Striking Gold on Attempt #2

Joss Whedon and Surprise Perfection

Firefly has attained a near-legendary status among science fiction aficionados. A lavishly-produced, snappily-written auteur science fiction series from the mind of Joss Whedon, the legendary screenwriter who brought you everything from Toy Story to Speed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that ran for a mere thirteen episodes.

The series was supposed to be the next headline science fiction franchise, hoping to rival the then-popular Star Trek and using many of the gimmicks popularized by Babylon 5 and its short-lived spin-off series Crusade.

Firefly was, tragically, cancelled before the first production batch fully aired. Nonetheless, it proved so popular that it generated a feature film (entitled Serenity) that tried (poorly) to wrap up the series.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled over the years documenting the ins and outs and ups and downs of the ill-fated series, but nowhere have I seen anyone else notice the show’s heritage.

Firefly wasn’t the first time Joss Whedon did a Space Western. It wasn’t even the first time he did a Space Western about a scrappy bunch of humans struggling against mind-boggling odds in a universe dominated by anti-human forces of oppression and genocide that were motivated by a fear of losing power and/or succumbing to moral corruption.

It was, in fact, the third.

Instinctive Genius

I’ve not been exactly complimentary to Whedon over the years—just about every time he came up as a subject on The Every Day Novelist, I voiced my disgust for his sensibility and the effect that sensibility had on a generation of young novelists and screenwriters.

But even my contempt has limits, and there are some real gems in Whedon’s oeuvre. In the 1990s he was a script doctor with a brilliant ear for dialogue, and he did some frankly spectacular rewrites on now-classic films ranging from the Keanu Reeves vehicle (pun intended) Speed to Twister to the first Toy Story film. He had an ear for the kind of repartee that’s rare in American screenwriting—more creative and quotable than Aaron Sorkin¹, his best work had moments that rivaled the screwball comedies of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He did fast-paced, move-countermove verbal fencing characterized by irony and wordplay with a sense of self-aware bathos that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in the Road To… pictures that Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made bucketloads of.

I should talk about that “bathos” sensibility for the moment.

You may have heard of “pathos.” It’s that sense of dramatic movement that instills great emotional investment.

“Bathos” is the opposite: rather than paying off dramatic tension, bathos undercuts built-up emotion with playfulness, comic relief, or tonally contrasting irony. When employed injudiciously, it cheapens drama and stakes (as it did at the ending of the otherwise spectacular Whedon effort The Cabin in the Woods), creates cutesiness and flippancy (as it did frequently in the TV show version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), or engenders a sense of world-weariness and emptiness (as in much of Whedon’s Marvel Cinematic Universe work).

But when it’s employed well, bathos is nothing short of artistic brilliance. The final moment of the following sequence from X-Men (another Whedon script doctoring job) is a perfect example bathos at its best:

But back when he was still becoming a name, Joss Whedon made it clear that he had Space Westerns on the brain.

While Firefly’s ham-fisted finale film reveals that the series probably wouldn’t have been as well remembered had it been allowed to have a full run, the bits of the series the public got to see were loaded with heart and charm.

Which was something a relief for those of us watching at the time, because Whedon’s first attempt to get something like Firefly to the screen was…not good.

The Resurrection That Wasn’t

When talking cinematic and mythic perfection, it’s hard to beat the original Alien trilogy. Starting off with a haunted-house-in-space film patterned closely on H.P. Lovecrafts At The Mountains of Madness (which also inspired John Carpenter’s The Thing²), Ridley Scott’s Alien was followed six year’s later by James Cameron’s Aliens, which managed a trick rare in sequels: expanding the story and world of the original without either rehashing or undercutting it. Cameron took Ripley’s classic final-girl character—a genre-tailored epitome of the mythic Maiden archetype—and grew her into a classic Mother archetype, mirrored by a dark Cthonic Mother alien.

Six years later, still, David Fincher was tapped to helm Alien 3, one of the most notoriously troubled productions in all of science fiction film history. But, thanks to Fincher’s tenacity and some rather genius screenwriting contributions by himself, David Twohy (of Pitch Black fame), and New Zealand’s indie film wunderkind Vincent Ward, the Alien saga’s story was again advanced to a startling and mythically perfect conclusion, with Ripley recast again, this time as the prophetic Crone whose unheeded wisdom nonetheless saves the future.

