Star Wars... Not as good as you think.
Fallingman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This did surprise me.
Starwars VS Serenity
For those not wanting to follow the link:
Now, dont get me wrong, I like Serenity... I own both it and Firefly on DVD. But better than Star Wars? That's big. And definitely worth discussing. Also, do you think this will ring the "Money Bell" those in charge of the Firefly/Serenity franchise? Could we be in for more? Personally, I dont care what their motivation is. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Get your geek on! Go on, have a Dorkgasm.
Starwars VS Serenity
For those not wanting to follow the link:
Space thriller Serenity has beaten Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll of 3,000 fans.
Now, dont get me wrong, I like Serenity... I own both it and Firefly on DVD. But better than Star Wars? That's big. And definitely worth discussing. Also, do you think this will ring the "Money Bell" those in charge of the Firefly/Serenity franchise? Could we be in for more? Personally, I dont care what their motivation is. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Get your geek on! Go on, have a Dorkgasm.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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Star Wars is awesome. Those 3000 fans should be shot. Star Wars is the greatest Sci-fi movie, period.
Now, in terms of franchises/series, it goes like this:
Star Trek
Dune
Star Wars.
As for the sci-fi elements of both, I'd have to say that Serenity is better.
See, I like to pretend that 1 and 2 never happened, because I mildly enjoyed 3. Now, if Lucas would've left it as Episodes IV, V, and VI, it would've been perfect.
And we're still left in the dust wondering just what in the hell happened!
Why would you do that?
*not that I put it on the list, but it deserves to be there.
I defy you to watch the scene with the bug in the ear without getting mildly freaked out.
Also, greatest line of all time: "Khan, you bloodsucker....KHAAAAN!"
Pretty much. Once your nostalgia gets raped it's hard to look back on it favorably in comparison to newer and equally good things. However, you really do need to take into account the context of the first 3, the latter 3, and Serenity to have anything even close to a fair comparison. I mean, before ILM there was nothing in terms of special effects in movies outside of guys in rubber Godzilla suits.
I watched the movie, thought "ok..." watched the series, loved it, re-watched Serenity and thought "That was awesome".
Otherwise River kicking arse wasn't anything special.
...is that legal?
Was the poll presented to Serenity fans or fans of Science Fiction as a whole?
I enjoyed Serenity, but is it the better of two science fiction films? Only time can say I think.
Star Wars may have lost ground because we're judging the series by the new trilogy, rather than the originals or even the first film itself, Star Wars IV: A New Hope. If so, I know Star Wars : A New Hope is a timeless classic. Serenity has just begun to earn a following of people in my opinion.
Blasphemy! Burn him at the stake!
Wrath of Khan pwns!
That said, Star Wars shouldn't even be on a list of sci-fi films. It’s a fantasy film with a pretty generic plot yanked from generic mythology. Simply because most of it takes place on space ships and a space stations does not make Star Wars any less about a guy using mysticism to save people from evil. Science fiction is about what could happen if certain technology appear, not about what might happen if people had magic powers.
Then what do you call the Death Star, or X-wings, or lightsabers? Don't those count as technology?
As for Star Trek, I take the Futurama approach... "you know what 7 movies average out to be pretty good? Star Trek movies..."
Technically it's a Space Opera, but that's getting rather semantic in polling.
I mean come on, there were lasers.
pew pew pew
Star Wars the new trilogy was crap and I hated it.
Star Wars OT was good and I liked it.
So lets make less crap and more good stuff please.
It's okay. You don't need to qualify that statement.
This whole Serenity/SW thing is going to take some thinking.
The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite movie. Star Wars blew my four-year-old mind away and changed my whole life. The characters, the locations, the expanded universe, and the overall story are my favorites of all time. But I definitely think there is better sci fi out there than Star Wars.
Great space fantasy? Yes. Great modern mythological storytelling? Yes. Great sci fi? No.
Also, Serenity as a movie really doesn't work unless you've seen Firefly. Most of the reason it's a great movie is because it has such great characters, and the characters aren't nearly as awesome until you've seen them fleshed out over the course of a dozen hours.
In summary, the comparison is sort of absurd. Star Wars was the first movie of an epic saga. Serenity was basically the two-hour series finale for the Firefly series.
Context is pretty dang important in judging the quality of movies imo.
I think Serenity could stand on its own, but I think it works much better as a film if you've seen the fifteen Firefly episodes first because the "twist" has a much graver impact, and, as you say, the characters mean more to you.
Anyway, I think the designations of "Sci-Fi" and "Fantasy" are mostly about setting. If it looks like sci-fi, if it takes place in space and invovles shiny or dirty-shiny objects, or if it has computers, it's sci-fi. If it has swords and castles and magical creatures, it's fantasy. If it takes place in New Mexico circa 1850 and people have guns, it's a western. In practice the lines that define the genres don't run any deeper than that.
I thought it did the entire setting very well. I wasn't a fan of "magical socialist utopia" (Star Trek) or "heroic underdog beats overwhelming EVIL force" (Star Wars). I liked the fact there really wasn't a lot of black and white in Serenity/Firefly among the main charecters. I liked that there wasn't nifty technology to save the day, and there really weren't any "red shirts". I liked that the Alliance may have been a bunch of bastards, by far and large they were competent bastards.
But oh well, I will die if I must for my beliefs, a martyr to my cause.
If we mean Star Wars as in, "A New Hope", then I think Serenity is a better film. The direction, characters, acting, dialogue, all of it was better.
If we mean Star Wars as in, the six volume series, then Serenity is FAR better because Lucas can't direct his way out of a paper bag and this time he didn't just copy classic war movies for his direction.
Of course, I will add that if we compare just Serenity to JUST Return of the Jedi, then I say Jedi is the better film.
Jedi? Really?
I'd argue the only great film in the entire Saga was Empire, although Jedi wasn't terrible.
But yeah, no question in my mind that anyone not trapped by maddening nostalgia could recognize that Star Wars films, by and large, are poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed movies with pretty good special effects. Serenity on the other hand was wonderfully acted, directed well enough, and had a somewhat interesting, if obvious story.
Neither are amazing sci-fi movies (if SW is even sci-fi, which it's not, imo), but Serenity is certainly better than all but Empire, and that's close.
I think the real problem here is that George Lucas cockslapped all of us. That cuntbasket ruined his own franchise and our collective opinions both of him and it. Frankly, I think of his as a complete artistic failure.
It's very hard not to separate my emotions when judging the films at this point.
River's line to Simon before she jumped out the hatch, especially.
But yeah, Empire was great, but I still think Serenity was a better movie.
There's also a pretty significant camp of "if you saw Firefly, then Serenity pissed you off." If I had it to do over again, I'd rather see Serenity first, then fall in love with Firefly, and then never watch Serenity again.
The story was fine; the characters though, they all just felt wrong somehow.
What twist are you talking about?
Edit: Ah, never mind.
Really? I thought the charecters were very good - I just think Serenity was everything coming to a head. Simon and River leaving the ship, Mal's disgust with the Alliance, and Jayne's constant near mutiny was the logical effect recent events were having on the crew. So it was going to seem different to us since the charecters were undergoing so much drama.
It's interesting that the two most popular Star Wars films are the two that weren't directed by Lucas. Ah, hell, it's not interesting, it's obvious, but still.
I watched Serenity after seeing the series and I thought the characters were fine. The only things that didn't make sense are trifles that sound more like nitpicking than actual issues.
IE, in the pilot
However, stuff like that is easy to forgive since Whedon was either trying to make the story palatable to the people who hadn't seen the series or the studio demanded that he make the story palatable to the people who hadn't seen the series.