Hacker Cinema
Serenity
2005 · Film · 119 min
Directed by Joss Whedon
Science FictionActionAdventureThriller
A group of rebels travel the outskirts of space evading the sinister Alliance regime. Their lives of smuggling and cargo-running are interrupted by a psychic passenger who harbours a dangerous secret. Soon, the crew find themselves being pursued by an Alliance agent who will stop at nothing to find them.
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53 comments on Hacker News
I watched "Lower Decks" episode just to see how they portrayed Deep Space 9, how actors pick their old roles. While they did good job, visuals were giving me this feeling it's a distant memory that fades away. Weird thing to say but same thing happen when I pick that "Babylon 5: The Road Home" - it's like the show you were watching but it's not the same.
And I risk saying that perhaps media that become iconic shouldn't be touched no matter what happened during production or screening. Because if you start fiddling around it even in a good faith that charm may be gone forever.
"Firefly/Serenity" for me is from same shelf as DS9 or rebooted BSG - a closed story that doesn't need any continuation. These titles got rather bitter than sweet ending; there are questions and that's good. Not everything has to be wrapped up with a picturesque idyllic scenery, where everyone "lived happily ever after".
But at the same time, I don't mind if they roll animated "Firefly". And I give them my thumbs up, will be happy if they manage to success but I don't have big expectations either.
Okay so a little bit of out of universe trivia on Dollhouse: It was planned for 5 seasons. With the risk of cancellation, the second season and the two Epitaph episodes were a severely compressed telling of 4 seasons of plans. And, personally I think it worked well. Something similar happened to Babylon 5, Manifest, Jericho (IIRC), Firefly (Serenity was the original ending that would have played out over multiple seasons), and the Escaflowne anime: the main plots towards the end got compressed to create a faster pace at the climax while ensuring the story could be finished (though I wasn't a fan of how Manifest ended).
My concern about original writers being involved in reboots is if they want to fill out the story they couldn't tell the first time around and end up with a more standard pacing that's less exciting, and end up getting cancelled before finishing. Then we end up with things like Tru Calling and Dark Matter, which had planned plots they couldn't finish.
While I'm definitely going to give this a chance, I'm not going to get my hopes up. Firefly was a perfect storm--it was the combination of Wheadon, Tim Minear, and the entire cast. Personally, I think the writing is what made Firefly work, and without Wheadon or Minear, I don't know if it will rise to the same level.
Moreover, I felt Serenity was a good conclusion to the original mythology (River, Alliance, etc.). If they introduce a new mythology arc, it might not quite have the same resonance. And if they just do a bunch of monster-of-the-week episodes, it won't be enough.
But I don't want to criticize what I haven't seen. They know way better than I do, and even if the only result of this is that the original actors have a lot of fun, then I'm all for it. They deserve to take a shot.
Nope, nope, nope.
Think about the Matrix series. The first Matrix film was iconic, the second was decent but sort of mid, the third was absolute drek and it taints the entire franchise as a result. I can't watch The Matrix any more without knowing how they fucked up the third film and without that slightly ruining the experience. The fourth I watched but I must admit that it hasn't really left any kind of impression on me.
Resolving at any cost is way worse than leaving something hanging.
I think it's why Firefly is so well regarded: it didn't last long enough to fall to enshittification. And when they did resolve it they only had a feature film's length to do it, so they had to focus and we got Serenity, which is excellent and how they resolved the origin of the Reavers is still a great piece of storytelling.
Reuse of starship models certainly happened in SF shows and movies. There’s a big fleet battle in Serenity with IIRC some Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek models in the background, and I think the Serenity and one or two Star Trek ships found their way into fleet shots in Battlestar Galactica.
Here's what I term my "flypaper" movies. If I happen to glance at the satellite TV guide and notice one of these coming up, there's a good change I'll be watching it.