I’ve written in depth about this film and its heady theological themes in this article:

For Alien 3, star Sigourney Weaver had one important creative requirement: Ripley had to die. Weaver had become a respectable dramatic and comedic actress by this point, and didn’t want to be typecast as a sci-fi heroine…so Ripley had to go.

Ripley’s swan song made for bracing cinema, and her story concluded in a sublime and bleakly heroic fashion.

But the fans wanted more.

That “more” came in the form of Alien: Resurrection. Headed by French indie film genius Jean-Pierre Junet³, the script featured what Firefly fans might recognize as a familiar cast of characters:

A mercenary crew headed by a gruff and morally ambiguous captain. A burly meathead enforcer type who, while relatable and endearing, has ever-shifting loyalties and is definitely not to be trusted. A sexy and formidable female first officer. A sensitive ingenue tech wizardess with uncanny abilities and an unique understanding of the evils of the all-powerful government who was dealing in ethically abhorrent medical experiments for fun and profit, with the goal of making the government secure against its malcontents. Some fast-talking, ethically complex minor crew members who nonetheless display great resourcefulness and tragic hubris.

Sprinkled liberally with the expected Whedonesque repartee and bathos, the result is a train wreck of confused tones and un-scary horror played almost for laughs. To this day, Whedon claims that the film would’ve worked if it hadn’t been directed by a French auteur, but he’s kidding himself: the script is a pile of garbage, and the resulting film was so bad that it didn’t merely polarize its audience (as did Alien 3, with it’s bleak tone and complex themes), it completely killed the franchise for well over a decade.

Unlike the first two sequels, this film added nothing interesting to the universe or the thematic content, and consequently its cleverness, technical finesse, and first-rate acting performances (all of which are liberally represented) added up to a whole lot of nothing.

Which is a bit of a shame, because Whedon would very quickly prove that he could deliver a top-notch Space Western with plenty of heart…so long as he was kept on the right kind of creative leash.

The Cosmic Castaway

Return with me now, if you will, to the 1990s when a Second Golden Age of televised Science Fiction graced us all with its presence (the first such golden age happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s). Star Trek was then, like now, everywhere—but unlike now, people actually watched it (and by “people” I mean “almost everyone”). Babylon 5 was going head to head with Deep Space Nine, and a weeknight didn’t go by without an installment of The Sentinel, Nowhere Man (technically a techno-thriller, but it counted), Space: Above and Beyond, Andromeda, Earth 2, Sliders, or any of a dozen or two other series that came and went over the decade—and that’s to say nothing of the blockbusters that graced the cinema screens.

In the midst of this golden age, Fox Family developed a live action film about a scattershot human race trying to survive in the cosmos after the destruction of Earth—but despite securing an astonishing cast for the film⁴, the money couldn’t be raised to do a live-action film convincingly. So, Fox pivoted to its animation studio, and to Don Bluth, the genius animation director behind The Land Before Time, Anastasia, An American Tale, and The Secret of NiMH to bring the thing to the screen.

Bluth, in turn, recruited talented script doctor Joss Whedon to turn the solid storyline into a screenplay that sparkled.

Whedon delivered in grand style.

As Titan, A.E. opens, the Earth is destroyed by the villainous Drej who believe that humanity poses a threat to the stability and perfection of their empire. Our hero, Cale, is a mere boy at the time, but his father manages to get him onto an evacuation ship with a smuggled map that will allow Cale to eventually find the Titan, a titanic (pun intended) ship rumored to carry the secret to the salvation of humanity.

After kicking around refugee colonies for his young life, Cale makes for himself a life as an asteroid miner (working for near-slave wages). At the mining outpost, Cale meets Korso, a charismatic privateer who claims to have been a friend of his father’s. While he happily invites Korso to go suck a neutron star, Cale finds Korso’s comely first officer somewhat harder to resist. An attack by the Drej—who are hunting Cale—forces the issue, and Cale finds himself voyaging aboard Korso’s ship, which has a retrospectively reminiscent shape.

