Serenity Trounces Star Wars

DogBotherer writes "The BBC is reporting that the film Serenity has been voted the number-one Sci Fi film of all time. Serenity is a followup to the series Firefly. The 2005 film beat out Star Wars better than two-to-one for the top honors. This result came in a poll of 3000 readers of SFX magazine.

I hate Star Wars

But Serenity wasn't that great of a film. Firefly was an amazing TV show, but the film was without the same depth.

Re:I hate Star Wars

I think if they were operating systems Serenity would be Linux (small market share in general, but popularised in geek circles by very loyal fans/users). Star Wars would be Windows (huge market share, almost no loyalty). This being a nerd poll, Serenity will win by a huge margin.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Are you saying that Star Wars doesn't have a loyal fan base? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard. "Jedi" is an organized religion in many countries. Serenity can't touch that.

Let's be realistic. Star Wars is popular to the point of becoming a cultural phenomenon, and there are more Star Wars fans that are completely obsessed with the franchise than there are people who even saw Serenity. Heck, more people dressed up as Wookies last Halloween than saw Serenity.

What's even more hilarious is that Serenity even made the top ten. Ten years from now people will still be talking about Star Wars, Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, and pretty much everything else on the list. Serenity won't even be a foot note.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Let's be realistic. Star Wars is popular to the point of becoming a cultural phenomenon, and there are more Star Wars fans that are completely obsessed with the franchise than there are people who even saw Serenity. Heck, more people dressed up as Wookies last Halloween than saw Serenity.

Yes, but what's the cross-section of those fans with SFX magazine's readers? My guess is that most of those fans are pretty-much exclusively star wars fans, and therefore likely wouldn't read a general scifi magazine like SFX.

You are all avoiding the real question

The honest and hard hitting question is.. Who would win in a fight, Firefly or Millenium Falcon On a serious note, my first time getting onto the net in the early 90s, the first usenet post I came across that had a massive depth count was a thread on The Enterprise vs The Death Star. Sometimes I miss those days.

Re:You are all avoiding the real question

Battle Star Galatica (even that raping-of-my-childhood bastard new series)

See, that's why I avoided the new BSG series for two seasons before I got on board with it. But then, once I got it through my head that it has nothing to do with the series from the 70's, the show instantly became enjoyable. All you have to do is not compare the two series, realize that the new series is completely separate from the old series, and you're in business. Kinda like the Batman series of movies from the late 80's/90's and the new Batman Begins series, or like Star Trek vs. TNG -- just reboot the part of your brain that pays attention to BSG, or create a separate partition for it, and you're good to go.

Pity that doesn't work for Star Wars.

Nonsense!

The Falcon would win in a fight...the Serenity isn't even armed. 8)

Nonsense! On board Serenity is none other than Jayne Cobb, the Hero of Canton! He is science fiction's answer to Chuck Norris!

Jayne doesn't just shoot first, he shoots *before* first!

Re:You are all avoiding the real question

Damn yokels can't even tell a transport freighter ain't got no guns on it.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Who gives a rat's who reads SFX?

Gosh, I cant see how that would be relevent to the poll. You may want to RTFA.

And the grandparent's comment stands: "More people dressed up as Wookiees last Halloween than saw Serenity." People. Not SFX readers. People. Period."

Star Wars is more popular, it doesn't mean those who like it feel more strongly about it or make them 'loyal fans'. It's pretty hard to be a 'loyal fan' when the quality of the material varies so greatly. If anything, have a wide popular fanbase it means the strength of feeling is likely to be much diluted - think Manchester United supporters, for example.

I know people who are loyal fans of a few different stories/franchises. While most people I know really like Star Wars and we'd trape along to the cinema if a new trilogy was coming out, I don't really know anyone that feels as strongly about it as people do about smaller, tighter (i.e. more consistantly good quality) franchises like Firefly.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Look at it like this: if the Star Wars franchise is the Roman Catholic church, then who is Jar Jar Binks? The antichrist? Or just Martin Luther?

Re:I hate Star Wars

if the Star Wars franchise is the Roman Catholic church, then who is Jar Jar Binks?

One of those child-molesting priests?

Sorry... :-O

Re:I hate Star Wars

I think jarjar would be Judas, I can't see Jarjar starting a "new" religion. But he did cause the first movie to be fairly crucified by a lot of the Star wars lovers, so yeah, I stick with Judas (and not the Book of Judas sort of Judas either ;-) )

Re:I hate Star Wars

"Ten years from now people will still be talking about Star Wars, Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, and pretty much everything else on the list. Serenity won't even be a foot note."

Out of all the other hyperbole in your post, this stands out as the most inaccurate. Serenity was an important scifi film and will be talked about still in ten years, as will the Firefly series. Perhaps not as much as Star Wars, but it doesn't help your argument any to overstate your case and alienate fans of both properties.

