Finally caught it this wknd (thus I'm finally reading your post).
I actually think I liked it better than the series. It had unbelievable emotional oomph.
Responding to some of your quibbles ...
The thing that killed Wash, I'm pretty sure, was a piece of rubble. They'd just crashed into a structure, and if you've ever seen that happen, things continue to fall at odd moments for a while. Wash's death was (I think intentionally) meaningless: there's a powerful contrast set up between his and Shepherd Book's.
Book has a standard Movie Death: miraculously, the one character we care about is the only one to survive until the Heroes get there, so he can have a Death Scene with Meaningful Last Words. His death has Meaning. Wash has a Realistic Death: it Just Happens; he's There and then he's Gone, without even an "Oh my God."
This works (for me) on a number of symbolic levels: Wash was always the innocent, trying to fit in with a bunch of -- well, criminals. Book was the one who looked like an innocent but appears to have had the most sinister (not the word I want, but -- well, not-innocent) past of the bunch of them. They were ... no pun intended ... bookends.
River and the Reavers: Okay, you've watched a lot more Buffy than I have, but when the hatch opened and she was there, standing on a pile of dead reavers, backlit, with an axe in each hand, I flashed immediately on a classic Frazetta Conan illo. You know the one I mean. The only thing missing was a sexy guy at her feet.
Joss clearly likes female superheroes; I'm chuffed about him doing a Wonder Woman film (and only hope Warner's will let him do it his way). As you say, there was certainly plenty of foreshadowing about River, but I could wish they'd saved the revelations about her till a second movie and built up more foreshadowing in this one.
I agree completely about some of the character inconsistencies. I'd like to know how much time is supposed to have passed between the series and the movie: I know that the three-issue Dark Horse comic is supposed to come in between. (FWIW: if you haven't read it, don't bother. It's like a not especially good episode of the series, in which a Bad Guy you thought was dead comes back, causes trouble, and then gets genuinely dead. Plus, they deal with a pair of 2x2s. I guess it does explain why pieces are falling off the ship at the beginning of the movie.)
no subject
I actually think I liked it better than the series. It had unbelievable emotional oomph.
Responding to some of your quibbles ...
The thing that killed Wash, I'm pretty sure, was a piece of rubble. They'd just crashed into a structure, and if you've ever seen that happen, things continue to fall at odd moments for a while. Wash's death was (I think intentionally) meaningless: there's a powerful contrast set up between his and Shepherd Book's.
Book has a standard Movie Death: miraculously, the one character we care about is the only one to survive until the Heroes get there, so he can have a Death Scene with Meaningful Last Words. His death has Meaning. Wash has a Realistic Death: it Just Happens; he's There and then he's Gone, without even an "Oh my God."
This works (for me) on a number of symbolic levels: Wash was always the innocent, trying to fit in with a bunch of -- well, criminals. Book was the one who looked like an innocent but appears to have had the most sinister (not the word I want, but -- well, not-innocent) past of the bunch of them. They were ... no pun intended ... bookends.
River and the Reavers: Okay, you've watched a lot more Buffy than I have, but when the hatch opened and she was there, standing on a pile of dead reavers, backlit, with an axe in each hand, I flashed immediately on a classic Frazetta Conan illo. You know the one I mean. The only thing missing was a sexy guy at her feet.
Joss clearly likes female superheroes; I'm chuffed about him doing a Wonder Woman film (and only hope Warner's will let him do it his way). As you say, there was certainly plenty of foreshadowing about River, but I could wish they'd saved the revelations about her till a second movie and built up more foreshadowing in this one.
I agree completely about some of the character inconsistencies. I'd like to know how much time is supposed to have passed between the series and the movie: I know that the three-issue Dark Horse comic is supposed to come in between. (FWIW: if you haven't read it, don't bother. It's like a not especially good episode of the series, in which a Bad Guy you thought was dead comes back, causes trouble, and then gets genuinely dead. Plus, they deal with a pair of 2x2s. I guess it does explain why pieces are falling off the ship at the beginning of the movie.)