Lawrence of Arabia The Maltese Falcon Most Hitchcock films Blade Runner The Man From Snowy River The Martian Monty Python & the Holy Grail The Princess Bride Serenity The Thin Man series The Thing Tombstone Young Frankenstein Monty Python and the Holy Grail Clerks and most Kevin Smith movies Baby Drive and most Edgar Wright movies Fanboys Spinal Tap Kung Fu Hustle Apollo 13
Well said.
I enjoyed watching the best show of all time. (Of course I did!) Up until Firefly got canceled, anyway, which was enormously frustrating. But at least I got to keep the sense of mystery and the potential of big reveals.
Then they made Serenity. Which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong. But I had to do some mental gymnastics to treat it as something other than a continuation. I had to think of it as its own thing, and then I could be okay with treating it as a good movie.
But it wrapped up several loose ends up a wholly unsatisfying way. If that was what the original series was leading up to, then I could no longer care when re-watching or just thinking about the series. It wasn't so much wrapping up loose ends as snipping them off. It was a 90° turn into a different story. So I treated it that way, and it was really nice when my kids were old enough that we could watch the series together and accept that it terminated abruptly at the last created episode.
I think the writer's point is that Kubrick has been analyzed _to death_ on social media. It's true - there's a huge ecosystem of YouTube explainer videos, listicles, in-depth articles about his shooting style, camera tricks, editing, symbolism in his films, etc. So, I don't think he's actually wrong. In previous decades there was an ecosystem of books and magazines about films (for example I have books on the making of Dune, the making of Blade Runner, the making of Star Trek, books of essays on X-Files, Serenity, and Cinefex magazines that go into amazing detail on how the visual effects for Lord of the Rings were made). But most of this sort of thing seems to have shifted to online.
Something that Joss Whedon said in the commentary on Firefly and Serenity was that they deliberately took care to make the CGI bits a bit crappy - no perfect tracking shots of ships in space, but a bit of wild panning to catch the action, not quite getting everyone, a crash zoom out. The whole "cinema verité, cameraman caught on the back foot" thing. Even a lot of the "exterior mounted cameras" were done to look a bit wobbly and grainy, because it would be hard to shoot if it was real so you'd model it like you'd just sucker-mounted a VX2000 to the side of your ship and shot on DV as best you could.
It's surprising how it makes it more immersive than perfection.
Things like the new Marvel movies leave me a bit cold because there's no sense of "how did they do that", because the answer is always going to be "green screen and Blender".
I've had that same thought. How far away are we from true "video on demand"
- Show me the second season of Firefly, set after the events of Serenity - Remake Flash Gordon in the style of John Carpenter, with Roddy Piper as Flash - Create a 6 part mini-series, a modern day retelling of Seven Samurai, in 2050 Tokyo underworld, with Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe - I'm too busy to read this obscure book from project gutenberg, make a movie of it for me - Here's a one-pager I wrote, give me a trailer for it with Keanu Reeves as the main star
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
I don't understand why they don't now factor a TV movie or mini series to tie it all off, in the season's comissioning.
A Serenity to Firefly.
Even if one is shot every season that may be its last. Just left without post-production unless needed.
Everyone gets resolution, the show is presumably worth more in the catalogue and resale, and you've got people watching another couple of hours of content. No more "I'm not starting it, Netflix will kill it on a cliffhanger."
The shot footage can potentially be recycled for the next season anyway, or used to write out actors that don't return or whatever.
Would writing and shooting less than three hours of material, with no post-production, really cost that much more?
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
One of my conjectures about the future world is that emotional abuse is likely to become as taboo as physical - and at some point companies will need to check their management for such behaviours - and not just the outrageous stuff. We will start to monitor all our interactions and ... well with enough data points (second by second capture of interactions over billions of humans) then coaching / therapy becomes a medical / epidemiology problem
It's going to be a weird world, but maybe we will be better adjusted ?
Or does that sound like the ending of Serenity the movie?
"I find it difficult to watch action movies these days, with camera cuts every second and thirty seconds per scene."