I would

(put my waging money on it)
People who did not see Firefly tend to forget that it already had cult status and recognition... Browncoats bought so many Firefly DVDs that they convinced Fox (or whomever) to produce Serenity in the first place!

Re:I hate Star Wars

Your comment sums up the most important difference between Serenity and Star Wars. Star Wars stood on its own. Serenity was a great film, but it did not make much sense without the half-season of character development that had gone on before it. Characters died in Serenity, and the audience cared because they had been introduced earlier, and we knew them.

If you haven't seen FireFly, then I wouldn't expect you to think much of Serenity, because you don't have the correct context in which to place the film. I would thoroughly recommend the series to you, by the way, but your comment highlights exactly why the movie did so badly. The potential audience for Star Wars was everyone who liked cowboy films, space films, or both. The potential audience for Serenity was a subset of people who had seen FireFly. From the DVD sales, this was a fairly large number, but still tiny in comparison to most other films.

Re:I hate Star Wars

If you haven't seen FireFly, then I wouldn't expect you to think much of Serenity, because you don't have the correct context in which to place the film.

I guess I'll have to be the exception that proves the rule... I saw Serenity first and completely enjoyed it. I got enough from the dialogue and how everyone played off each other to figure enough to not be confused.

Did I understand everything? Probably not. But even after seeing Firefly I still don't, but on the other hand, I found the verse crafted well enough that I figure even if I don't know an exact reason for something, one exists that makes sense.

Re:Serenity will be relegated to trivia

Then Blade Runner is trivia.
Nothing more came from that. (not directly)
If you want innovations, here are some off the top of my head:

space shot in handcam style - everything in BSG's external shots is Firefly derivative.

The wild-west space - a genre-crossing adventure with the idea that not everyone will have golly-gee technology

Inara was wicked hot. (sorry, not a valid point, but still true)

Re:For what it is worth...

People who keep objecting to the "silly old-west" theme should perhaps talk to an anthropologist or historian or two who knows a little something about how remote or frontier societies develop, even when their parent societies are affluent.

There are places on Earth *right now* where people don't have running water or electricity, and do subsistence farming with domesticated animals. Western-style clothing evolved in the US because it was *practical* for low-tech manufacture with locally available materials and for the local environmental conditions. Why would you think that all remote space colonies would all have their own replicators and Mr Fusion generators?

Compared to almost all other sci-fi shows ever made, more of Firefly was realistic than fantastical. There was no faster-than-light travel or wormholes of folding space or whatever. People had to grow and raise their food, and it was real food not bioengineered food paste. The entire show took place within one single solar system. People had idiomatic speech patterns that were not simply "This is how we talk today with some made-up words thrown in". Which is not to say the show was pure science-based speculative fiction, but it generally took much smaller leaps than the typical sci-fi show.

Firefly isn't going to bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity or foster a new religion, but there was a lot of positive things to say about it as a representative of the sci-fi genre.

Star Wars *was* the top

Star Wars *had* a loyal fan base.

That is, until Lucas started to repeatedly rape the fan's memory, trying to squeeze the last penny he could get out of the franchise.
I think the the new trilogy has done more harm to the fan base, than actually a concurrent franchise stealing fans.

Re:Be sure to watch Firefly THEN Serenity!

I agree 100%

I had never seen Firefly, but I had a lot of friends who were fans of it. We all saw Serenity, and while it was a decent movie, if you asked me a week later what I thought of it, I wouldn't have even been able to recall what it was about.

Recently, I was convinced to sit down and watch all of firefly. I really enjoyed it. Then I watched Serenity again. It was like I was watching a completely different movie!

Seeing the movie by itself, you don't really get attached to the characters like you do in the TV show. [Spoiler] When Wash and Shepherd die, you don't really feel badly about that in the movie, because you didn't really know them. Shepherd especially, he wasn't much more than a background character.[/Spoiler]

Re:I hate Star Wars

"What's even more hilarious is that Serenity even made the top ten. Ten years from now people will still be talking about Star Wars, Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, and pretty much everything else on the list. Serenity won't even be a foot note."

I disagree. People will still be talking about Serenity because people will still be talking about Firefly. It isn't a question of Serenity's value by itself, in a similar way to Star Wars' appeal not being a question of the original film by itself.

Without the latter two films in the original trilogy, Star Wars wouldn't have nearly the fanbase it does now.(Yes, including RotJ, Ewok haters) The three films of the original trilogy came out in a manner that allowed the series to span the childhoods of its first generation fanbase.(and as much as it pains me to say it, there's a good chance that the second trilogy will benefit from a similar effect) Anyway, none of the films by themselves would have inspired the fanatical devotion they enjoy now.

