Current mood:

geeky

Serenity (with very minor spoilers)
Yes, I was part of the very first audience to see Serenity, thanks to veggiebelle and lifeofreilly.

We'd planned to pretend to be normal folks. ("Oh, a free movie? With spaceships? Nifty.") But it became pretty clear that the majority of the audience was composed of Firefly fans. Still we had hopes of remaining undercover Browncoats, until the movie started. Once people started cheering at the mere appearance of major characters, our cover was blown. Ah, well. They let us stay anyway.

The first image onscreen was the Universal logo, a photo of the planet Earth with "Universal" wrapped around it. When I saw that, I said, "Earth that was!" because I'm a big dork. Then the "Universal" slid away, the camera zoomed in to show spaceships leaving the planet, and a voiceover began, "The Earth that was..." Heh.

The movie began with a voiceover explaining about terra-forming new planets and the formation of the Alliance. It morphed into a classroom scene, showing the speaker to be a teacher. We get a bit more background, and one of the students turned out to be a young River Tam. Then the scene morphs into... well, I don't want to give everything away. But it's an amazing opening sequence which offers some basic background information and draws you into the story right away.

Serenity is back, and the ship is introduced to the movie audience with a long single shot, similar to her introduction in "Serenity", the TV pilot. Joss must have loved working on a movie where he could take the time to do extra-long steadycam shots.

Being a very early test screening, many effects and music were not finished. I was afraid that this would detract from the movie, but my mind had little trouble filling in the images when presented with titles like "Serenity enters atmosphere" or "Insert Alliance ship here". (Not actual titles.) I'm looking forward to seeing the movie with full special effects, though. The quality of the music varied greatly. Some of it was amazing, some appeared to be the same as the series, and some was obviously filler music. I'm hoping the bits I really liked will be staying in the finished version, but I trust that whatever music it ends up with will be good.

I don't know how a general audience will react. Fans of the series should rest assured, though, that this is a fantastic movie. And it is clearly a movie, not an extra-long TV episode. The story and the visuals are of a much grander scope than anything made for the small screen. Many (though not all) loose ends from the series are wrapped up. I'm not going to say if the ending leaves a possibility for a sequel because that would be telling. :)