Author of Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card on Serenity

For those of you who know who Orson Scott Card is, just skip ahead. For the others: he is the author of a little book called Ender's Game, and a subsequent series in the Ender-verse. Ender's Game by and large is regarded by most as one of the best works of sci-fi ever written. It is damn interesting, has a lot of depth (seriously I am talking Huxley-ian, if not Orwellian levels), and is really well written. Add to the mix the fact that characters are crafted masterfully, and you've got a piece that by and large everyone from "literature people" to "epics people" to "philosophy people" love. And love it they do.

So it seemed interesting as to what Mr. Card had to say about the sci-fi film Serenity. Take a look:

"I walked into this movie reasonably aware of the advance word-of-mouth (though not obsessively so) and only as the film actually began this afternoon, the day of its premier, did it occur to me that I had not heard a whisper of a breath of the actual plot of the movie. All I heard was, "It's great, you'll love it."

Well, guess what.

It's great.

I'm not going to say it's the best science fiction movie, ever.

Oh, wait. Yes I am.

Let me put this another way. Those of you who know my work at all know about Ender's Game. I jealously protected the movie rights to Ender's Game so that it would not be filmed until it could be done right. I knew what kind of movie it had to be, and I tried to keep it away from directors, writers, and studios who would try to turn it into the kind of movie they think of as "sci-fi."

...For me, a great film -- sci-fi or otherwise -- comes down to relationships and moral decisions. How people are with each other, how they build communities, what they sacrifice for the sake of others, what they mean when they think of a decision as right vs. wrong.

Yeah, even comedies. Even romantic comedies -- it's those moral decisions.

Wow, that sounds so heavy. But great film is heavy -- out of sight, underneath everything, where you don't have to be slapped in the face by it. On the surface, it can be exciting, funny, cool, scary, horrifying -- all those things that mean "entertainment" to us.

Underneath it all, though, it has to mean something. And the meaning that matters is invariably about moral decisions people make. Motives. Relationships. Community. If those don't work, then you can gloss up the surface all you want, we'll know we've just been fed smoke. Might smell great but we're still hungry.

So here's what I have to say about Serenity:

This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar).

And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be.

And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.

I'd rather just watch Serenity again.

...On that ship we had an interlocking community with a history, rather like what has been a-building with Lost and what was developed over the years with Friends (but what never existed in Seinfeld because the main writer, Larry David, doesn't seem to believe in anything, and you can't build a powerful community on a sneer).

The key to this kind of movie is that you create a community that the audience wishes they belonged to, with a leader that even audience members who don't follow anybody would willingly follow. That will be the key to Ender's Game if the movie is ever successfully made; and it is the key to Serenity.

It won't be obvious in a literary-novel kind of way, where the writer is sure to point out his trivial little "central metaphor" and all his "deep" characters who are for some reason still mad at the writer's Mommy and Daddy.

It will feel like adventure, like a bunch of macho strutting, like a lot of whizbang and dead bodies and violence and vaguely weird language until all of a sudden you realize: I care about these people. I like these people. Even the unlikeable ones, I care about. Even the villain really is somebody.

Think about this: Hamlet has a lot of violence and death, intrigue and betrayal; it's downright gothic. In fact, if you hadn't already been told it was a "great work" and somebody told you the plot, you'd think, what a bunch of junk.

Only it isn't, is it? And why? Because, of course, it's very well written -- but more than that, it's about something. Relationships and moral dilemmas and -- oh, wait, I've already given you that list.

Lots of sense-of-wonder (oooooh, a ghost!) and sudden shocks (don't kill the man behind the curtain!) and grim deaths (Ophelia did what?) and the gratuitously macabre (oh, look, let's play with a dead friend's skull) -- but it holds together because it's about something.

Well, not only is Serenity about something, it's also extremely well written. Joss Whedon has invented a kind of weird future slang that is still perfectly intelligible but is different, with snatches of foreign languages and obsolete English words that make it clear that it's not ordinary English they're speaking.

The effect of this -- at least in Whedon's deft hands -- is to allow himself something of the kind of heroic language that was possible for Shakespeare -- and for Tolkien. It allows him to be eloquent.

And then he turns around and deliberately clanks with some humorously abrupt language that makes us laugh for the sheer startlement of it. Just as Shakespeare did, when he'd drop from blank verse to the funny coarseness of comic prose.

Will everyone like it? Not a chance. It really is too strong for some people -- there are indeed dead bodies and cruelty and unspeakable violence, and you don't want to deal with the nightmares that young children will have. Plus the storyline is smart enough and mature enough that some people simply won't get it. Can't be helped -- it's all there on the screen, though.

Charlie Kaufman's movies have been great science fiction, but without being completely open and accessible to the mainstream audience.

Joss Whedon is not as artistically edgy, but is every bit as inventive, and he has the common touch. Like Shakespeare, he doesn't have to show off to prove himself an artist, he only has to tell the story his way, and the art takes care of itself."
-Orson Scott Card, Review of Serenity.