The Guns of Firefly?

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Just picked up the DVD set and watched it through. You guys were right. It's the best TV show I never saw. I like Whedon's long and complex story arcs. The action is probably the best I've ever seen in a sci-fi TV show. Or any TV show for that matter. And the best part is if I decide to go to a "Firefly" convention, I can find several appropriate costumes in my dresser, not to mention the proper iron.

My Mosin M-44 with a tactical light and quick release sling would work well on that show. The prop men seemed to favor old fashioned firearms with high-tech attachments.

I note the preacher man from Barney Miller says the wounds on several victims in "War Stories" were from a "54R sniper rifle" :evil:
 
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:cool

http://www.edinburgh-festivals.com/reviews.cfm?id=1831122005

Serenity

ALISTAIR HARKNESS


Directed by: Joss Whedon
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau

WATCHING the first big action set-piece in Serenity, I found myself trying to work out why I found the scene - which features a band of grungy space pirates escaping from a gang of vicious cannibalistic creatures known as Reavers - almost intolerably exciting. It took a few minutes before the answer hit me.

It wasn't just that the effects work was great, or that the editing was tight or that the score and the sound design were dramatic. It was something about the characters: they were actually interacting with each other and their environment.

It seems like such a simple thing to point out but, in an age of over-detailed CGI worlds full of digital characters and actors reacting against nothing, watching a chase sequence shot in a physically real location, featuring honest-to-god real live trees, and actors talking to each other, actually feels revolutionary.

But that's Serenity all over. The film is the big-screen directorial debut of Joss Whedon, who brought us Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and its spin-off, Angel), and he obviously has such a pure belief in the value of storytelling, characterisation and witty dialogue that he makes concepts and ideas that we've seen a million times before feel fresh and new.

Serenity is a science fiction adventure that riffs heavily on the Western and, inevitably, owes a few debts to the original Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Alien movies. But rather than making you pine for those films, it makes you thankful that someone has learned the right lessons from them.

This is the type of filmmaking that knows how to keep us entertained from first frame to the last. It's a fantastically layered film, with a dense structure, but it's not overloaded with mythological significance, nor does it try to pound us into submission with an inflated sense of its own importance. The plot is tightly constructed, but there's enough room for the actors to manoeuvre and let us get to know their characters. And the script is smart and funny, which keep the atmosphere light when it needs to be, but ensures that dramatic and emotional moments are pretty toothsome, too.

Serenity is based on the short-lived TV show Firefly that Whedon created in 2002. Running for only 13 episodes, it was cancelled mid-season by Rupert Murdoch's Fox network, presumably because it wasn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer in space. Nevertheless, the show's fervent fanbase kept it alive online and with massive DVD sales. What's great about this film version is that it doesn't require you to be a fan to enjoy and understand it. I went in knowing nothing and was hooked almost immediately.

As the film opens, though, you might groan because it does look like a science-fiction TV show - and a really bad one at that. We find ourselves in one of those yawn-inducing antiseptic worlds full of fascistic looking people talking in artificially calming tones.

A teacher is telling a group of pupils about the recent galactic civil war in which a vast coalition known as the Alliance have emerged victorious against a band of rabble-rousing freedom fighters called the Independents. They, we learn, objected to the Alliance's attempts to civilise them with subtle mind-control devices.

The film looks in danger of becoming a boring, humourless, exposition-heavy science fiction melodrama - but then Whedon pulls the rug out from under us, plunging us into a whole new darker environment.

Then he does the same trick again a few minutes later and we realise that we've just been brought up to speed on all the background that we really needed to know from the TV show. It's an audacious move, and as breathtakingly proficient a start to a movie as you could hope for.

Our heroes are the rag-tag crew of the titular Serenity, a hunk-of-junk space ship captained by Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a wily Han Solo-type who fought on the losing side of the war and now scratches out a living robbing government institutions.

Among his crew is River (Summer Glau), a mysterious psychic girl rescued from an Alliance research lab that was conducting experiments on her to turn her into a weapon. She has a secret locked in her memories and the Alliance, desperate to prevent this getting out, have dispatched a cold, logical assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor - superb) to bring her back.

The film kicks in hard as an action film, with Mal and his crew engaging in some surprisingly ruthless behaviour, and it follows through in spectacular style with a fight scene that will have Buffy fans going apoplectic. But Whedon and his hugely likeable cast nail the dramatic stuff, too.

As the normally self-serving crew find themselves caught in a fight with a higher purpose to it, Serenity becomes that great thing: a blockbuster with a heart and soul.
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And another:


http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=1827162005

Creator of Buffy slays them with film debut

TIM CORNWELL
ARTS CORRESPONDENT


THE big screen debut of Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival yesterday, with hundreds of fans descending on the Scottish capital for one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of the year.