The Valkyrie is peopled with a familiar cast of archetypes (somewhat remixed):

A superior, snooty, English-accented intellectual, an older-yet-bumbling tech genius, a stroppy female engineer who can fix a ship’s engine by hitting it the right way, a beautiful and ethereal tactician, and a morally ambiguous captain with inscrutable motives. Cale rounds out the enterprise as the reluctant tag-along with loyalty issues who keeps trying to jump ship any time a better deal comes along.

This rag-tag crew, always barely half-a-step ahead of the Drej and its dreams of a perfectible cosmos free of humanity’s rough-n-tumble ways, follow the treasure map to the Titan, which, they discover, holds not just the key to humanity’s future, but its past. It is a terraforming machine—almost like Star Trek’s Genesis device—designed to take a high concentration of matter and turn it into a clone of Earth, complete with tens of thousands of cloned species to populate it. It’s a biosphere backup-and-restore technique, and, if the crew can manage to keep the Drej from destroying the new world the Titan creates, it would, in fact, give humanity a second home, a second chance, and the opportunity to live again.

Lightning in a Bottle

There is nothing in Titan A.E. that isn’t entirely engrossing and endearing. Treading perfectly the line between family film and Anime-style storytelling, it deals out enough wonder, beauty, pathos, heart, heartbreak, audacity, and humor to delight the heart of even the most jaded sci-fi fan—and, structured in the manner of a Heinlein Juvenile novel,⁵ it serves as a fantastic introduction to the 20th century’s most astonishing and enriching mythological genre.

Commissioned in 1997 on the heels of Alien: Resurrection’s artistic failure, Titan A.E. is, among all his work, unarguably Whedon’s best single screenplay (though the script for Toy Story is a very close second). It’s humorous without being twee, sarcastic without being flippant, melodramatic without resorting to idiot plot, and in the areas where Whedon is notoriously weak as a writer (such as in depicting the actual power machinations of politics, the functioning of institutions, and the delicacy of identity-tinged trauma) it remains general enough that none of his weaknesses show.

Whedon must have sensed that he had nailed his Space Western formula. He captured lightning-in-a-bottle with this film, and after its tragic box office failure (a result of bad cultural timing and a studio that had was decommissioned before the movie could be marketed), he apparently decided to try again to make magic with space cowboys.

While his first attempt at this genre brought us interesting characters like Johnner and Call from Alien: Resurrection, and his final attempt gave life to delightful personalities like Jane Cobb and Malcolm Reynolds and River Tam and the rest of the gang from Firefly, his effort to freight both of those incarnations with weightier themes never quite matched the unity of purpose and artistic execution, the bold emotional colors and high stakes, and the sheer confidence and brass on display when he was working hand-in-hand with one of the greatest casts and greatest directors in the history of American animation.

Sometimes artists get it right the first or second time. You might call it beginner’s luck. You might call it cosmic alignment. Whatever it was, this project is where Joss Whedon had the perfect amount of latitude for his talents to shine bright, without having so much he devolved into self-parody—and before he’d grown bored enough with his work that he was painting-by-numbers.

So if you want to see where it all snapped into focus, and delight in one of the finest examples of the Space Western genre ever put to film, carve out an hour and a half for Titan A.E.

And bring a friend. The final scene in this film is at its best when it’s shared between friends.

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1. Easily the most overrated screenwriter of his generation.

2. The Thing was, in turn, based on the Golden Age John W. Campbell short Who Goes There?, itself a sideways re-telling of At The Mountains of Madness.

3. Director of masterpieces such as Amélie, and The City of Lost Children.

4. Bill Pullman, Matt Damon, Nathan Lane, Jeanine Garroffalo, Drew Barrymore, Ron Pearlman, John Leguizamo, and Roger Jackson (among others).

5. A collection of twelve-plus-two novels written in the 1940s-1960s for a teenage audience that defined the territory of coming-of-age science fiction and fantasy. They have a distinct literary form and formula. I’ve written the definitive study of the corpus, entitled The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile. I’ve also written several novels in the tradition, the most prominent of which is Hadrian’s Flight.