You can't take the sky from me

[ivyfic]

I love Joss Whedon.

I hate Joss Whedon.

I hate when he breaks my heart. And he does, over and over again. But it's only because he is willing to do that - and do it without remorse, hesitation or sap, in the most brutal way possible - that his stories are so good. I know he will not hold back from anything, there is no place his stories won't go, so I can't become detached from the story or the characters. It is so easy to get complacent in most other shows. Oh look, they're backed up against a wall - insurmountable odds, impossible enemy, blah blah blah. But in most shows, I know they're going to get out. There's no question. So it's boring. It's just flashy special effects. When Joss backs his characters up against a wall, you don't know that any of them are going to make it out, so you feel as desperate and afraid as they are. And this only works as long as he continues to be willing to do things the fans will hate.

Two sides of the same coin, but damn. Watching Joss shows I can see why most creators don't have the guts to pull what he pulls.

I love how everything in this movie was both surprising and inevitable. With each revelation you could hear the click of perfect continuity. That's why Whedon is a master at story-telling. Every answer he gives is perfectly satisfying; he never cheats the audience (though he tricks us all the time).

I will have more specific thoughts later. Now I just need to go cry over Wash.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I've seen very little of his work and I noticed that (one or two episodes of Buffy is about it for my prior Whedon-watching.) It definitely was deliberately written to make newbies realize that...the first time the characters are in real danger is right after Wash's death. At which point I'm thinking, "They may not all come out alive..." As opposed to every other sci-fi movie, where the only dying characters seem to be either tangential or the death is really frickin' obvious (Trinity in Matrix Rev., The Terminator in T2, etc.)

And that's why I'm now a convert :)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Everything about how Joss handles character death is brilliant. He gives the characters their moment to shine. He doesn't dwell on the death - it's clean and abrupt and brutal, and completely true to the world. And he uses the death not just to hit the audiences heartstrings but as an integral part of the arc of the story. Wash's death had to be there to establish jeopardy; if Wash hadn't died, when we went into the final showdown, it would've been another ho-hum action scene. But by putting the death first, the ensuing battle was horrifyingly realistic.

The man's a gorram genius.