Though Firefly and its associated stories won't have that childhood-spanning quality, with the revolutions and evolutions in media and entertainment, Firefly won't need it. Star Wars came out at the dawn of the VCR. Firefly was born into an era where the home entertainment industry is not just well established, but arguably as important as the theatre industry. Even more importantly, Firefly was born into an era where movies and television shows are traded on file-sharing networks. It isn't nearly so hard to stay in the public consciousness now as it was in 1977, 80, or 83. If you raved to a friend about this movie you saw then with lasers and swords and intensive breathing apparatuses, and it was out of theatres or on its way out, there wasn't much chance of your friend seeing it.(not that you would have been a particularly good friend had you waited that long to tell them about it) Now your friend can get the show off the net and be on their merry.

And then, of course, there's also the penchant of the internet to foster geeky forums devoted to minutiae. If the internet can resurrect a forgotten Sega Mega Drive game [wikipedia.org] from 1989 and turn its horrible translation into a cultural phenomenon, then surely it can foster a fanbase for a well conceived but ill-fated sci-fi franchise from 2002.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Does that make Apple the Star Trek of the analogy?

Re:I hate Star Wars

Longtime, loyal, somewhat-crazy fans, first marketplace claims, static marketshare... I'd say the only thing your analogy is missing is "good taste in design". Never cared for those hideous jumpsuits and pager-pins myself..

Re:I hate Star Wars

but the film was without the same depth

That's what happens when you only have ~120 minutes (movie) instead of ~650 minutes (series)

Few people will sit through a 600+ minute movie, no matter how deep it is.

Re:I hate Star Wars

weeellll... I saw Starwars in a theatre in Bakerfield, CA when it first came out. I saw it 6 times on opening weekend. Whenever anyone says "Star Wars", it takes me a minute to realize that they aren't talking about Episode IV. So to me, Star Wars is Episode IV, and blows the airlocks off of Serenity without even trying. However, if you consider "Star Wars" as everything put on film as being Star Wars "canon", and Serenity also including Firefly as "Canon", then serenity/firefly wins.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Hadn't thought about it that way, and I have to say you've got my vote on that, and I'm a huge Firefly geek. And when you stop to think about the styles and skills of the involved auteurs, it makes a lot fo sense: George Lucas, able at times to bring out work that is simply stunning, but leave him running too long and he'll fuck it up, whereas Joss Whedon's always plan for the long haul (yes, I know that's par for the course when you work in TV, but his methodology is evident in most everything he does.

One is a visionary, well-versed in the peaks and troughs associated with that status. The other is simply a master storyteller, laying his foundations like a brickie and keeping his eye on the finish line.

Dang, it's 4AM, Hope any of that made sense, as I'm not gonna preview it!

Re:I hate Star Wars

... an utterly unoriginal storyline.

You know, it's only fairly recently that originally trumps all else as a measure of value. God help Shakespeare if he were trying to make a living with today's critics.

Re:I hate Star Wars

But Lord of the Rings was a very successful 600+ minute movie, and many went out and bought the DVD with the extras, despite having watched the movie at the theaters. And I have been in a few Lord of the Rings whole-day-viewing marathons myself.

Re:On topic of length versus quality

Dune will never produce a good cinematic version, either. You'd think people would learn to leave cerebral books with a great deal of politicking and internal monologue alone.

Re:I hate Star Wars

Good point.

If that'd happened with B5, I'd be able to comfortably and comfortably call it the greatest sci-fi series of all time, past and future. Sadly, we've got a rushed 4th season, an off-kilter and mediocre 5th, and a couple of (reputedly, I haven't watched them out of fear of the suck) crappy tv movies, thanks to the bastard suits.

I really, REALLY want the US tv producers to get their acts together and start producing reasonably-long (1-5 seasons, not never-ending 10-season monstrosities) with full story arcs. Tell me a story, goddamn it, and don't leave me constantly in terror that you will yank the show JUST before it gets a chance to wrap up, or push the writers in to making it much longer than it ought to be, then making them rush in an ending.

If they do that, then I can stop watching anime. I don't WANT to watch anime, but their well-developed characters and pre-planned series-length plot arcs are such a draw...

So please, corporate media gods, save me from anime. For the love of god, save me. 90% of the other Americans who watch this stuff are ugly, introverted, cheeto-faced losers with no social skills, and I'm afraid that their disease is contagious :(

Re:I hate Star Wars

I wonder why animated sci-fi was not included in the same vote. For example anime series such as Cowboy Bebop and Trigun could very easily compete with Serenity and Star Wars in all departments, especially in story and characters.

BTW: if you liked Firefly/Serenity, then watch Cowboy Bebop series - it gave a lot of inspiration to the Firefly. And Trigun is of very similar quality but with more humour and even more bitter end.

