There’s something fishy about this film
Serenity has a plot twist that’s more of a tangle and has this movie barely staying afloat
This article not only contains plot spoilers for the new film Serenity, it’s proud of it.
Future lists of the worst movie plot twists of all time will have to include the bonkers revelation in writer/director Steven Knight’s Serenity, which catches a shark and then jumps it.
Serenity tells the story of Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), who runs a charter fishing boat from an island called Plymouth. That sounds like it should be off the coast of New England, but looks like it’s off the coast of Florida, with tropical weather, fields of sugar cane and ready access to rum.
Baker spends most of his time trying to catch a tuna he calls Justice. When he runs out of money, he sleeps with Constance (Diane Lane), who pays him for the pleasure. And then one day his ex-girlfriend Karen (Anne Hathaway) shows up and asks if he’ll kill her abusive husband (Jason Clarke). She can pay too: $10 million.
The twist, and it’s a howler, comes about an hour in, when we learn that “Plymouth” is actually a computer game created by Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), Karen and Baker’s son. The real Baker died in the Iraq War. The digital Baker is Patrick’s way of toying with the idea of killing his abusive stepdad, which (additional spoiler alert?) he eventually does.
Critics have been up in arms for two reasons. The biggest is that the twist is too far out, and raises questions both benign (like, did a teenager just create a self-aware A.I. on his laptop?) and icky — like, did he code scenes of his dad having sex with Constance and, later, Karen? Granted, they’re never too explicit, but even so. And what about McConaughey’s many barebutt scenes?
The second reason, closely related, is that Serenity doesn’t play by the rules. It sets itself up as a rather cheesy neo-noir, but then changes gears midway. Actually, it hauls out the entire engine block and changes that.
Knight admits it: “Whenever I direct something, I set myself a challenge,” says the man who made Locke, a movie set entirely in a car. “With Serenity, I wanted to set up a conventional situation and then — at the most inconvenient moment for the narrative — rip everything away. Whatever stakes you’ve set, they’re not the stakes at all. So that was the challenge I set for myself in the script.”
Mission accomplished? Critic Christy Lemire on rogerebert.com describes the sensation from the seats: “He partially pulls the rug out from underneath us about halfway through, then yanks the whole thing out by the end, then waves the rug around in the air as if to joyfully shout : ‘Ha! This is the rug you were standing on! See? It’s not underneath you anymore!’” She gave the movie one star.
The odd thing about the sudden surprise in movies is that it only works if it’s not too surprising. It’s OK for Keanu Reeves to discover during The Matrix that his whole universe is a computer simulation, because we’ve been leading up to it. It would not be cool if he learned the same thing in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Some of the great twist endings in movies — think The Sixth Sense, Planet of the Apes, Inception or The Usual Suspects — work because the movie sets up a universe where the twist is inherently possible, and/or drops some clues along the way.
Serenity does nothing to make it seem possible, and drops few clues. Baker says at one point that he “never really came home” from the war. His boat is named Serenity. The tuna he seeks is Justice. And literally everyone on Plymouth tells him the tuna is only in his mind. Oh, and Plymouth is the street where Patrick lives. If you had no concept of metaphors you might even now be saying: “I got it right away — piece of cake!” Except you wouldn’t say that because you wouldn’t know how metaphors work.
Serenity placed eighth at the box office in its opening weekend, with $4.4 million in ticket sales and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 21 per cent from critics and 29 per cent from the crowds. References to 1981’s Body Heat were rife but not kind. “Imagine Body Heat being consumed by The Truman Show,” Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone went further: “Serenity plays like the bastard child of Body Heat and The Sixth Sense, minus the heat and the sense.”
And while professional critics generally know enough not to give away big twists in their reviews, some couldn’t help themselves with Serenity. Rex Reed in the Observer just up and gives away the ending as though unaware it’s a twist at all. (The website has added a “spoiler alert” since the first time I read it.) And writing in The Wrap, critic William Bibbiani notes: “What follows might be considered SPOILERS to some, so proceed with caution.” But how can a reader unaware of the twist follow that advice? Read with one eye closed?
But perhaps Serenity is best watched — if at all, and that’s a big if — with full knowledge aforethought. One can then ponder the big questions. Like: Is the film’s risible dialogue evidence of a poorly written screenplay, or just a screenplay trying to illustrate a poorly written video game? And: When Patrick meets up with his dad in the game at the end, is that the kid losing his last finger-hold on reality, or just the movie?
Forget the spoiler alerts: Serenity should come with a bad taste warning.