Serenity
Seeing films in the cinema usually reminds me why I like DVDs. DVDs have subtitles. They might not be totally accurate, but they do at least let me follow the dialogue. I must have missed at least a third, perhaps approaching half, of the dialogue in Serenity. Not so much that I missed the essential gist, but enough to dip out on many of the character-oriented nuances.

(This isn't a cinema thing, btw, but a basic hearing problem. I have the same trouble with TV soundtracks. And real-life conversation, though not quite so bad. But I can still pick out a Tree Pipit 300 feet overhead. Go figure.)

On the other hand, buying a cinema ticket reminds me of one advantage the big screen has over DVDs, or at least newly released ones. It's a lot cheaper.

From which you might deduce that I was not entirely impressed.

Fair's fair, I've never seen so much as half a second of Firefly and walked into the cinema knowing next to nothing about it. Buffy-meets-B7-via-the-Usual-Suspects seemed to be somewhere approaching the mark. And that's not far off, it seems. Only for B7 substitute Star Trek. And for the Usual Suspects, delete and replace with the Brady Bunch. Take a clutch of decent, morally upright middle class folk, dress them up in tatty clothes, and have them pretend to be amoral, cynical mercenary types who rob people and do nasty stuff like shoot unarmed people. They don't pretend very well. Under the swaggering tough talk and gun toting, they're Reservoir Hamsters. They don't have so much as a tenth of the amorality behind the Home Counties diction of the B7 crew, and even less in the way of charm.

In fact, they're a bog standard roster of stock spaceship crew. A ruggedly handsome captain whose chief talent seems to be getting people to follow him around for no readily explicable reason, a shapely female Number 2 (who in this case also doubles as the Token Non-Causian), a loudmouth roughneck in love with Very Big Guns, a pilot who's very very good at flying the ship and ... well, nothing else, an inner child in an adult body, and the obligatory emotional flatliner. Mark Harrison was ripping the shit out of half of these stereotypes in his Travellers strip in White Dwarf twenty bloody years ago. You'd think someone of Joss Whedon's (supposed) calibre might have noticed by now that they're long overdue for an unceremonious boot out of the airlock. Apparently not.

And there's an evil empire. Wow. There's a novelty. I forget what this one's called - the Alliance or something - but it doesn't matter. They're all the same. They're sleek and clean, faceless and bland, in stark contrast to the multi-coloured, multi-textured rough-edged trappings of the heroes. Perhaps we're meant to think they represent nasty Big Government, but they don't. They're just mass society, the post-Industrial Revolution urban bloat. The heroes of Serenity - and they are heroes, not one of them deserving even the smallest 'anti' prefix - might for a moment seem like champions of freedom and individualism, but really they're just another howl of existential anguish. We've got enough of those already. It says something, doesn't it, that by far the most interesting - indeed, the most sympathetic - character is the aforementioned evil empire's monomaniac assassin. (And a black baddie, too. Haven't seen one of those since Outland.) At least The Matrix took the time and trouble to identify the source of modern metropolitan angst, and if I was feeling charitable then I might assume that Serenity was using that as a springboard. But I'm not feeling charitable. Serenity feels like a film that doesn't even know it's banging its head against a wall, let alone what the wall might be made of.

What else is there? Oh yes, a pack of subhuman hyperpsycho cannibals. This is where my wonky hearing lets me down - I never did figure out if they were called Reapers, Reavers or Reefers. Doesn't matter. They're bad dudes, they're beyond all redemption, our noble good guys can slaughter as many as they like without so much as a teensy little smudge on their moral copybook. Talk about dehumanising the enemy. Yes, okay, we're told where the Reapers/Reavers/Whatevers come from (with a level of scientific plausibility that even Terry Nation would be ashamed of), but you don't have to be a Guardian reader to work out that this makes them victims of the evil empire. If Whedon's saying what I think Whedon's saying, then letting rip with all barrels blazing is a perfectly legitimate final solution to the chav problem. (I admit it can seem like an attractive solution at times, but it takes more than seeming attractive to legitimise something.) Expect a rave review from the Daily Mail.

Oh, and there's River. If Buffy was a displaced atonement of masculinity-guilt, then River is a life sentence of hard labour. In Virgin Goddess worship terms, River's been hoisted up on a pedestal so high she doesn't know what ground is. The sad thing is, Whedon probably thinks that this neutered, depersonalised combination of risible hyper-lethality and adolescent innocence really stands to earn him feminist brownie points. Hardly that, but it's probably worth a plastic pig or two.

Strip away the breakneck plot development, narrative cuts, impressive CGI and cultural richness (on which more in a moment), and you find Serenity treading very familiar ground. Motley crew of ragtag social misfits discovers big secret of nasty government and sets out to tell everyone else. You can fight City Hall and the Truth is really Out There. Well, that sounds jolly useful to know. Serenity is a chassis of cliches with a bolted-on melange of additional cliches, all wrapped up in cliche-flavoured clingfilm. It is utterly devoid of even one idea that I could pick out as genuinely arresting, or even particularly interesting. It has all the radicalism of the Famous Five and slightly less insight than the Teletubbies. Star Wars, even at its worst (and its worst is pretty awful), is disarmingly honest by comparison.

So, do I have a good word to say about Serenity? Yes ... sort of. Aside from the awesome quality of the SFX (which can so easily be taken for granted these days), there's obviously a lot of care been invested in crafting the universe in which the film takes place. I don't think I've seen any other space opera that goes to such lengths to convey the impression of a richly pluralistic society, albeit only on the fringes of the (allegedly) grey and characterless cultural monobloc of mainstream society. Considering the conservative bourgeois morality of the film's protagonists, though, this only emphasises the White Negro aspirations that the film ultimately embodies. The Serenity crew are all fucked up middle class college students who wanna be black, without having the faintest idea what being a nigger might really mean.

If this is SF, then the S stands for Shite. I'm feeling generous, so 4 out of 10.