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...)

( continues...) were too many death scares at the end. Both Book and Wash are dead, and at that point, if anyone else had actually died, I might have just walked out of the theatre. So I couldn't really enjoy the tension of "oh my god, will Simon (or Mal, or Zoe, or River--yes, they all have death-scare moments) live?" because it would have just destroyed me. It was too wrenching to be enjoyable; I could hardly bear to watch at that point.

if I'd experienced the HSQ moments Jen describes totally unprepared, I would've deeply and profoundly lost my shit.

Yeah, this was me. (I haven't cried so hard in the theatre since Return of the King, which, granted, wasn't so long ago, but I expected it to remain a high-water mark for many years.) I think this was a lot of people. It was a very subdued audience that left the theatre, in contrast to how keyed-up and bouncy everyone had been beforehand.

But it really is a fantastic movie. The dialogue and characterization is so spot-on, and the moments of terror, comedy, tragedy, and joy are (mostly) well-balanced and beautifully done. It's necessarily unsatisfactory, I think, because there are still so many questions left unanswered (even most of the pressing questions about River aren't really answered; we know part of why she was so crazy, but we still don't know for sure why the Alliance chose her or what they were doing to her). And the pacing is so different from the TV series--again, necessarily. So there were some moments that seemed jarring to me, because I wanted more time devoted to them. But the plot was excellent: they managed to explain the origin of Reavers without making them any less horrific, which I'll admit I wasn't sure they could do, and everyone got at least a little screen time. And I liked the Operative a lot (Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my names-to-watch-for now, having seen him in this and in Dirty Pretty Things).

Our film was a little unclear at points - almost as if they were using smaller film than standard movie film. Maybe they'll have that fixed for release.

Yeah, ours was a little grainy and unfocused in a couple of spots, but I figured it would be cleaned up for wide release. There were some parts where I figured there will be more special effects, but nothing stood out (to me) as glaringly unfinished. Can't say for sure about the soundtrack either. A lot of the music that did play was the same kind of Western-influenced music that the TV show used, which made me happy.

One disappointment: sound in space. Only in a couple of scenes, but there you have it.

Wow... I totally missed Jen & Kate at the preview! I never did go around looking through the crowd like my friends did, because I figured nobody I knew was there except for the people I came with.

I thought the soundtrack was entirely undistinguished -- I never noticed it at all, which means it wasn't wretched in a "sore thumb sticks out" way, but it also wasn't good in the way the Christoph Beck or other Whedon productions had music. Hopefully they can work on that in the next four months.

I really do look forward to seeing it again after Joss et al have had another four months to tinker.

grits teeth. continues not to read the whitefont.

Damn.

Theo, I didn't know you were there! Both Jen and I were fairly close to the front of the line. I did try to keep a lookout for other people I knew; sorry I missed you!

Fay, what are you still doing in here?? I almost didn't whitefont, and then realized that you were still reading in here. Not that I mind, since whitefonting isn't a problem for me, but how can you stand NOT reading the whitefont??

edit: I'm off to lunch now, but will be dying to discuss in depth when I get back!

even most of the pressing questions about River aren't really answered; we know part of why she was so crazy, but we still don't know for sure why the Alliance chose her or what they were doing to her

I thought we did know - she was being turned into a telepath who could also kick-ass in combat. Apparantly she was to be controlled à la The Manchurian Candidate .

And from the series we know they chose her because she was a genius - maybe being a genius makes you a better ass-kicking telepath.

I'm not sure I needed to white-font any of that....

Ok, I'm simultaneously amused and squicked that Simon knows River's safe word. That's not going to quiet the hodgeberry crowd down any, is it?

Now I know what to say if someone ever tries to feed me too many hodgeberries....

I thought we did know

Well, I mean, we didn't really learn anything new about her backstory (pre-Alliance) or her abilities from the movie. We already pretty much knew she was being trained to be an assassin of some sort, and that she had psychic abilities. But did she possess psychic abilities before the Alliance took her? What exactly did they do to her to turn her into a psychic assassin? What kind of Evil Plan was she going to be used for?