Firefly
Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 4:02 pm
I just bought the complete series DVD of Firefly this weekend. I never saw it on TV, and I'm baffled that Fox seemed so determined to screw the show over. They aired episodes in a random order and never even aired the two hour pilot till the show was cancelled. They didn't even air three of the finished 14 episodes!
It really was a different style of sci-fi than I've ever seen on TV. And shockingly it's actually intelligent. There's no sound in space, there's no force fields, cargo ships aren't armed with laser guns. During one show they had to shoot something in space, so they put on space suits, opened the cargo doors and shot it with a gun, which had to be put inside a space suit since it needed oxygen to fire.
I've never seen Joss Wheadon's other shows (Buffy, Angel) but I love the way he'll play out a traditional situation, then the hero solves in the most logical manner instead of the most dramatic one. A villian is hiding behind a horse shooting at you? Shoot the horse. A tied-up henchman promises to hunt you down after he returns to his boss? Kick him into the ships engine and deal with a different henchman.
The dialog was great too. Futuristic space-talk delivered with an old west dialect and chinese swear words. It seemed like a strange mix between Robert Heinlein's "Tunnel In The Sky" and the british show "Blakes 7" with an emphasis on characters instead of technology.
They made a few concessions to reality to make the stories more interesting. Ships seem to meet in empty space rather often, and they pass by each other slowly instead of going 300,000 miles per hour. But it's such a nice change to see people behaving logically and sometimes failing rather than technobabble saving the day in every episode.
It seems like the new "Battlestar Galactica" is trying that same kind of logical approach to sci-fi. The good news (for me, anyway) is that they're making a Firefly movie. They finished shooting it already, and apparenty it's going to be released in September of this year. The creators seem very happy with how it turned out. Hopefully it will be a big enough hit that they will want to restart the TV show. If Glactica is popular maybe they'll see there's an audience ready for this stlye of sci-fi.
The only thing that annoyed me was that the Alliance soldiers all wore the armor from "Starship Troopers". But they always come out looking like idiots which I see as a nice revenge on that stupid movie, at least, where the soldiers really were idiots.
It really was a different style of sci-fi than I've ever seen on TV. And shockingly it's actually intelligent. There's no sound in space, there's no force fields, cargo ships aren't armed with laser guns. During one show they had to shoot something in space, so they put on space suits, opened the cargo doors and shot it with a gun, which had to be put inside a space suit since it needed oxygen to fire.
I've never seen Joss Wheadon's other shows (Buffy, Angel) but I love the way he'll play out a traditional situation, then the hero solves in the most logical manner instead of the most dramatic one. A villian is hiding behind a horse shooting at you? Shoot the horse. A tied-up henchman promises to hunt you down after he returns to his boss? Kick him into the ships engine and deal with a different henchman.
The dialog was great too. Futuristic space-talk delivered with an old west dialect and chinese swear words. It seemed like a strange mix between Robert Heinlein's "Tunnel In The Sky" and the british show "Blakes 7" with an emphasis on characters instead of technology.
They made a few concessions to reality to make the stories more interesting. Ships seem to meet in empty space rather often, and they pass by each other slowly instead of going 300,000 miles per hour. But it's such a nice change to see people behaving logically and sometimes failing rather than technobabble saving the day in every episode.
It seems like the new "Battlestar Galactica" is trying that same kind of logical approach to sci-fi. The good news (for me, anyway) is that they're making a Firefly movie. They finished shooting it already, and apparenty it's going to be released in September of this year. The creators seem very happy with how it turned out. Hopefully it will be a big enough hit that they will want to restart the TV show. If Glactica is popular maybe they'll see there's an audience ready for this stlye of sci-fi.
The only thing that annoyed me was that the Alliance soldiers all wore the armor from "Starship Troopers". But they always come out looking like idiots which I see as a nice revenge on that stupid movie, at least, where the soldiers really were idiots.
