Serenity DVD Extras Review
While the first part of my Serenity DVD review focused on the movie itself, here I’m looking specifically at the DVD presentation of that movie. Before I cover the specifics of the extras, it’s worth noting that both the image and sound quality was extremely high on the pre-release copy that I received.
Serenity Deleted and Extended Scenes
There are quite a variety of extended and deleted scenes presented in the DVD extras. From the look of them it seems as though they were largely finished before being edited out of the final movie release. In most cases I’d say that the right decision was made as most added little that couldn’t be easily inferred from what we saw on screen.
The exceptions to this are probably the scenes including Book and some of the scenes with Inara, two characters who really didn’t get much screen time. Book in particular could have done with his extra scene to make the significance of his character’s later scenes much greater.
There are a couple of scenes that would have moved along the relationship between Mal and Inara in a much more significant way
Serenity Outtakes
Clearly Serenity had its share of bloopers and jokes. The DVD presents a good 6 minutes worth of them and they are probably only entertaining for a single viewing, but I did chuckle a few times.
Serenity Documentaries
More interesting was the Serenity mini-documentaries. Future History: The Story of Earth that Was talks about the setting of both Firefly and Serenity. Whedon has some interesting comments to make about why he chose the background he did. It’s a short piece, but well worth watching.
What’s In a Firefly focuses on special effects team and their work,looks at the technical difficulties of shooting various sequences in the movie and what they brought to it. The attention to detail shown here is quite remarkable. There are plenty of movies out there now that have gee whiz special effects, but the attempt to make things here realistic is what makes Serenity stand out.
Re-Lighting the Firefly covers the cancellation of Firefly and how Joss Whedon went about taking a “failed” tv series and turning it into a feature film. Mainly we get the feelings of the cast at the cancellation of the series and the chance they got to return to the Firefly universe with Serenity. Honestly there really isn’t much in the way of information in this one, though the footage of Whedon and co at Comicon was pretty cool.
Joss Whedon’s Introduction is a special introduction (duh!) that Joss Whedon recorded for the Serenity pre-screeners as part of the word of mouth marketing campaign which they mounted in order to get the word out on a much larger scale than their small marketing budget would normally allow. This one might well be the highlight of the extras for me.
All in all, not a bad DVD package but it would be nice to have had more in depth behind the scenes stuff. All the extras presented were worth at least one watch, but I’m not sure I’d bother to watch them a second time. It’s been reported that the UK version of the DVD will have at least one extra documentary on it and it’s a shame we couldn’t have got that for the US DVD as well.
Link: Universal Studios - Serenity DVD
Eoghann Irving is amongst other things the creator and Editor of Solar Flare. He has a life long interest in all forms of science fiction and fantasy and a pressing need to share this interest with anyone who will listen. Find out more at his personal website eoghann.com..
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