Serenity was good...

Excellent, even. I can see it beating Star Wars. But the likes of Blade Runner? I mean, nothing against Serenity, but I really don't think it's the Best Science Fiction Film Ever.

Re:Serenity was NOT good...

First of all, let me say that I was a HUGE Firefly fan (though not a fan of Whedon's other work). I thought the series was absolutely groundbreaking at its best. Episodes like "Ariel," "Out of Gas," and "Jaynestown" subverted the classic hero stereotypes and stock character expectations which had generally been the mainstay of sci-fi television. But, that said, I *HATED* "Serenity" the movie. No, that's not accurate. I HATED HATED HATED it (to paraphrase Roger Ebert's review of "North").

The plot was pedestrian, the characters who were so rich and multi-dimensional on the show were reduced to almost comic simplicity in the movie (and, in the case of Simon, COMPLETELY altered). Malcolm Reynolds, for example, was presented on the show as a decent, but harsh and practical, mercenary who felt a strong loyalty to his crew but had completely rejected juvenile notions of "changing the world" from his younger days. In the movie, he's presented as a stock reluctant hero, just waiting to save the world and make bombastic speeches at the slightest provocation (it was as if the old Mal had been replaced by a retired James T. Kirk). It was the kind of implausible and simplistic "redemption" story that would be perfectly at home in fan fiction written by an 6th grader.

The movie was also loaded with ridiculous "crowd pleaser" fight scenes and FX extravaganzas, with Whedon even ripping HIMSELF off with the cheeseball and ludicrous "River the Reaver Slayer" fight scene (at least Buffy's ability to defy all known physics could be explained by magic). This would have been bad enough had the FX in the movie looked even as good as the series. I don't know who they hired to do the special FX in this movie, but it's rare to see FX in a movie adaptation that look WORSE than in the TV series (was that landspeeder chase scene meant as some kind of JOKE, a la "Army of Darkness"?!?!?)

I could go on and on. But, suffice it to say that I wish they had simply left the series alone. The movie failed on virtually every front.

Firefly was really meant to be a series, and was ill-suited for the feature film form (even if they HAD done a better job of it).

I just hope Ronald Moore learned a lesson from Whedon's mistake. Don't do it, Ron.

Re:Serenity was good...

Blade Runner - the plot was fairly straightforward.

Replicants (the bad guys) return to earth and they are hunted down by a cop (the good guy). Cop kills all the replicants, but falls for another one, and they do a runner.

The questions that the plot raised - what made the replicants not human? what makes humans human? Was the cop human or not? How do we know our memories are real? - are all pretty deep, complex, and ambigious. Add to that top quality acting from everyone, superb cinematography, good backstory (a dank, dreary, rainy world), a good script (once they ditched the noir voice-over), and all the little touches (like the photos on Deckard's piano, the owl and the snake) some memorable lines (which are not endlessly requoted by the office wit, keeping them freash) and you have a great movie.

Re:Serenity was good...

The Blade Runner soundtrack is by Vangelis, and it stands on its own quite well. You may be too young and immature to realize that the technology involved in art changes, but that change doesn't diminish the value of the earlier art. You must be a real hoot to watch Casablanca with.

Re:Rigging

That's always the problem when a poll is based on the will to participate (and knowledge of its exitence).
In 1999, the city of Paris organized an online poll in which we were asked to vote for the most important person of those two millenia and someone in my electronic school put his name, so we all voted for him, then another scholl put up its own champion against ours. shortly before closing the poll, they had to eject both of them because their poll, supposed to be based on notoriety, had two totally unkown winners above 40% each, with Jesus being a good third around 3% and everyone else below 0.5%.

"Serenity" has a vocal but minority following

I wanted to like, "Serenity." I went to the theatre expecting to like it. But I was bored silly by a boring plot that was full of holes. The characters weren't especially compelling. I couldn't figure out what was so great about this. After finishing it, I couldn't even figure out what was tolerable about it. From what I've seen since then, it seems as though "Serenity" fans are fanatically loyal and vocal, but most people who weren't already fans didn't find the movie especially entertaining. Obviously, I haven't taken a poll, but the box office results must mean SOMETHING.

As for "Star Wars," I don't agree that it necessarily ought to be classified as fantasy, but it's also silly to see it as representing all of science fiction, as so many people do. "Star Wars" was an example of one particular branch of sci-fi, but it came to be seen as what sci-fi really was because ignorant studio execs all tried to clone it after it made a lot of money. Good science fiction is easy to find it books, but very hard to find on screen, IMO. It's hard to see either "Serenity" OR "Star Wars" as the best sci-fi movie ever.

