Thanks, Betsy, but Sunday was definitely a "I've spent 2 minutes on it, that's long enough" hair day. It looked much better on Saturday, and I am hoping I can get it close to that tomorrow.

Has anyone posted this? A shitload of reviews at AICN: [link]

I like this part of this review just because it is well written and says what a lot of us can relate to:

eta: x-posted with Firefly, as I just realized it's spoiler free.

It is so obvious that every scene in this movie was made with genuine passion for the material, that it makes me feel like my very minor complaints (which I'll go into in the spoiler section at the end) aren't even worth caring about.

Above all else, *that* is why I will tell you to see this movie. The passion. If you read this site, you're like me in some way. You love some aspect of fandom, you love some show, some comic, some movie, *something* enough to come here and read these reviews and flame each other in these talkbacks and speculate about casting decisions for movies that may never get made. You have felt this passion for something, and it's left its mark on you. And I'd bet that you've probably been let down at some point when something you felt so passionately about was handled badly. Whether it was a poorly-adapted novel, or a TV show that lost its way, or a promising concept that got focus-grouped apart and put through the wringer of the Hollywood process until the soul of it was bled dry and all that remained was the trappings of something you could have once loved. If you really care about the stuff that gets reported on this site, you probably know what that's like.

Well, that didn't happen here. There's a damn good reason why so many Firefly fans who've been to the preview screenings are raving about this movie. It's because this thing we feel so passionate about has been beaten down by the system and survived intact. The very existence of this movie is a big Fuck You to the shallow executives at Fox who tried to scuttle the series. It is a living testament to the power of fandom, an example of what can happen when word spreads and suddenly this thing that was written off by the people in power has a million advocates shouting its glories so loudly that they can't be ignored.

Fuck yeah.

So right.

I'm so glad I went to the Big Damn Preview. No matter how shiny the finished product is, nothing is going to beat those moments when the lights came down, Joss's "You may call yourself browncoat" speech and the huge Braveheart style cheer that followed it. Then the sheer kickassery of the movie itself...so, so worth it.

The Single Solar System theory makes me crazy. Sure, it avoids the FTL drive problem, but the likelihood of finding a system with dozens of planets all in the same range of habitable space is pretty slim. Unless they're not all in the same plane, and that's even rarer. But then Joss and science were never close, anyway. I'd be happier if they took it out and left us thinking it was an interstellar network rather than a single solar system.

Had a buddy point this out right after we saw it. Way I see it, it's no good being bothered by this and not caring that space has sound in just about every other SF 'verse. That said, I like this idea better than an interstellar system because ain't no way anything on Serenity is built to exceed/circumvent/ignore the speed of light. We've all seen that engine room. Not buying it. It's much more... comfortable to pretend that such an unlikely solar system exists than to pretend that ships designed like the ones in "Firefly" have warp drive.

I am still amazed that anyone cares about these type of improbabilities. I know that people do and I don't have a problem with it but, I am still amazed and shocked that anyone even has the time to care.

I am still so wrapped up in the story that the technical details are completely irrelevant.

I'm a logic geek, and I make time to care about that stuff. If I wrote a story with a star system populated like that, my betas would slap me silly unless I had a damned good reason for it.

I still don't see how that's different than tacitly assuming there's a medium in space through which sound can travel; the only reason they wouldn't slap you for that is that it's accepted. It's not any less wrong.

I think the one saving grace is that there have been in-series references to terraforming. Perhaps the system had a big asteroid belt or Oort cloud in the temperate range around the primary, and extensive terraforming has resulted in so many habitable worlds? Ariel and Persephone are the only planets I remember being densely populated (and therefore probably habitable for hundreds of years).

Weren't a lot of the planets actually moons of bigger planets (like gas giants or such)?

Yo, ita! Was your moon terraformed?

Way I see it, it's no good being bothered by this and not caring that space has sound in just about every other SF 'verse.

That was one of the things FIREFLY did right, though. It stood out for me, what with the effective way Joss used it in "Objects in Space" and "Out of Gas".