Review Detail
9.5 24 10
Overall rating
9.6
Audio/Video Quality
10.0
Audio Editing
9.0
Visual Editing
10.0
Narrative
9.0
Enjoyment
10.0
I love FIREFLY, and I love its first episode "Serenity." Strangely enough, though, I know a lot of people who just couldn't get into that pilot episode. Many found it inaccessible.
Maybe if they had been able to start with Musiced's wonderful edit, they would have liked it better.
Musiced wisely puts the flashbacks from the episode "Out of Gas" near the beginning of the story, in their proper place in the timeline. These flashbacks do a great job of establishing the characters and setting up the world in which they live.
The episodes are edited together as a feature-length movie, and Musiced makes the transitions pretty flawless. I knew where the commercial breaks originally came from having watched the original episode many times, but Musiced seamlessly makes the scenes flow. There was a slightly lower audio/video quality in some of the deleted scenes that were added in, but as he explains in the opening, the scenes were not restored for the DVD release. The scenes were very worthwhile; they answered how Mal and Zoe finally got out of Serenity Valley, and why Mal would name his ship after the place where he and the others lost the war.
There was one moment at about 1 hour and 5 minutes in where the audio transition seemed a bit abrupt, but other than that, the audio was handled flawlessly.
I enjoyed the rearranging of the scenes so much that I almost wish that the Simon/River flashbacks from later episodes and the movie were also moved forward into the timeline here. But for new viewers, the connection of these scenes to the overall story would have been baffling, and the surprise reveal of who these two turned out to be would have been ruined if they had been put in the aforementioned order. Musiced made the right call.
A couple of very small, nitpicky things: The scene where Wash plays with the dinosaurs (a hilarious scene that's one of my favorites in the series) no longer feels right when placed in the middle of the movie. It's clearly an intro scene when Wash has already been introduced. (And, as Zoe notes, he *is* kind of annoying when that's the first time we meet him.) And the Mal/Inara flashback loses a joke through the reordering of the material (Mal promises not to call Inara a certain nasty name ever again, which is funny in a later episode when we know that he constantly calls her that. But the gag doesn't work anymore by putting this scene first).
Mind you, I love the dinosaur scene so much myself, I don't know if I could bring myself to cut it either. And I don't have a solution for the Mal/Inara scene; it pretty much has to be placed where it is. I talk about these minor niggling points because so much else works about this edit that it leaves me with little to say.
The use of the theme (for the first time in this version of the story) over the end credits is beautifully handled.
A large portion of this edit is simply the "Serenity" pilot episode running in a straightforward fashion (as it should be). I imagine that the third part will be mainly the 2005 SERENITY feature film running in a fairly straightforward fashion. But what I really look forward to is seeing how Musiced sums up the middle section of the story in the one movie that comes in between them! That will probably require the most inventiveness and repurposing of footage on this part.
But after seeing this edit, I know that he's got the skills to pull it off. :)
Maybe if they had been able to start with Musiced's wonderful edit, they would have liked it better.
Musiced wisely puts the flashbacks from the episode "Out of Gas" near the beginning of the story, in their proper place in the timeline. These flashbacks do a great job of establishing the characters and setting up the world in which they live.
The episodes are edited together as a feature-length movie, and Musiced makes the transitions pretty flawless. I knew where the commercial breaks originally came from having watched the original episode many times, but Musiced seamlessly makes the scenes flow. There was a slightly lower audio/video quality in some of the deleted scenes that were added in, but as he explains in the opening, the scenes were not restored for the DVD release. The scenes were very worthwhile; they answered how Mal and Zoe finally got out of Serenity Valley, and why Mal would name his ship after the place where he and the others lost the war.
There was one moment at about 1 hour and 5 minutes in where the audio transition seemed a bit abrupt, but other than that, the audio was handled flawlessly.
I enjoyed the rearranging of the scenes so much that I almost wish that the Simon/River flashbacks from later episodes and the movie were also moved forward into the timeline here. But for new viewers, the connection of these scenes to the overall story would have been baffling, and the surprise reveal of who these two turned out to be would have been ruined if they had been put in the aforementioned order. Musiced made the right call.
A couple of very small, nitpicky things: The scene where Wash plays with the dinosaurs (a hilarious scene that's one of my favorites in the series) no longer feels right when placed in the middle of the movie. It's clearly an intro scene when Wash has already been introduced. (And, as Zoe notes, he *is* kind of annoying when that's the first time we meet him.) And the Mal/Inara flashback loses a joke through the reordering of the material (Mal promises not to call Inara a certain nasty name ever again, which is funny in a later episode when we know that he constantly calls her that. But the gag doesn't work anymore by putting this scene first).
Mind you, I love the dinosaur scene so much myself, I don't know if I could bring myself to cut it either. And I don't have a solution for the Mal/Inara scene; it pretty much has to be placed where it is. I talk about these minor niggling points because so much else works about this edit that it leaves me with little to say.
The use of the theme (for the first time in this version of the story) over the end credits is beautifully handled.
A large portion of this edit is simply the "Serenity" pilot episode running in a straightforward fashion (as it should be). I imagine that the third part will be mainly the 2005 SERENITY feature film running in a fairly straightforward fashion. But what I really look forward to is seeing how Musiced sums up the middle section of the story in the one movie that comes in between them! That will probably require the most inventiveness and repurposing of footage on this part.
But after seeing this edit, I know that he's got the skills to pull it off. :)
User Review
Do you recommend this edit?
Yes
Format Watched?
DVD
T