David

Re:"Serenity" has a vocal but minority following

If you had not seen/followed Firefly before, I'd have to agree with you, even though I really liked Serenity (to be expected, being a fan of the series).

I think the movie is pretty good, technically speaking, but it made some gigantic assumptions on the exposition of the characters, plot details, etc. It felt like a really good TV season finale, not a theatrical movie that stood by itself.
I can see how watching the movie without following Firefly would feel like catching the last episode of a series you don't watch, with closures for plot points that were never opened, and characters that you have no reason to care about... fine for late night cable, but not the same entertainment bar for paying a ticket to watch a movie in the theater.

Admittedly, I doubt adapting it to a stand-alone movie would work. A lot of what was great about Firefly as a series depended on having that span to explore the universe and the characters over an episodic show. The tempo would have to be very different.

As part of the show, I think the "movie" was great and well worth it.
As a movie per se, it was overrated, because the very vocal fans are Firefly fans, and saw it (and hyped it) as part of the show.

It reminds me of the X-files movie in that sense, except Serenity was better made and had more of the grass-roots-hype, and less of the bovine and equine abuse.

Re:"Serenity" has a vocal but minority following

Serenity is a good movie, and i think their producers did a fine job of keeping the storyline as independent of the original series, Firefly, as possible. Having said that, yes, i felt the same as you did - it's too convoluted of a story. Sadly enough, a lot of things in the movie simply won't make much sense without having watched the series.

Now, let me give you some advice. If you wanted to like Serenity but felt it was lacking character developement and plot, i suggest you give the Firefly DVD boxset a try. Hell, just buy it. The movie is OK, but the series were mindblowing, IMHO, and some of the finest blend of sci-fi and adventure i witnesed on TV in quite a while. I know a lot of people who didn't think much about the movie but fell in love with the series after watching a few episodes.

Re:"Serenity" has a vocal but minority following

I wanted to like, "Serenity." I went to the theatre expecting to like it. But I was bored silly by a boring plot that was full of holes. The characters weren't especially compelling. I couldn't figure out what was so great about this. After finishing it, I couldn't even figure out what was tolerable about it. From what I've seen since then, it seems as though "Serenity" fans are fanatically loyal and vocal, but most people who weren't already fans didn't find the movie especially entertaining. Obviously, I haven't taken a poll, but the box office results must mean SOMETHING.

I watched and really enjoyed firefly, when I heard about the movie I was very sceptical that it would translate onto the big screen, I found the movie enjoyable, maybe even good, but I'd stop far short of labelling it great.

I find people have a tendency to ally themselves with a certain bit of media or subsection of culture, they'll then defend any show, movie, or book that falls into this subsection even though they realize that it isn't very good. Conversely they'll denigrate anything that falls into categories that they don't like, regardless of its quality. I know I've often found myself wrestling with these very tendencies.

Simply put firefly fans were fanatical enough about firefly that they earned themselves a movie. When this movie came about, even though it wasn't as good as the series, they had so much personally invested that they continued to push it every chance they got. I'd suspect that a good portion of those firefly fans who voted for Serenity realize, and would even admit that Serenity isn't the greatest science fiction movie ever. But they perceive an attack on Serenity as an attack on their community, and therefore themselves, and thus feel the need to defend it.

Let the Flamewars begin....

Me and my mod points are going to maintain a distance of no less than 3 articles from this inevitable flame-fest.

Who Has the More Active Fanbase

These sorts of surveys are more about who has the more devoted and active fanbase at the moment. That doesn't make the result less significant, its just a matter of what the result is actually saying: Firefly has managed to develop and extremely devoted and extremely active fanbase. This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise. Oddly enough it still remains far more likely that we will see another Star Wars film than a sequel to Serenity (though neither is that likely). Star Wars fans may be apathetic about the films these days, but they still exist in vast numbers.

Not even most active

Look at Star Wars - coming up is Star Wars Celebration IV [gencon.com], where around 30,000 people will attend. Having been to the last Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis, I can easily believe those numbers.

Now look at the last Serenity convention - the Flanvention. Even if it had not abruptly folded the day before it was to go off, it only had some 500 people attending - as did the one the year before that I attended. Now partly that was a limitation by choice of the event organizers, but I'm not sure they quite reached even 500 the first one.

I really, really like Firefly and Serenity - but they have no-where near the fan base that Star Wars does, in either size or bredth or sheer fanatisim. This was just a case of Browncoats gaming the polls before the Star Wars Bantha could wake to smite them.

Obvious unfair advantage.

Let's see of the results hold after Serenity makes a sequel with Jar Jar Binks.

I thought so.

Come on

I loved the TV show, but I hated the movie, the plot was shallow, everything feeled pressed into the movie format there was no character development whatsoever (I especially hated how they cut out pretty much everything where Morena Baccarin hat part in it) The movie was mediocre, it felt like a mediocre episode of the TV show.

