I still remember the GILES!!!!!!! heard 'round the world.

That was so awesome.

Huh, managed to make it two hours, but read both the HSQ spoilers from later, so I figured it wasn't going to make a difference.

Damn, now we'll never get Book's backstory.

I know it, Frank. And he was always my favorite . Or my favorite who was not Mal or Jayne or Zoe or Wash or Kaylee or dammit I love them all. Maybe even Inara, sometimes.

Oh, I read somewhere else that there WAS sound in space. Is that the case?

It really does not sound like Joss plans this to be a series of movies; that is really tying up all the loose ends. BTW, as this is supposed to be a hardcore spoiler section, do we really need to go on whitefonting? Can we just make a note that if you don't want to be spoiled, don't scroll past this post in the HARDCORE SPOILER thread?

I'm usually the most squeaky-clean double-padlocked-chastity-belty of spoiler virgins, but I think I needed this spoilage. Movies are just so much larger than TV, so vast and loud and looming that when I see something on the big screen it sucks me right in and I get overwhelmed and disappear. I'm probably the only person on the planet who sobbed when Malkovich was horribly cruel to my Seth in the relatively crappy Knockaroud Guys; if I'd experienced the HSQ moments Jen describes totally unprepared, I would've deeply and profoundly lost my shit. So this is good. In a very bad way.

Also, Emmett has seen the preview several times and thinks it looks very cool, but it definitely sounds like something he doesn't need to see for several years yet. At least.

Also, Perkins, I got your email yesterday and replied, but I think possibly Gmail dislikes my work addy and it never got to you, so I'll resend from my own Gmail. When I started on the internets I was full of a naive delight in the wondrous instantaneous reliability of email, but after many years I'm about one step away from investing in a flock of carrier pigeons.

Book's death was more expected - in fact, I was surprised that he was alive when they found him. And he had the meaningful last words that motivated Mal through the rest of the movie. So his death had a point, sort of.

With Wash, we'd just gotten through the wrenching sequence where Serenity crash-lands and is torn to pieces. It finally grinds to a halt - you think, Serenity's totally trashed, but the crew, while banged up, has survived.

A moment of relief - then HOLY SHIT! - Wash is impaled. Totally random, pointless death.

::reads. wonders. contemplates reading the rest of the whitefont. backs out of thread, falling over things on the way::

::reads. wonders. contemplates the whitefont. backs out of thread, falling over things on the way::

Only now do you realize the power of the dark side white font....

OK. Saw Serenity in Boston last night (and saw Jen in line, yay! you may all commence to be jealous now), and am still feeling the aftershocks. It's MUCH darker than the TV show. Like Jen said, it's much more violent, but I think it also goes to darker places with the characters, especially Mal.

A couple of comments on Jen's whitefonted summary:

She got most of the plot right, but the scene where Mal brings River along on a job is on a different planet from where she flips out like a ninja in the bar. In the first scene, I'm not entirely sure why he wants her there, but I guess she helps by anticipating the moves of the hostages, one of whom has a gun that they're able to take away from him with River's help. Then, in that same scene, she feels the presence of Reavers and freaks out. Turns out the Reavers have just landed on the planet, and thanks to River, our crew is able to get away just in time (after a wild chase on the new "mule"). Then Simon confronts Mal and gets really angry with him for putting River in danger (he didn't want her going along on the job to begin with). This is the second argument they have about River in the first, maybe, fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie, and I think this is where new viewers might get confused. We know that Mal is really a good man who wants to help protect them, but he comes across as much meaner and cold-hearted in these scenes, IMO.

Anyway, Simon tells Mal to leave him and River at the next planet they come to, where Mal is going to drop off the stolen goods and get paid for the job. So Simon and River leave the ship and go wandering about the town where Mal is conducting his business. Mal meets his contacts in a bar, which is where River comes in and flips her shit. Simon comes racing in just as she is about to shoot Mal(!) and says the safe word (no joke; that's what he calls it later) and she falls to the floor in a dead faint. He brings her back to the ship and chains her up in a little cell off the dining hall, and then the crew argues a lot about what to do about them. I don't remember exactly what's decided at this point. Oh, wait, this is probably where they go to visit Book for a while. Meanwhile, Inara is visited by the Operative, who has her send a message to Serenity asking them to stop by with some totally flimsy excuse like "uh, I left some stuff on the ship that I decided I wanted after all". So they go to rescue her (knowing from the start that it's a trap), and it's during this rescue mission that the Operative's forces kill Book and everyone on his planet, and--as it turns out--everyone else who's ever sheltered our crew.

The Early-like character (the Operative) has no name and no identity; he "doesn't exist". It's an interesting theory, Jen, but I'm fairly certain he's not meant to be Early, though they do share a similar levelheadedness regarding their own acts of violence and murder. Early, for one, was batshit insane (albeit, again, in his own cool, calm way), but the Operative is much more... down-to-earth, I guess.

I thought it was incredible. Fans will appreciate it because everyone is clearly recognizable as the character they were in the show, and like the show, everyone gets good screentime. And I think new folk will like it because it's accessible to people who've never seen the show.

I'm glad to see you say this. I was so emotionally distraught last night (as were most of the people I went with, bless their overinvolved hearts) that it was really hard for me to even say whether or not I had liked it. I was just not at all prepared for Wash's death, and I felt like there wasn't enough time given to dealing with it in the movie. As bicyclops said, it felt too random and pointless. I'm prepared to argue that there was no actual narrative need for that to happen. Anyway, with a little more distance today, I can recognize that I did really love the movie. I just wish with all my heart that the end had played out differently. Also, I think there (continued...)