You know that dream most people have had, where they're running down the hallway that never ends, or running away from something they can't escape, or swimming up through endless water, or any of a dozen variations on the theme of reality no longer being composed of length and distance and height but instead being just a geometrically featureless abstraction of whatever experiential idea is currently stuck in your head?
Modern Hollywood action feels like that to me. There's no geography. Nothing changes because no matter how hard you punch the superheros (whether or not this is formally a superhero movie) they don't even so much as get their hair mussed. Things break and fall down, people get flung into concrete walls and break the concrete walls and pop back up so often it has lost all impact, you can't get your bearings on anything, you can't figure out where things are, nobody's winning or losing, it's not in any particular place, it's just never ending inescapable abstraction of fighting ideation, until the director or writer just decides it's over for basically no reason and we go on to the next thing, no different than a nightmare finally breaking not because you got away from the thing (you can't, it's in your head with you) but just because it is later.
Modern Hollywood action feels like that sort of nightmare you can't escape from for me... not the one that has you waking up drenched in sweat and terror, not the night terror nightmare, but the nightmare that drones on and on and doesn't let you go and makes no particular sense and you just can't get out of, with no real place or concrete events or anything else to hook your attention on to and break out of the loop.
Needless to say, I'm not particularly excited about throwing my money at them to produce this feeling in me.
(The last fight I really remember was the last on in Serenity. It sure isn't an action extravaganza like a Marvel movie, but that fight impacts everything and everybody. As Malcolm Reynolds hobbles away from that confrontation, there is no question. Something has happened. It happened in a place, and there was a sequence of events, that followed logic and biology. Events logically led up to it and consequences radiated out from it. Serenity isn't the greatest action movie in history or anything, the fight in the bar of the same movie also feels like the nightmare I describe above, it's just the last scene is the last fight I remember that impacted me.)
Fair enough.
I would caution about treatments that are designed to affect that fundamental a level of "being human," though. That clip I referenced was from the movie Serenity, and "Miranda" was a planet, where they tried pretty much exactly what you are talking about. It was fiction, but there's a road, leading somewhere, reputed to be paved with good intentions...
It's from Serenity, the film continuation of Firefly.
The translation of the Chinese is roughly "I want to darken my ears and heart and become a stone."
Scroll about halfway down on this page to find some info: https://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net/title/serenitynovel.html
> We believe Bitcoin will lead the world toward a better future.
This sentence reminds me of The Operative in the movie Serenity (2005), played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who kept telling everyone over the course of the movie, "We're making a better world" -- with the conviction of a true believer. I guess only true believers talk like that.
Kudos, was about to post that and saw you got there first.
For those who don't know, the Pax is G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate. It's a fictional chemical compound created by the Union of Allied Planets to pacify populations. Tested on Miranda, it had the effect of pacifying 99% of the population, but 1% turned into psychotic rage machines. All of this is from the Serenity movie set in the Firefly universe. I loved watching the Firefly TV series, and the movie.
MyAnimeList has a pretty good navigation list IMO. For example on https://myanimelist.net/anime/25777/Shingeki_no_Kyojin_Season_2 there is prequel, sequel, other (spinoffs and specials), and "alternate version" (condensed movie summary or remake). Maybe the naming could be better but those relationship types are the basic set for any kind of serialized media. Note that the media type is not fixed, e.g. the sequel to the last (TV) episode of Firefly is Serenity (a movie).
Now it's true that some shows aren't really designed to be serialized, e.g. for the Fate series there is a complicated mess of a graph (https://i.redd.it/6fz5fzz6sfv11.png) and most relationships will have to be encoded as "other", but since it's so messy, almost any watch order is reasonable, so there isn't much structure lost.
I remember when Serenity came out. It was one of the first movies (that I had seen) that had bright, colorful, sunshiny days, with lots of visual effects.
