Serenity is, perhaps, one of the most bizarrely-birthed movies of recent years. Based on the TV show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse fame) it joins the elite club, also occupied by Star Trek: The Motion Picture, of movies spawned from cancelled TV series.
Firefly, ostensibly, is a “space western”. The clash of genres sounds bizarre here, but trust me: it works superbly. Nathan Fillion (an actor no-one in the UK has ever heard of, unfortunately, seeing as he’s arguably a better actor than Milo Ventipuckermouth off Heroes and his face looks less like a rat’s arse) stars as Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the spaceship Serenity, an ageing, cramped rustbucket that’s like the twenty-sixth century equivalent of a Victoria line Tube carriage.
Seeing as my Freecom DataTank conked out at the beginning of the year (I’m still waiting to acquire either an allen key or a hacksaw so I can crack open the enclosure and rescue the drives within), I bought a new hard drive last week. It’s a Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB, and was on special offer from Amazon (£55 – a bargain).
Hard drives do pretty much what they say on the tin, so there’s not much to say about it. It does its job very well. It’s quiet, small, and rather easy on the eye. In fact, as a measure of how small it is, here it is next to the Universal Size Comparator:
That little lozenge down the front is the access light, and I think it’s the only immediately-noticeable flaw. When the drive is on, it glows blue. When the drive is in sleep mode (which it automatically goes in to when the host computer sleeps, turns off, or when the drive has a long period of inactivity), it flashes once every five seconds. However, when the drive’s being accessed, it flashes the top and bottom segments on and off, like on a zebra crossing. Mine is on a shelf under the desk, so it’s not too much of an issue, but if you had it on your desk, I couldn’t help but imagine that it would be somewhat distracting.
Aside from that, there’s not much else to say. It uses passive cooling through the Morse Code-shaped holes on the top, back and underside, so it’s very quiet – the only time the noise is noticeable is when the drive is spinning up from sleep mode.
There are a few inconveniences: for example, the ridiculous power adapter. I’m not complaining that you have to plug in the UK-style plug yourself (in fact, that task is trivial) but it uses one of those stupid, wretched plugs that end up obscuring two sockets on an extension board that has more than one row. Why is it so difficult to design an alternate power adapter?
Also, I’ve had trouble trying to register it for service, due to the fact WD thinks it’s an internal drive based on the serial number. Of course, external hard drives are very reliable, provided they’re well looked after and are replaced after a year or two. (In fact, storage is so cheap there’s no excuse not to buy multiple external hard drives).
So… anyway. That’s the My Book Essential. It’s not particularly exciting, but it does the job. As a hard drive should.
So… I went to see Moon. It cost me about £25 in the end, including cinema tickets, travel expenses, and food. I did complain that that was a bit much for one trip to the cinema. I stand by that statement: it is a lot. That didn’t stop it being worth every penny.
I did review it, briefly, in the form of a video(YT – Vimeo) but that doesn’t really do it justice. It is just fucking brilliant.
The movie is set (unsurprisingly) on the Moon, and stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, a lonely lunar miner, working at a one-man base to monitor the machines extracting Helium-3, by that time Earth’s primary source of clean energy.
This is quite scientifically sound. Due to the fact the Moon has a very weak magnetic field and a very thin atmosphere, Helium-3 from the solar wind could well have become abundant in the Moon’s soil; He-3 is of great interest to nuclear fusion researchers.
Sam is assisted by Gerty, a robotic assistant that seems to be a bizarre cross between HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Cooker from A Grand Day Out. In a typical display of irony, Gerty is voiced by a man, Kevin Spacey, and his only way of expressing emotion is through his actions, such as a particularly touching scene where he tries to comfort Sam by patting him on the shoulder with a robotic arm, or a tiny screen embedded in his body which displays a crude approximation of his current mood in the form of a smiley-face emoticon that could have been culled directly from MSN Messenger.
Cut to the chase, and Sam starts feeling ill and having hallucinations, which eventually leads to him having an accident in a moon rover. He wakes up in the base’s infirmary to find himself being cared for… by a younger, sharper, angrier version of himself.
The plot isn’t particularly complicated (and I certainly won’t ruin it for you) but it’s a good one, and the storytelling is brilliant. It unfolds like a novel, and the picture doesn’t become fully clear until the end.
Both Rockwell and Spacey put in killer performances (which is just as well for Rockwell in particular, because the role was written for him) and the visual design is beautiful. Before directing Moon, Jones used to work on commercials and therefore has experience with stunning visual effects on a low budget: whilst the visual effects aren’t Star Trek-style, they’re sublimely beautiful.
The icing on the cake is the beautiful soundtrack by Clint Mansell. It’s minimalistic and somewhat atypical of sci-fi movies: the main theme is a simple, regular piano melody, unlike the banging, crashin and dramatic score for most other movies of this sort.
The computers, while having interfaces that look a little odd, aren’t too bad. There’s no extracomputational abilities in there, and while the password entry screen looks a little odd, computers never do anything silly, such as explode when they malfunction. Considering most of the machines would be embedded systems, the 2001-style interfaces make perfect sense.
Easily the best part of the movie, however, is Sam Rockwell’s magnificent performance (or performances) as the two Sams. He distils the differences between the two characters, and their shared loneliness and neuroticism, in such a beautiful way that if he doesn’t win Best Actor at the Oscars, I will personally bomb the Academy’s headquarters. It’s beyond words to describe it: it’s simply exquisite, and needs to be seen to be believed.
Overall, Moon is one of the best films, probably the best film I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the best sci-fi movie of the last ten years, probably the last twenty, or maybe (at a stretch) thirty. It’s such a shame that its release is so narrow that the closest it was playing to me is Richmond. If there’s sufficient public demand, a wider release might be considered… and a wider release is certainly what this film deserves.
If you’re a fan of good sci-fi, a good psychological drama, good thrillers or simply want to see a good film, then you have to go and see Moon. Take a friend, travel across the country if you have to: there’s no excuse for you not to treat yourself to this. It is fucking brilliant.
