Archive for May 30th, 2005
Serving The Story
Okay, any of you who haven’t seen Serenity yet — and that’s probably most of you, honestly — stay the hell away from this post if you have any intention of seeing the movie. I mean it. Don’t read any further. Well, OK, you can go a little further, but when you come to the SPOILER WARNING, know that I’m serious about that and you should move along to whatever’s next on your daily reading list. I’m going to talk about things you really, really shouldn’t know about in advance of seeing the movie.
Have I made myself clear? Good.
I’ve been thinking about Serenity pretty much round the clock since seeing it last Thursday night, and I’ve been thinking about the fundamental difference in the nature of storytelling between episodic television and movies. As much as I love movies, I’m more drawn to well-done TV shows. There’s a depth of characterization that episodic TV can attain that’s difficult for movies to reach…well, I think breadth of characterization might be more a accurate term.
I’ve always been more interested in watching a character’s growth (or deterioration) over time and movies just aren’t the ideal format for that kind of thing. They can do it, sure, but it’s rarely done all that well. Most movie series that have recurring characters tend to be action flicks, and yeah you can get some growth there, but there’s simply not enough time in a movie to get that into a character’s head. Further complicating my personal preferences: I like ensembles, and movie series (serii? serieses?) that track a group of characters and can give each of them the screen time necessary are rare.
Which brings me back around to Serenity, which springs forth in September from the torched TV series “Firefly.” This combo provides me the perfect opportunity for thinking about the modes of storytelling because, unlike most other TV-show-to-movie transitions (say, The X-Files), this one I actually care about.
Right here is that Big Damn Spoiler Warning, by the way.