Re:Come on

I thought the second worst sin committed was killing off certain people needlessly.

No. There were Real Life reasons for killing Book and Wash. Book's actor wanted out of acting to do political activism full-time, and Wash's actor had other acting commitments.

Concentration of Quality

I really enjoy both the Firefly and Star Wars universes. That being said, there's a LOT more material to be found for the latter, orders of magnitude more.

In a way, I think this poll shows some disappointment with some of that vast collection of material for Star Wars. Some of it is very, very good (the original trilogy, KotOR, etc.), but some of it isn't quite so good... in fact, some of it's really quite ridiculously bad [wikipedia.org].

Firefly/Serenity, on the other hand, is:
a) relatively new and fresh in our minds
b) excitingly dynamic, humorous, sexy, etc. in a way that Star Wars failed to be in Episodes I-III
c) a fairly small collection of material. All of it quite good (imho).

There's something to be said for having such a high overall level of quality in such a concentrated amount of material.

However, I do agree that a similar poll 20 years from now might not have Firefly in the top 10. Then again, maybe Star Wars will decline over time?

All Hail Terry Gilliam

Where is "Brazil"? Where is "12 Monkeys"?

"Serenity" was fun and all, but those are good films...

Awesome sampling, really

3,00 readers of one SF magazine...yeah, that's definitive. I can think of a handful of SF films better than either. I'm a huge Firefly fan, loved Star Wars, but this "trouncing" is only slightly more relevant than me and my homies declaring 'Jabba the Slut' best SF-porn of all time on our MySpace page.

Why did either one win?

Neither one is much of a scifi film they are both fantasy films. It's not a value judgement I enjoyed both they just aren't really scifi films. 2001 and Bladerunner are scifi films. Neither of the films, Star Wars or Serenity, gave more than a passing thought to science. Star Wars had little to do with science and Joss Wedon seemed to keep confusing solar systems and galaxies. Both films were fantasy space operas. Really entertaining but in no way predicting a future that will or could ever happen. Star Trek has faired remarkably well as has 2001 but Star Wars is still fantasy. There's nothing wrong with space operas, they actually go back to the Buck Rodgers era, it's just they aren't science fiction. There's so little real science fiction people seem to be forgetting there's a difference.

3000 people?

It's been voted best by a one magazine with a tiny poll of 3000 readers?

Hardly conclusive evidence, given the fact that 99% of people who have seen Star Wars have never heard of the magazine in the first place ;)

Serenity was excellent, but definately not ground breaking - that's the difference.

puh-lease

Does anyone think there would even *be* a Mal Reynolds if there hadn't been a Han Solo first?(and yes, they both shot first!)

Despite the depths of mediocrity that Lucas has since sunk to, give credit where credit is due. Star Wars and all the technology that ILM created during the making of the Star Wars films changed the industry forever. Blade Runner certainly changed the look of sci-fi films, but it still didn't have the impact that Star Wars did. I'm not sure that was the overriding criterion for making the list, though.

Serenity was great (GREAT! "I am a leaf on the wind!"), but c'mon, let's not get stupid here. While you don't have to have watched Firefly before Serenity to enjoy it, it certainly helps immensely. The whole Mal/Inara history has much more comedic impact if you have the Firefly backstory. The Rev? A complete throwaway character if you haven't watched Firefly!

The bigger surprise(s) of the list (for me) were what was included, that most fans have forgotten:

Planet of the Apes (the original) and Forbidden Planet. Right on.

Back to the Future? Uhm, I don't think so.

The Star Wars film that most fans seem to think was the best (Empire Strikes Back) wasn't even on the list? That seems a little odd.

A bit of historical context

Does anyone think there would even *be* a Mal Reynolds if there hadn't been a Han Solo first?

Well, there was a time when the hero in a story was always entirely good - I think the modern term would be "all american" (think Flash Gordon). The idea of a hero with flaws and conflicts was popularized by Lord Byron, oh about 200 years before Han Solo hit the big screen. Here's the wiki article for further research. [wikipedia.org]

I realize that you didn't actually claim that Lucas had invented the Byronic hero. I just want to make it *painfully clear* that he didn't invent it. But you're right, Han Solo did make the archetype very popular.

It bothers me a bit that Lucas gets any credit. Lucas is an idiot who stumbled clumsily into a great movie (ep. IV) that he really didn't deserve. Lucas himself has no clue what a Byronic hero is. Lucas doesn't appreciate it or value it at all. This is why he was willing to change episode IV so that Gredo shot first. Lucas is a drooling idiot staring at a movie that is accidentally good, and going "deeerrrrr, lets maik hand shot first, har har. deeeerrr."