I know that it wasn't the first, but I hadn't really seen much, before that. Star Wars had effects in color, but there wasn't any actual CGI involved.
I’m not sure if it’s hatred towards sex workers they aren’t likely going to have the Reavers either at least not in the same manner as the show yet alone the film.
Firefly was really dark with a lot of gore compared to most network shows of the time.
Serenity was probably closer to the level of “dark” JW wanted to have in the show mixed with a FU of some sorts to fans by killing so many of the main cast and basically killing any sequel possibility on either screen.
The issue Disney has is that Disney+ has no room for anything that isn’t kids friendly because it’s a babysitting as a service first.
The Mandalorian goes out it’s way to avoid graphic violence if it wasn’t such a money maker to Disney I don’t think they would’ve it slip into the TV-14 realm for the recent episodes before that it was pretty much TV-PG.
Under these circumstances it’s going to be very hard to have Inara on the show.
In fact I’m not sure how Fox even got away with a TV-14 rating for FF initially, Germany, Australia, NZ and quite a few other countries have rated it 16/18+.
My guess is that Fox got the show rated on the based on the pilot and with how the season progressed they would’ve definitely have had to re-rate the show if it wasn’t canceled.
Disney has a real problem on their hands right now they are in possession of so many IPs that they no longer can be kids only or even kids first across the board and they’ll likely have to segregate their streaming services to support that.
I would not be surprised if Disney would launch a spin-off brand for their more mature properties sort of like Fox and FX.
I think you're significantly underestimating the amount of money that would need to be raised and overestimating the amount of people who would put their money where their mouth was and fund multiple seasons of these shows. Serenity, the Firefly movie, was sort of this, and it cost a lot for a two hour movie ($39M per Wikipedia) and didn't do a ton of extra revenue over that budget ($40.4M).
If there's something structurally preventing it, it's that the big studios and especially the "streaming as a loss leader" stuff players Amazon and Apple TV are making so many big-budget/high-production-value shows that audience expectations and standards are very high.
They kinda try to patch it up in the movie "Serenity". Supposedly the whole show takes place in a gigantic star system full of giants with dozens of moons amounting to hundreds of worlds. They also have some form of terraforming tech to make inhospitable worlds habitable.
Frankly I find that whole set up only slightly more plausible than some kind of FTL, especially since they also have gravity manipulation tech already.
The potential unintended consequences was covered in the movie Serenity.
As someone who has watched Firefly quite a few times, I don't recall this episode. The only thing that comes close is "Ariel", where they steal medical supplies off a core world hospital, but that's straight up theft.
I don't recall all the details of the film Serenity, but the plot described does not ring a bell. Are you sure it was Firefly you were thinking of?
Note: I have not read the comics, if it is one of them the plot appears.
Didn't Firefly have story arcs planned out, I don't know if there were five years worth.
Ouch, Joss Whedon tried to cram it into the film Serenity when Firefly got cancelled, I daresay there's far more detail I am not versed in.
Man this is so cool. I saw that movie Serenity when I was younger and totally wanted to Teraform other planets after seeing that. In the movie they're like "Process only takes 10 years!"
...AI please help us
I have to agree so much.
I think the memories of what made Firefly so special ignore the reality that it's been 16 years.
Nathan Filion will be 50 in 3 years, he can no longer physically pull off the young uppity captain with a grudge against the system. The same goes for all the other actors - they've all grown up and matured since then.
So to account for that, time would've had to pass. I find I find it difficult to believe that the crew of Serenity would've been able to stick together for more than another year, two at the outside.
In the movie we'd already had Book and Inara leave, and given the events in the movie I can't see Zoe wanting to stick around much longer, despite her loyalty to Mal.
Given the wanted status of most of the rest of the crew, paying work would continue to be hard to find, and the ship was already running on fumes as it was. Any failures of any critical components would quickly see the ship grounded, and then Jayne would be gone if he hadn't already bailed.
