Serenity vs. Riddick Part Deux

A few weeks back, Devin came blasting out of the gate with a scathing review of Serenity as compared to The Chronicles Of Riddick. I hadn't avoided Serenity, but I also hadn't gone out of my way to see it. But how could thousands of geeks be wrong? Well, it turns out they were only half wrong.

Last week I received Serenity from my Netflix queue and watched the film for the first time. Trying to filter out all of the debate over the movie in this here Lodge, I attempted to clear my mind and come in fresh giving Joss Whedon the benefit of the doubt. My first criticism of the movie spawns from it's use of the Papyrus font. Come on. If you are trying to create an original Scifi show/flick, you'd think you'd come up with an original logo and not use a font that I used for my cover pages on essays back in college 10 years ago. Maybe I'm being fickle, but it was pretty cheap looking.

The movie did strike me as impressive, but not without fault. I only gave it a 3 out of 4 stars on Netflix because I did like it. But I had some issues with it, both good and bad. Starting off, the story seemed done to me. Genetic engineering to create passive lifeforms makes some turn into carnage seeking creatures? It was too much like A Brave New World meets 28 Days Later for me. I know art is recycled, but great art is original and inspired. The movies characters were its strength. Great depth in the characters, especially Captain Malcom Reynolds and the smokin hot Inara character. I think having the Firefly headstart really benefitted the film in this instance, because the actors seemed to really believe in their characters. Very seemless, very well done. I'll cut my rant short by ending with the fact that the editing was the worst part of the film. After watching the Special Features and viewing the Deleted Scenes, they all should have been included in the film. Each scene backed up the fantasy world that Joss Whedon (and whats with this guy and female names for males, I think he wrote the man's man character of Jayne to combat his own insecurities about sharing his own name in "Joss" with a female pop singer from the UK, but that's just me) was trying to create. The new worlds scenes in Serenity didn't have the depth of new worlds created in classic Scifi films like Dune, Star Wars, Bladerunner, Star Trek, Pitch Black, The Fifth Element, and many, many more.

And speaking of Pitch Black (which is a far better film than The Chronicles Of Riddick, by the way), that brings my post full circle back to The Chronicles Of Riddick. Devin did a great job getting Jayne's panties up in a bunch a while back. So when I was walking through Best Buy last night and was perusing the DVD racks, I almost got a side ache laughing so hard when I saw Serenity packaged with The Chronicles Of Riddick in a DVD Combo 2-pack. Hilarious. I called Devin immediately and shared my joy. Now I share it with the Lodge.