If Lucas understood Han Solo, he would have made it *more* obvious that Han shot first.

Also, in the scene in Empire where Han is getting lowered into carbonite, Lea says, "I love you" and Han says, "I know." How cool is that guy, you know what I mean? Well, Lucas actually wrote the script so that Han says, "I love you too" but Harrison Ford changed it. What a moron Lucas is. He has no clue whatsoever.

Different times, different appeals.

This is one of the few topics I feel strongly compelled enough to comment on. For those who voted Serenity topping Star Wars, I understand completely. Let's be real here. Star Wars was a space opera, a caricature of science fiction. The SF genre, in my own opinion, is one that deals in honest ways with how science impacts our lives on a daily basis. Star Wars wasn't an original story to this genre. It was the same old good versus evil, take down the evil conglomerate story which could have easily been told in a Western. Serenity crossed boundaries in ways Star Wars did not. It relied on a political back story familiar to those of us not subject to "empires" even as it showed a human side to the struggle. What? Luke Skywalker lost his hand in a lightsaber battle to Darth Vader, only to have it replaced by seamless prosthetic? Malcolm Reynolds got the crap kicked out of him and LIMPED away from his LUCKY defeat of the bad guy. His crew fared no better. The story itself was more relevant to our society than Star Wars. The primary struggle in Star Wars was Luke not becoming his father and joining the monolithic religion his own version of which was opposed to. It was individualistic, properly suited for the coming 80s decade of similar attitudes of self-preservation. Serenity dealt with issues of survival of minority against a seemingly benevolent majority. It mirrored one man's issues of being on the losing side of a war and contrasted them to the why's and how's wars are won and lost. Given the 14 episodes of backstory from the single season it was on and one comes away with an even better understanding of this movie. In summary, Serenity trumps Star Wars as a sci-fi movie because it is actually more REAL and deals more specifically with real issues. It is not some fairytale fantasy story, able to be retold in any genre without losing anything.

Re:Serenity/Firefly: overhyped?

I'll translate for those of you who don't feel like reading: Serenity and BSG have too much emotion and too little technobabble. I'm uncomfortable with the former and therefore dislike shows that deal with it.

Agreed...

I've seen a lot of "science fiction" movies, and I mean a *lot*. I put the quotes around the words "science fiction" because I'm being really generous about what SF is. It includes the Star Treks and the Star Wars, the Serenitys and the 2001s, and other stuff that's only SF because some studio executive saw "lasers" and "babes in leather" and thought that made it so (this is why execs show T'pol grunting around in panties and bra and shouting essentially, "F*ck me or I'll die" and thinking that it'll endure beyond the immediate tittilation of watching Jolene Blalock in panties and bra).

Serenity passes my definition of SF because it does a couple things: explores what happens when technology is used properly and improperly; explores what it means to be human in light of technology showing that we're nothing much more than a chemical soup. The technology must be central somehow. It must be the sine qua non...

But that alone would make a really dry movie. It would be like reading "The Pilgrim's Progress" or some Sunday school homily. IMHO, Serenity rocks because the characters are so believable. They're foils certainly. Mal is the typical anti-hero, Jayne the none-too-bright tough guy, Zoe the hardened warrior with a soft side... Heck, they're all warriors in some way.... But you end up liking them and being concerned about their well-being. I couldn't say that about Harry Potter, or hell, even Anakin.

And perhaps lastly, Serenity didn't take itself too seriously. It was a Western shot in space by design. There was no pretense. It didn't preach about ideals and the Price of Humanity or The Dangers of War or We're Humans So We're Better. The Serenity crew were thieves and murderers by most laws moral and otherwise. But they were family. And that's nothing to sneeze at.

So yeah, it would get my vote too.

Sci-Fi Movies...

Some of my favorites in no particular order:

Brazil
Blade Runner
Altered States
The Fly
Solaris
Red Planet
Forbidden Planet
Metropolis
Alien/Aliens
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Tron
Dr. Strangelove
The Last Starfighter (cheesy I know, but what is cooler than a kid who becomes the hero of the universe by getting top score in an arcade game)
Logan's Run
THX1138
Alien Nation
Amazing Stories
The Black Hole
Westworld
Charly (film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon)
War Games
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Dark City
Dark Star

And the list could go on and on and on..... (really, I have tons more I love to watch now and again)

Notice, you don't see Serenity or Star Wars on there. Yes, I do like them, but do I consider them Sci-Fi? Maybe in the same way that I consider "The Terminator" or "The Transformers" to be Sci-Fi.