Kaylee and Simon might have made it work for a while, but Simon was always too focused on his sister's well-being to the exclusion of everything else. With the government apparently no longer after River, he might have reached out to the rich father to return home.
The movie, Serenity wraps it all up, so it's worth watching the series.
I loved loved loved Firefly but Serenity killed that franchise for me. A dismally bad film.
The Black Mirror series is worth watching, although they seem to focus mostly on 'digital consciousness'. The USS Callister episode is not only gripping but very funny too. So many great episodes though - hard to pick a real standout although I would have to say if I had to San Junipero is one of the best things I have ever watched.
Then there's the really cheesy old "so bad it's good" stuff, for example: - When Worlds Collide (1951) - The People That Time Forgot (1977) - Swamp Thing (1982)
Have you seen the original War of the Worlds?
Then there is the Alien franchise, Aliens (Alien 2) being my personal favourite - Bill Paxton is sooo funny in that and of course it's directed by James Cameron. Some other great actors like Michael Biehn too.
Have you watched the series Firefly? Also the (related) movie Serenity.
There is soooo much great stuff out there!
Chuck and Serenity come to mind. The rabid fan base used their dollars to indirectly influence the studios to renew and greenlight a feature film; respectively.
I'm a Firefly fan. I was dying to see Serenity when it came out. Just dying. If the studio had limited the box office to 100 tickets I would have acquired one. I would have rolled my grandmother for a ticket. And there were a lot of people just like me, in absolute numbers. A few thousand, at least. Those 100 tickets would have sold for thousands of dollars. By your logic that would have made Serenity the most sought after movie ever.
But there weren't enough people like me to make the movie's release successful by conventional measures. It barely broke even. There were enough die-hard fans to drive up the price of those theoretically limited 100 tickets, but most people aren't Firefly fans at all and didn't bother to buy tickets at the normal price.
This is a rudimentary form of the plot of Serenity (the Firefly movie), if I'm interpreting that correctly. Kingsmen, too.
I took a completely different message from Serenity. Shepherd new what Mal believed in and was encouraging him to stand for it. Up until that point in the film, he had behaved as if he were just a leaf on the wind.
I'm not sure that Shepherd's advice would have been the same had Mal believed differently.
They don't care if you think they are hypocrites, they are believers in their own righteousness.
I wonder, do people broadly take away this message from Serenity? Not the slick-talkin space cowboys are cool message, the message about believing. The theme is repeated in the movie, but it's directly delivered by Shepherd Book. He labels the government antagonist as a believer. He literally says to Mal I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it.
In the end, the only thing that stops the believer is having his entire world torn down.
But yeah, it's pretty hypocritical.
I've watched Buffy, Angel, and Firefly several times all the way through (Firefly the most often, by far). Certainly, some of the magic of Buffy is gone when watching it as a middle aged man (I was an adult when watching it the first time, but just barely), but it's still enjoyable.
It was definitely a show that got better in the later seasons, but it was always funny and fun pop horror/fantasy, and the cast was excellent (except Michelle Trachtenberg's Dawn, who was just annoying). I think maybe Whedon's greatest talent back then was picking a good cast with great chemistry, which may be why Dollhouse failed so miserably, for me. So much of that cast was just wooden and utterly forgettable (I almost said "unlikable", but I can't remember anyone from the show other than Amy Acker and Eliza Dushku, so I can't even say I disliked the cast). Now that he's working with huge names, and the cast is already mostly set in stone, I'm not inclined to go see his films. I watched the first Avengers and remember it being funny, but not really anything else about it. The second was a snore.
Anyway, Angel was maybe more adult-friendly; at least it was intended to be, since no one could pretend David Boreanaz was young enough to be messing around with high school girls anymore. Though Buffy was always funnier.
But, Firefly is the best of them all. Surprisingly so, since all other Whedon shows are widely regarded as being best after they've had a season or so to find their rhythm. It seems reasonable to assume Firefly would have actually gotten better; the film hints at that potential. Though Serenity was rushed, it was still excellent, and would have made a top-notch series of episodes for the show if it'd been presented in that form.