Spawned from the cancelled TV series Firefly, the new film, Serenity, sold out within hours of the festival box office opening last month. Two extra screenings were hastily scheduled to meet the huge demand, both of which also quickly sold out. In fact, tickets sold out so quickly that they crashed the festival's computers and led to a bidding war on eBay.


Strong reviews for Serenity, the story of a small band of galactic outcasts set 500 years in the future, promised to seal its place as the big film of this year's film festival.

Extra crowd control staff were laid on at Cineworld to cope with the large numbers of fans expected to turn up as the entire cast of the $45 million film descended on Edinburgh for the premiere.

The stars included Nathan Fillion, whose leading role as a disillusioned spaceship captain has had fans putting his performance on a par with Harrison Ford's in Star Wars. "What I do is not so much an homage to Harrison Ford, as copy him," he said.

And the actress Summer Glau, a slender former ballet dancer who plays the deadly River, told an enthusiastic audience of film writers and critics how she built up her combat skills for the movie.

Whedon said yesterday that the Serenity story was inspired by Western tales of frontier life - "how people lived in an age before everything was convenient and could be beamed to your house".

"To be premiering here is exactly where I want to be," Whedon said. "Not just because I love it here, but because we do have fans who wouldn't expect to be the first people to see this. There's a lot of people in LA going, 'What?'"

Serenity, which opens in the United States on 30 September, was an unlikely choice for Edinburgh. "It's almost a cult movie, but it's going to be very hot and popular," Ginnie Atkinson, the film festival's managing director, predicted.

However, there is evidence that the film's appearance at a festival away from Hollywood is part of a carefully cultivated marketing campaign. Entertainment Weekly reported recently that the film has had more than 60 "sneak previews" to try to boost interest among internet-busy fans.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a huge hit in the UK, with some critics noting a British sense of humour - even traces of Monty Python. There is a similar feel about Serenity.

Whedon and his cast joked that the making of Serenity was "revenge" after Firefly was cancelled by an American TV network after 11 low-rated episodes.

His next project is the making of a new Wonder Woman film, but Whedon is already thinking about a sequel to Serenity, he revealed.

A very different film, Tsotsi, a tough tale of redemption among the gangs of a South African township, is leading the vote for the audience award at the festival, according to Ms Atkinson. "Tsotsi is obviously a very heart warming and interesting film that has grabbed the audience. It shows what diverse fare the audience are interested in," she said.
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I will not get excited about TMIAHM. I will not get excited about TMIAHM. I will not get excited ...
 
A Tim Minear quote from that interview, for anyone who doesn't want to dig through to find it:

This book is so important to so many people and you don’t want to f*ck it up. So there’s that. You want to keep true to spirit of it, and you want to take this enormously long book, that takes place over a long period of time and try to do a version of it that will play for two hours on a movie screen. The other thing is to make sure the powers that be in Hollywood don’t force you to turn it into some Marxist screed on socialism, when Heinlein was a Libertarian and it’s about free-market capitalism.
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I just watched all of the Firefly boxed set, and was impressed as hell.

If they could do a decent job on TMIAHM then I would be overjoyed.

I can't wait for 'Serenity'.
 
I just got through outfitting my target grey SP-101 with Crimson Trace grips and a Trijicon night sight. I'm going to call her "Firefly" in honor of the show, and because she is now mildly radioactive and glows in the dark.
 
Be sure to click on Jayne's profile for the "weapons explorer" bit.
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Written by idiots who 1) know nothing about firearms and 2) apparently know nothing about Firefly :scrutiny:

Mal wasn't an "officer" in the war, so why would he have an "officer's sidearm" issued to him ... and Zoe's gun is NOT a shotgun. :rolleyes:
 
Just took a look at the new Serenity site...looks pretty good, except for the bit where they identify Zoe's mare's leg is a "sawed-off shotgun". D'oh! :banghead:
 
Zundfolge, does Mal really seem to you like the kind of guy who would restrict himself to carrying what he was issued? :)
 
ah so what if a liu kuoshui de biaozi he houzi de ben erzi made the website, Serenity is still going to be a fun flick.

And it looks like Vera got a make-over.
 
One week!!!

Dr. Rob is right, looks like Vera got a makeover.
 

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That's not Vera! What did they do with Vera?!

I'm kinda worried about showing up for the premier. If there's a local news crew there they will assume I'm a die-hard fan who came in costume. I'll have to explain that I've always dressed like a character from the set of a post-apocalyptic western.

This photo was taken prior to the series, for example:

levergun.gif
 
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