I wasn't a big fan of Serenity when I first saw it, and I'm afraid I'm still not a
fan. Watching Serenity (the Firefly pilot) and Serenity (the Firefly
movie) back to back merely served to highlight all the gripes I had
about Serenity (the Firefly movie). The television pilot (and
series) featured an ensemble cast and while the movie started off
that way, it eventually turned into Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or, in
this case, River the Reaver Slayer) and a bunch of people who she
magnanimously puts up with. It didn't help that Malcolm Reynolds,
the only other strong character in the movie, seemed to have
undergone a complete personality shift somewhere in between Objectsin Space (the last episode in the series) and Serenity (the Firefly
movie). In fact, I found Mal's personality shift so jarring that I
almost felt I wasn't watching the original Firefly cast but their
Mirror Universe counterparts.
I could have forgiven the
inconsistencies in Mal's characterization in the movie as opposed to
the series (after all, a bit of time was supposed to have passed and
people do change) but I really found the resolution of River's story
arc to be really difficult to stomach. I may be in the minority here
but I find the concept of omnipotent and omniscient heroes to be,
well, boring. During the series, while it was obvious that River had
some unique and powerful abilities, the fact that she was off in
la-la land half the time prevented her from being too obtrusive.
Once she was "cured" of her psychological ailments, she
became...boring. And obtrusive. And speaking of how she was
"cured", it was simply too neat and tidy: River sees a
holographic recording of Ms. Exposition describe how an entire
planetful of people just decided to lay down and die, how the Reavers
came to be and after witnessing the bloody climax of the recording
(Ms. Exposition getting raped and eaten alive by a Reaver), River
purges her demons by vomiting against a nearby wall after which she
declares: "I'm alright...I'm alright". Huh? What? This
was most unsatisfying considering everything that she and Simon went
through during the course of Firefly's fourteen episodes.
Yeah, we get it. She's
cured. And a total badass now
Personally, I think the movie would
have been much more satisfying had River died; if she had simply
closed the blast doors, tossed Simon's medical kit through the doors
before they closed and then gotten killed by the Reavers, the movie
would have been much better. We would have been spared the rather
difficult to swallow scenes of her wading through the Reavers and
piling their corpses up like cordwood and River sacrificing herself
to save her brother and the others would have been very poignant, on
par with Spock sacrificing himself to save the Enterprise and her
crew in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Her dying to save her
brother would also have lent thematic symmetry to their story arc.
And more important of all, we would have been spared the exchange
between River and Mal at the film's end where we realize that she can
essentially do everything that everyone on the crew can (and probably
do a better job of it) which leaves us with the question of what
purpose they serve now.
Spock saves the
Enterprise and its crew in a selfless act of heroism
Of course, having River die in Serenity
probably would not have sat well with many
Firefly fans, especially since almost a third of the original cast
ended up getting killed off in the film. River dying probably would
have resulted in grief-stricken Firefly fans converging upon JossWhedon's home with torches and pitchforks in hand and bloody
vengeance in their hearts. However, I find nothing wrong with the
idea of the hero dying in a story. I thought the Star Trek moviefranchise would have been much better had Spock stayed dead in the
aftermath of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (if anything, it could
have opened up some interesting story-lines about how Kirk and the
rest of the crew dealt with their grief and eventually got on with
their lives) and I thought Lethal Weapon 2 would have been a much
better movie had Riggs died in Murtaugh's arms. There's nothing
wrong with the hero dying, either in the act of saving the lives of
others or avenging a loved one.
If anything, it's heroic.
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