Yes, I did get around to seeing that movie about folksinger Mal Reynolds.
Mal... vina. Bad... wine?
"Cole Porter ... who wrote 'Kiss Me Kate'?"
OK, so it's an entirely different Mal Reynolds, who didn't write "Little Boxes", and who in fact shows no musical aptitude whatsoever, but who is a bit of a rebel.
As I noted in an earlier post, I had a feeling maybe the characters had changed since Firefly. They have indeed; I'll get to that later.
The movie opens with some context that was missing from the TV series: all the action takes place in one humongous solar system, with many habitable planets and terraformable moons. (Seems a bit unlikely to me, but I'm no astrophysicist.) This means that there's no need for FTL drives, just plain old reaction drives that get fantastic gas mileage. It does, however, imply that the navigation charts should be more dynamic than they appear to be (e.g., the region in space around Miranda wouldn't be around Miranda for very long; all the objects in it would be in their own orbits).
The movie is a sequel to the TV series; all that happened in the series is in the movie's past (though some of the background has changed). This means moviegoers who missed the series won't know the existing relationships between the characters, and some events will just be coming out of nowhere. It helps, for example, to know the Mal/Inara backstory, or something about the Shepherd (not that we really know much about him anyway).
Ah, yes: the character changes. Some of the characters have gotten more... well... concentrated. It's like they've had Ever-so-much-more-so sprinkled over them. Mal has gotten crazier and more ruthless (lack of Inara's civilizing influence?); Simon is more intense; River might have been bitten by a radioactive Bun-Bun and turned into a cute fuzzy psychotic killing machine. Inara, on the other hand, seems to have gotten toned down: once exotic and mature beyond her apparent years, she now seems 10 years younger, less exotic, and more cute, which just doesn't seem to fit.
Oh, and now I know who the Operative is. How the heck do I score 63% Operative on that quiz? He's a collectivist, and somehow simultaneously a true believer and a cynic; I'm an individualist, and don't believe in much of anything. True, I have a supply of blue nitrile gloves, but the Operative, for some reason, doesn't.
Chinese is still the new Yiddish. (If you learned your Yiddish from MAD Magazine like I did, that statement should have made sense.)
A plot oddity (and spoiler): the Operative went around killing off people who had sheltered Mal in the past. His explanation, apparently true, was that the purpose was to deprive Mal of future hiding places.
My first thought was that the purpose was to eliminate anyone who might have learned any secrets River might have been carrying around... and, if Mal had thought along this line, it would have had exactly the opposite of the effect the Operative intended: don't even think about surrendering, because you'll all be killed in the name of keeping the secret.
The explanation for the origin of the Reavers is... interesting. Consider that 1/10 of 1% number. According to FBI statistics from a few years back (sorry, I've misplaced the clipping), 0.07% of the population accounted for 70% of the violent crime. So, thinking of the real world and not the movie... figure something on the order of 0.1% of the population is ready to turn Reaver anyway.
To use a currently fashionable manner of dividing up humanity: if we're 98% sheep, 1% wolves, and 1% sheepdogs, then about 7% of the wolves are rabid.
Maybe, then, a mysterious minority side-effect of the drug is unnecessary. Maybe it's sufficient for the drug not to work on the rabid wolves.
The movie's account calls for a Blake's 7-style pacification drug backfiring. But what if it didn't? What would happen if it pacified the already-pacific sheep, and the sheepdogs, and the common wolves... but had no effect on the rabid wolves?
Rabid wolves running unchecked. Reavers.
While we're still a ways from Brave New World, let alone Blake's 7, there's a definite tendency on the part of governments to pass laws ostensibly intended to reduce serious crime, but in practice affecting mostly, or exclusively, the sheep. In extreme cases, the sheep are severely pacified, the sheepdogs either locked in their kennels or allowed to go feral (and/or wolves hired as sheepdogs), and no attention directed toward dealing with the rabid wolves. (We can't focus on the rabid wolves! That would be discriminatory!)
Think of the youth gangs in England as sort of junior Reavers. Laws can be just as effective as drugs....
Enough frothing at the mouth for now. If you haven't seen the movie, go see it (but seeing the TV series first is a good idea).
(Wanders off, humming Leslie Fish's tune to the completely irrelevant "Tarrant Moss".)
Additional: I've long though that Serenity needed some sort of armament, for dealing with Reavers and general bandits. Guess the Alliance gets kinda shirty about armed merchantmen. Still, I think Mal should try to scrounge some weaponry that can be put in pop-out turrets that aren't obvious to search parties. Putting Vera in a space suit is just lame.
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