Serenity was a spaghetti-western in space, only not as good as the real spaghetti westerns such as "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" or "Pale Rider". I didn't even think Firefly was that great either. Star Wars was entertaining, but I thought it just to be another action flick like Indiana Jones or whatnot, only set in space. Don't get me wrong, I love the movie, but I just didn't see it like I guess some other people see it. The Empire Strikes Back was excellent, and one of the few in the series that Lucas didn't get to screw up the first time around, hence why it was better than the rest. Space opera definitely. I felt like I was watching a fancier Flash Gordon with a better plot.

BTW: Everyone needs to quit dwelling on the whole "Luke this" "Luke that" thing. The entire story arc of the movie series was about Darth Vader, not Luke. The whole Luke obsession thing is almost homo-erotic :P

But these are all so recent ...

With the possible exception of Forbidden Planet, these are films that people roughly my age and younger (36) remember being released. While I know you can only vote on what you know, it's certainly a limited array. I immediately noticed the lack of A Trip to the Moon, the first (1902) sci-fi film ever made (and a quite entertaining one, at that). Metropolis isn't exactly pure sci-fi, but it has its own very prominent elements of sci-fi.

And while I know I'll get myself modded down here, I would argue that The Matrix is more about the special effects than the story -- I think anyone who ever got high with friends from their honors physics class has had discussions that go along the Matrix plot path. It was a pretty and cool-looking movie, but was certainly not innovative as far as the story went.

'Course, by that argument, the fact that Star Wars (IV) is just the hero myth revisited should get it taken off the list (though it clearly belongs there). So it could just be that I hate Keanu Reeves and that further colored my opinion.

Either way, it seems like some older classics were missed. Not surprising considering the likely target demographic of a sci-fi magazine, but still. It's like my saying that I'm the strongest man in my house -- true, and my wife and daughter and female cat would agree. But there's not a sufficient data set present to make that mean anything.

To quote Mal...

"They won't see this comin'."

As both a Star Wars and a Firefly fan, my first reaction to this news was disbelief, but as i read a bit and thought a bit, i realized that i agree - Serenity is better. Of course you have to realize that no matter what the poll actually said, both were judged on their entire series, not just on the individual movies. Star Wars includes episodes 1-6 and Serenity includes Firefly. Would you rather watch Episode 2 or any 4 episodes of Firefly? Star Wars was the phenomenon that it was because it was new and amazing. Serenity was better because the story and characters are better.

Plus, be honest, when the Serenity and her 'escorts' come flying out of that nebula, don't shivers just run down your spine? No scene comes close to that "whoa" factor in all of Star Wars, imo. (Blasphemous as it may be to say, the light saber fight between Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jin probably comes the closest.)

Whether Serenity (+Firefly) is better than a lot of the others is a much tougher question.

1977

Star Wars was released in 1977. If we're talking about the original Episode IV movie, we're talking about a movie that is 30 years old. Many movies have come and gone since then, and Star Wars still holds up remarkably well. I enjoyed Serenity, but I think its success in this particular popularity contest is primarily based on it being the best scifi movie to appear in recent years.

Take another poll in 2037 and see where the two stack up. I suspect Serenity will hold up well, but I don't know that it will have the broad effect of Star Wars. Despite its faults, Star Wars embraced big themes and grabbed hold of the imagination in a way that few films have.

Star Wars isn't Science Fiction

Star Wars isn't science fiction - It is a space opera fairy tale. While Serenity wasn't "hard" science fiction, Serenity actually deals with scientific and technological dillemas (such as the morality of using chemicals to modify human behavior). It is mostly an adventure story, but it at least makes some attempt at being science fiction.

Re:Damn Brits!

How exactly is star wars somehow less scifi then firefly?

I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly.
So what do you define as science fiction?
I mean, it's fiction, about science.
Firefly barely had enough science to make it not qualify as a current fiction w/ spaceships.

Re:Damn Brits!

The main argument against Star Wars being sci-fi is that it is better considered science-fantasy. More to the point, the whole Force thing is generally considered to kill the science fiction-ness and turn it into science-fantasy.

In reality, science fiction is fairly loosely defined and Star Wars fits very well under some definitions and not at all under others. Firefly is given more science-fiction credit because of the fact that it didn't have random fantasy elements (well, except for River's psychic-ness, but we never got around to getting a good enough explanation of whether it would be better classified as a faux-science or a fantasy element, but from what we did get, it seemed as if they wanted to at least try to make it more the faux-science route.)

Star Wars is Sci-fi

Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction.

Science fiction and fantasy are both speculative fiction sub-genres.

Science fiction is mostly defined by its setting and subject matter: outer space, aliens, time travel, imaginary technology, etc. Star Wars is certainly science fiction, even though it crosses the boundary a little with what might be considered magic (as does Dune). What Star Wars is not is hard sf, a sub-genre of science fiction in which the plot itself is based on plausible scientific theory.