To be fair, Serenity was a much weaker movie, as a stand-alone thing. It failed to expand beyond the core fan base much. A relative of mine went to see it 6 times during the opening weekend to goose the numbers, but only because he was a fan of the show.
This was 2003 no TiVo even, and Fox doesn't really do traditional syndication.
Scifi is expensive to make a scifi show has to outperform the competition to survive simply because of production costs.
This is why Shows like Buffy or X-Files worked because they didn't really need anything to set up the world, no need for expensive sets or special effects (buffy had some but you could always just do a filler episode with not much going on to balance the seasonal budget) a high school/small town setting and rural new jersey with a few wind breakers and 2 rental cars isn't going to break anyone's bank.
And also when Fox did try to monetize fans, the fans didn't coughed up the cash, Serenity made 25M at the US box office just to put it into perspective, xXx State of the Union and freaking DOOM made more money than Serenity.
They did it with Serenity and it didn't work out that well, barely covered the production budget.
Nathan is way too old these days, it would be fun to see but I don't think it could ever live to the expectations of the fan base.
This is one of the problems with cult pop culture items, a lot of the following is based on the fact that the fanbase produced just as much content as there was originally if not more, and what the imagine is "perfect" but also very individual and the illusion of perfection would shatter when some one tries to make into something tangible.
Firefly is probably the best example of "never meet your heroes", it was an epic show, but part of it's epicness is what we've all imagined it could be if it only had X more episodes or years to go.
I don't think that Firefly is a show for nerds, I don't do 90% of the stuff that are considered "nerdy". I'm not into comics, I'm not into anime, I enjoy good scifi and fantasy because they are good not because of the genre.
Firefly is one of my favorite shows, but I can also see it's many flaws, and I honestly don't know if a 5-6 season Firefly would've been even as remotely good as the "Firefly" that fans imagine.
Firefly was very entertaining as a show and it set up a universe that allowed people's imagination to run wild with fan theories and fanfiction, but it doesn't mean that the show would ended up being half as good as the short preview we had.
The airing of the show was abysmal the episodes aired out of order and created a mess it was mishandled on every step but I can nearly guarantee you that if it would've went on the end result would've been considerably worse than the would be show the fans imagine in their heads.
Firefly is your highschool crush that you never had a chance of dating, it been put onto such a high pedestal that I could never live up to it's expectations, and when the fan base did get another chance with Serenity it flopped.
Serenity wasn't a bad movie, it was pretty well in line with the show in terms of quality of writing and performance, and the budget was considerably better but after years of imagination people just didn't came to watch it.
They got a movie that made 25M domestically (The DVD sales of Firefly made more), and about 14-15M world wide, it barely covered it's budget it made like 300K over the production costs which means that it most likely ended up losing money.
If Serenity would've been a huge success Fox would've greenlit additional movies (it's been 11 years since it came out so don't cry about spoilers) or even a renewal or spin off of the TV show even tho several characters died in the film.
But the fans pissed all over it, so I would have to say it's a good show but we all have a major selection bias because of our cultural bias, your mom might like the show but I can guarantee you her tastes are probably closer to yours that you might think since at least some part of your own cultural bias came from your parents.
And again I absolutly love Firefly, and I chuckle at the Firefly references and jokes in Castle (another show that was dragged way past it's lifespan) I do find the whole western/space opera theme extremely cool (one of the few animes I not only love but can actually bring myself to watch is CowBoy BeBop), but I'm not sold that it would've been a perfect show and a hit if it would've been let to run a full season or more.
Firefly+Serenity could be a pretty great ~20 episode series.
If it followed TV success, it would have 50-100 forgettable episodes to go with 20 good ones.
I think this applies to an awful lot of stuff on TV. The economics of it mean that buying season 5 is a better choice than taking a risk on something new. I think better stories would get told if series were generally shorter.
