Saw Serenity tonight with Amber. I enjoyed it. Mostly. It obviously had a very high production value, good fight scenes, and I absolutely loved Jayne's tee-shirts (I expect them to show up on www.founditemclothing.com before too long, please, please, pretty pretty please), but there were a few points I just had to mention, including the title of this post:

"Any questions?"

"Yeah, does Han Solo know you raid his wardrobe?"

"You'll get the answer to that next Saturday."

We Hain't Done Had no Book Larnin' These Here Last Five-Hunnert Year, I Reckon.

I hain't had nothin' twixt my nethers 'ceptin' it take a batt'ry.

That's an honest-to-goodness quote [*] from the movie. Really.

Okay, Wild West in Space. It's a great motif, but it was sooooo overdone in the dialogue. None of the actors seemed comfortable talking this claptrap in an affected drawl. Some of the scenes were great. Everything about the bank robbery felt true. It worked within the universe.

Tatooine was a planet on the outskirts of everything. We understood immediately that Luke was a hick farmboy, not content with his lot. And yet, no need for the Arkansas in-bred delivery. The dialogue, even when it wasn't utterly contrived and cheesy, was thick with this kind of clumsiness. Except for Whitey. Wash was the only one that didn't clutter up the scene with, "Aw, gosh, gee shucks, ma'am, twarn't nothing, oh, golly."

Wheels Are a Good Thing.

The nice thing about having wheels underneath you is that if you can't make the VTOL your feet were designed for, and you have to make it in on your belly, you'll be able to roll to a stop. Take a tip from NASA; they might not look as neato-keen as feet, but they might just save your ship. I'd point out that Star Wars also makes this kind of mistake, but that took place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, while this ostensibly takes place 500 years in the future.

All Together Now

I'm happy to see that psychotic, cannabilistic monsters can still get it together to fly a spaceship. Reavers are bloodthirsty psycho killers (qu'est-ce que c'est?) bent on murder, rape, carnage and voting Libertarian, but they can still manage to be social enough to pilot giant cities in space?

I get it. The Alliance is Law, and the Reavers are Chaos, and the only good guys are the ones who play it right up the middle. If I were still 15, this might even make me write long, painful essays about Michael Moorcock and Man's ultimate need for a pantheon of anti-heroes, but I'm not 15, and I just feel like I've been manhandled by a deadly assassin. Not rough enough to kill me, just enough to make me angry.

Fontastic Voyage

Seriously, Pa-fucking-pyrus?