my name is mwd

Unlike some people I know, I’ve never really go into Buffy (though Spike makes some of it quite funny for his humour with the second ‘u’ firmly in place), and I’ve not seen anything of Firefly, but the trailer for Joss Wheden’s film Serenity looks like fun. As far as I know, it’s based on the canned TV series Firefly, which doesn’t normal set your pulses running, but Firefly seems to have quite a high standing in the geek community, so I have hopes.

One thing that’s vaguely engaging from the trailer is something that’s set in futuristic earth that isn’t dark and rain soaked. For Blade Runner it was perfect, but it seems that ever since people have been fixed on the idea of a drizzly future. And seeing an alternative vision will be nice. As an aside, I have to disagree with the critics who said that the film Johnny Mnemonic suffered because of a derivative atmosphere a-la Blade Runner - a dark, dank world is exactly what springs forth from the pages of William Gibson’s short story upon which the film is based. JN had another serious flaw though, which is that the screen play was shite. Oh well.

Colour in these things does seem to help though - I guess by presenting the future in a dank setting the film maker is trying to use short hand to say that the future is a tired and oppressive place in their story. That’s fine, I just wish there was another short hand for this. Even Minority Report slips into this at times, though I find it easier to forgive this as it otherwise has some wonderful futurescapes, and is a quite jolly film to boot. Total Recall on the other had should have felt more oppressive, but failed to as it was all a-glow with Mars redness. I know that Mars is red, but the films tone just didn’t suit the set colours, and generally it just came off cheesy (though the casting didn’t help there).

As yet another aside (what was it we were talking about?), I’ve managed to touch on 3 films based on the works of Philip K. Dick. Blade Runner and Minority Report both very good (in different ways) and Total Recall unforgivable rubbish (though not as bad as Starship Troopers - no film is as bad as Starship Troopers). Regardless of the mess that is the film TR, I do recommend PKD’s collections of short stories - wonderful stuff.

Link: http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/serenity/