> I spent 20 minutes trying to find this reference and could not find anything convincingly close enough. It is a sci-fi reference or something that happened in our world? The only thing I could find was FireFly related.
It is a scifi/firefly reference. Spoilers ahead for the Serenity movie.
Miranda is a planet on a far far "edge" of the Verse (the "known universe" in Firefly) and considered fictional before the events of Serenity as the Alliance had basically struck it from records (and it was deep in "Reaver space" where people of the Verse don't go without a serious death wish). An Alliance research program was tried there: G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate ("Pax") had been found to reduce aggression, and on Miranda it was tried on a large scale, spread throughout the planet via the air processors system.
The compound pacified 99.9% of the population so much they basically stopped all drive. They stopped working, talking, feeding, moving and ultimately leaving.
The remaining 0.1% blew a gasket and went the exact opposite becoming ultra-violent self-mutilating merciless and fearless animalistic — but not stupid — monsters: the reavers, which have plagued the Verse since.
Yeah, possibly. I have no expert knowledge of this particular shoot.
Serenity's not a great example though, normally a movie like that would've been closer to $100M at the time. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_(film)#Filming
Tbh to my ears that sounds like a bit of an overestimate.
Serenity, a 119 minute feature film, had a production budget of $39M.
Of course, there are probably higher costs for a "documentary" like this Maersk one, primarily because of fixed-costs and international travel, but I couldn't imagine that it would be more expensive per-minute by a factor of 7.
I can't help recalling Firefly, where (spoilers) only the worst, most sadistic bad guy (Adelai Niska) tortures people[1]. He does so using any method he can, not to get information but just because he loves to do it. It is obviously also a warning to other people not to annoy him, but this is almost a secondary purpose, at best equal with causing immense pain to his enemies.
This is a reasonably accurate depiction of torture, as far as I understand the science of it, and it's one of the few reasons torture might actually be used (i.e. at the orders of a complete psychopath.) - although Mal Reynolds seems unfeasibly good at resisting it (any evidence that this occasionally happens? I'd be interested to hear.)
[1] You can read about the character here: http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/Adelai_Niska and you can buy the DVD of the original series here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Firefly-The-Complete-Series-DVD/dp/B0001B3YTM (check out, in similar items, the film Serenity, which rounds off the plotlines from the series nicely.)
I just noticed this a couple weeks ago with "Serenity" - I mostly watch TV on Netflix, rather than movies - but they absolutely should be giving us the whole picture. TV's have anti-letterboxing modes, and the people who don't know any better than "the picture isn't taking up my whole TV" should use them. And of course there's no reason whatsoever for them to provide anything but the original version on the website.
I'm not sure that he would go this route. Based on what he's said in interviews, I get the sense that although he loves the Firefly characters as much as us, he DID get a chance to make the movie (Serenity) to wrap it up. VM fans/Rob Thomas didn't get that chance, hence this Kickstarter.
Also with the huge success of Avengers, Joss is going to be busy directing big budget sci-fi/fantasy/awesome movies for a while.
I think the gp was referencing the movie "Serenity". Good movie :)
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack
I think you are totally right given the current state of video lectures--they are like the first movies, just awkward translations of stage plays that don't take advantage of the ways that a film can be different and better. I'd much rather see a lecture in person today, all else equal. But I imagine as innovators take advantage of the digital media, we'll see some pretty cool stuff one day: higher production values, Second Life-style virtual worlds, more interactivity, HD, and Discovery Channel-type content that can better compete with live lectures. Right now, though, we are definitely on that second Innovator's Dilemma line where digital lectures only compete with the low end and non-consumption, the way maybe NAND memory used to.
Also, I agree that community is a big deal, and the number one thing we are missing to really take advantage of all the cool content that is coming out. (But I do think other video-based works, like Lost or Serenity or Star Trek, have been able to support both attention and community.)