(W)hedonism, or lack thereof
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to go and see a movie that I had neither heard about (because I don’t spend my entire time waiting for the next movie fix), nor particularly cared about once I knew what it was. I went, because it sounded like a fun idea and the rest of the night was good anyway. The movie was a pathetic and boring Sci-Fi Film called “Serenity”.
For those of you that haven’t seen the film and want to see the film at some point in the future, please stop reading now, because what I’m about to say will spoil the non-existant pleasure to be gained from watching this crud. It’s shit. There are some good lines in there and some amusing moments but the premise of the film, the plot, the characters etc are typical Joss Whedon generic bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.
Every forum I frequent says something about how this film is so much better than Star Wars. Well done universe on producing the dumbest generation of idiots yet. It’s a shit film that slightly better than an extremely shitty film, lets praise it all because watered down lameness is the new cool. Perhaps the fans of this pap like to eat paper mache testicles for breakfast every day, because after all, they taste Sooo much better than smoked dog shit? What a fucking stupid comparison to base the claim of this thing being good on.
Next up you see blatant fanboyism in halfbaked poorly attempted jobs like this:
From sensible people who know better. WHY?? Name me one thing that Joss Whedon has done that hasn’t been generic, soft and pale imitations of much better things. I’ll get onto that in a second, let’s first go over the ridiculous statement that this movie is somehow cool and good.
First off, The brilliant Whedon has to include at least one dream sequence. He always includes a dream sequence, he just can’t help himself - he has a strict formula to follow and a very specific order to follow it in. Needless to say it doesn’t work. Moving on, there are these creatures who are stated, with certainty to be extremely aggressive and nasty things. Pure aggression in fact. Yet these creatures who spend every waking second on screen growling and making scary noises have time to carefully paint their ships, burn the flesh of skeletons and neatly tie them around their ships and of course, sit in a massive fleet in orbit around a planet for, ohh…no reason at all. Let’s not get into the trivial detail of an animalistically aggressive thing being able to smoothly pilot a ship, or the fact that they’d attack each other due to their own aggression. This is the genius of Whedon, he’s obviously really carefully thought this out.
Okay, so that’s only one plot hole right? Surely that’s just a minor oversight, it can’t be that bad. Ohhh..but it is. You see, one of the characters has a deep dark secret. That secret turns out to be that the big bad empire is in fact big and bad. Who would have guessed it? It was made out to be some amazing thing and in the end it was quite boring, but get this. The team of bumbling idiots we are forced to follow finds a video of a woman explaining that the big bad empire is bad and big. This video could have been made anywhere, and has nothing that places it in context of any planet or indeed actually proves any of the womans claim. Ignoring all this, we are led to believe that by showing this video to the entire planetary system, everyone will now understand that the big bad empire is big and perhaps even bad.
Let’s ignore the fact that different planets will have different nights, some people won’t happen to be actually listening or watching some media (a concept completely alien to americans of course) and of course the huge technical impossibility of actually broadcasting such a video on all forms of media to an entire solar system, these can all be poorly explained away by the sort of warped logic that claims this is a great film. Let’s instead look at a very very disturbing idea that is marketed as completely possible that broadcasting this video is somehow going to not only convince everyone in this system that the big bad empire is in fact quite large and not very nice, (again, Whedon-arse-licking-logic can rule out the idea that people might have been savvy to this idea before seeing a video of someone talking with no context to what they are talking about or where they are talking from), including a zealot of the strongest order. If only the Americans had realised this and broadcasted propoganda to the people of the middle east. Or vice versa, depending on your current dietary habits.
It’s shit. Pure shit. And as well as these hideous plot flaws and continual standardised form, Whedon manages to make a fight scene that should have been vaguely impressive boring, as well as making a straight forward battle scene impossible to follow. Need any more evidence that Joss Whedon is a complete arsepastry? Go and look at this hideous mess of a script for Alien Resurrection. Certainly not the finest work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but by no means a particularly bad film. In fact, in later interviews he describes how he couldn’t create the film in his own vision, but was forced to make severe compromises. Read that script. The work of the Master Script Writer Joss Fucking Whedon. Personally, I think it’s amazing Jeunet even managed to get a good movie out of it at all, it’s a pile of cliched shit with all the usual Whedon trimmings.
So, if you watch this stupid Serenity film thingy (or any other muck involving this child protege), be sure to look for the following generic elements of the most boring scriptwriter/director around:
- Dream Sequences - It doesn’t work. It never worked. Please stop.
- Angsty ‘Cello Solo - Because it just shows how mature and clever you are for watching this and how highbrow your musical tastes should be
- Generic cast of characters each with very obvious and very exploitable character flaws - All of these characters have to look cool in some failed way as well.
- Female “super fighter” - again with deep personal problems, because only the best fighters have such anguish
- Attempts at horror that seem pale or watered down - In particular making someone being eaten boring and somehow presentable at a nice christian dinner
- Extremely unconvincing fight scenes - How can you make an armlock seem weak and tacky? Who can honestly believe that trained fighters move so goddamn slowly? Why do the kicks look like they’re being performed by a five year old?
- Theme plagiarised directly from some other source - The entire first season of Buffy, that was complete originality there.
- Sledgehammer Symbolism - Naming the ship and the movie Serenity just in case you didn’t get the clever reference. Jesus fucking christ.
- Admittedly half decent humour - To hide the complete lack of plot coherency or interesting storyline.
The most tragic thing of all is that the amount of money wasted on all this bullshit would be enough to fix an entire third world country, rather sobering that.