting to collect a list of their slang...

One of my favorite bits is where Simon tells River that if there's any fighting, she should drop to the ground or run, and it's okay to leave them to die. Mal informing Simon how broken up he'll be if anything happens to River is pretty funny, too.

I think it's interesting that River goes on this job barefoot. Not sure what it indicates--her bare feet have been featured in the series a good bit too. Think Objects in Space, when she steps on the branch. Maybe the bare feet vs. combat boots is when she's being psychically sensitive vs. when she's fighting, being a weapon? Because she was booted in both these fights. Mind, she also clomped around in boots playing with Kaylee and such, too. So maybe not just fighting, maybe being physical in general. I remember her boots when she was dancing in Safe, too.

Nathan Fillion commented that he loved shooting the scenes on the mule, it was on a track just flying down the highway.

The mule has the Serenity logo painted on it, driver's side up front. It gets scratched through when Zoe "kisses the rocks" when the Reavers are chasing them. Foreshadowing of how becoming like the Reavers will desecrate Serenity?

I am greatly amused by River's reaction to the chase being "I swallowed a bug." I think it's a reference to Objects in Space, when she says she's Serenity. As Serenity, she swallowed the mule. Yeah.

Current viewing, niqaeli commented on how River's line about how the Reaver lay down, they never lay down, made so much more sense now that we'd seen the movie. (I firmly believe that everything River says makes perfect sense if you know the context.) niqaeli suggests the Pax messes with sleep cycles--the majority of Miranda's population just lay down, as in the dream River has of her old classroom, and the Reavers never lay down.

Kaylee has some of the best lines--the advice to Simon about not flying in anything with a certain kind of engine she names, they fall right out of the sky; and the line about it's been a year since she had anything between her nethers that didn't run on batteries.

The bar where Mal goes to meet Fanty and Mingo, and where River flips the hell out, is called the Maidenhead. I'm sure it's significant but I'm trying to decide how to read it--that River was violated by the signal she received, lost some kind of virginity along with control of her actions?

Nathan Fillion says of the fighting work: If Summer Glau ever asks you to practice fighting with her, say no.

Has anyone translated the Chinese phrase that's Simon's safeword for River?

I think my Mal/River shipping is born of the scenes where Mal picks River up and carries her back to Serenity for no plausible reason he can tell Jayne or the rest of his crew, and River, when she wakes up in the locker area they locked her in, is mouthing Mal's words along with him.

Wonder why Mr. Universe was Jewish. Is Joss? The religions seemed more explicitly named here than in the series--Book said having shot down the Alliance ship was not very Christian of him, and Mal's fake prayer, "Dear Buddha, I want a pony." I mean, I remember River rewriting Book's bible (in what was that, Jaynestown?) but I somehow got the impression that the religions had diverged or evolved or something. Possibly from Saffron's "I know my bible" speech, though I guess she's not the best source. And I suppose that five hundred years isn't so very long in the course of the religions in question.

I like River's dream sequences, especially the one where she's in the classroom in her experimental test subject garb and finds Miranda on the computer, and there's this shot going around Miranda and the computer screen in orbit of planet, with River large as Neptune up there.

Nathan says the Haven set, the mine station, is the same as from Train Job.

More slang: a planet where terraforming didn't take is a "black rock." That's what they call Miranda.

I really like the shot where Inara meets the Operative. It's subtle--she doesn't move at all, but her smile just drops away.

I also like how Mal gets into the temple, his beaded shawl disguise. The man does like cross-dressing. Hee.

Someone asked Nathan if Joss Whedon just liked beating him up, or what. Nathan said, "Yeah... Oh, you mean in the movie. Yeah, yeah." He said that the thing Joss liked most about his fighting was his ability to take a punch. So he takes lots and lots of punches.

Back on Haven--this is a revelation I have after the fact every time I watch the movie, that Mal gets the inspiration to dress the ship up like a Reaver ship from something the Operative says.

River mouths the words of the holorecording on Miranda--I think the memory she had, from whatever Parliamentary official she received it from, was of this recording. I don't think she knew how bad it was going to be, really, on the planet, thirty million ghosts in her head saying nothing.

Took my family last week--Mom commented that the story of the effect of the Pax on the Reavers reminded her of this cat, Max, we used to have. She and Dad got him a tranquilizer for a roadtrip, and instead of being tranquil, he went *nuts,* was down in the floorboard shredding newspapers, Mom giving him the paper a page at a time, trying to keep him occupied until it wore off.

I think where River throws up is kind of a reference to the "I swallowed a bug" line again--the secret of the Reavers was the bug she swallowed, and it's come out, come up, and now she's really all right, as she tells Simon.

I can't remember what the audience reaction to Wash's death was the first time I saw it, because I was in such shock myself. People have talked about how it happened so fast (in defiance of cinematic conventions re: death). It did happen very fast, so fast that the first time, I couldn't believe it, I kept thinking something else had happened and Wash would be back in the end. I didn't believe it until I saw the grave (which, by the way, Nathan said that was the very first scene they shot, because they were shooting the outdoor stuff first--man, what a bummer). The second time I went, last week when it opened, there was this huge collective gasp. The third time, this afternoon, I think everyone had already seen the movie because no one gasped. (niqaeli had gone to the restroom, which, if she was avoiding the scene, was more mature than the way I avoided the Saw II previews, which was to squeeze my eyes shut, cover my ears, and sing lalala.)

Nathan Fillion text messaged Alan Tudyk on his phone during the screening back in June to ask if there was anything he wanted to tell us about Wash's death. (Alad Tudyk was on Broadway doing Spamalot.) Nathan read us his reply, which was that what we didn't know about Wash was that he was an alcoholic and always flying drunk, and his death was a blessing in disguise, because one day he would have flown Serenity into a planet or something.

I teared up for Wash the first time, and I think the second time I saw the movie, too. The third time, Wash still hurt, but I didn't cry for him. I cried for River, when she's fighting the Reavers, because she's beautiful and terrible and glorious and she never wanted to be this and part of her thinks she's going to die, that she's sacrificing herself for them.

Someone on my flist mentioned in their entry that they first thought Mal broke the Operative's back, when he won that fight, and how cruel it seemed to leave him alive. I wasn't quite sure what he actually did do to the Operative, but on this third viewing, my conclusion is that Mal popped his arms out of their sockets.

You know how the wall behind River explodes? I realized that the shot where the explosive lands in the wall is in the middle of the fight, it's there, not just out of nowhere. River's pinned to the wall and she sees it and she knows. Haven't quite figured out if it was a Reaver weapon or if it was an Alliance weapon that penetrated from the other side of the wall.

I love how River's hands tighten on her weapons when she's surrounded by the Alliance troops, when they don't know the Operative is about to regain his voice and tell them to stand down. Do you think she could have took on the men with big automatic guns with her two little blades?

At the end, Mal sits down in the seat Wash always drove from, but River sits in what, for us Americans, is the traditional driver's seat. Trying to decide if there's significance to that. (That entire last scene was, of course, fodder for my ship of wrongness. River likes listening to Mal, and Mal wants to tell her about love.)

During the crash ("I am a leaf on the wind") I suggested to niqaeli that Wash's dinosaurs were magic, because they never fell off. Or nailed down. This seemed even more plausible in the final scene, when Mal sits down and all the dinosaurs are on the dash. But I think there's a shot in the "repairing Serenity" montage where someone's working in the cockpit and there's only one dinosaur on thne dash, which means that sometime after that, they put all of them back. *sniffle*

I love this movie.