Movie Review : Serenity (2019)

* this review contains spoilers *

A bad movie is usually bad for one of the two following reasons: 1) it is ineptly produced. Low budget for its ambitions, lack of technical moviemaking skills, etc. or 2) it is inept at telling a compelling story. That makes Steven Knight’s Serenity an unconventional bad movie, because it sucks for neither of these reasons. In fact, Serenity is the worst movie I’ve ever seen that was almost great and I’ll forever have a morbid fascination for it. It’s an odd one.

Serenity tells the story of an intense fisherman named Baker Dill (the immortal Matthew McConaughey) who is not very good at making money from his profession, because he’s too obsessed with catching a giant tuna fish. One day, Dill’s ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) walks back into his life and casually offers him ten million dollars to kill her new and extremely violent husband (Jason Clarke). A man who fucking hates Dill’ thirteen years old computer wiz son.

If this synopsis sounds profoundly stupid, it’s because it is. But… it is sort of stupid by design? This is where Serenity becomes somewhat of a mindfuck. After suffering through an hour of a hardboiled episode of Days of Our Lives, Steven Knight hits you with the big plot twist: Baker Dill is not real. He is a character living inside a simulation created by his son Patrick. I know, this plot twist is equally stupid. But this is where Serenity starts being interesting.

So, if the first hour of Serenity was laughably bad, it is because it was technically written by a heartbroken teenage boy. Eh, I know: not a good excuse to put you through all that. Starting from there, Serenity turns into a somewhat ballsy, pseudo-philosophical commentary about God and starts playing around with interesting ideas. Notably it intertwines the concept of fate and programming through Baker’s obsession with that stupid-ass tuna fish.

My favorite part of Serenity is when Baker starts quizzing non-playing characters in the simulation about the nature of their reality. They all eventually revert to their programmed lines, but they are impossible to differentiate from the platitude people tell themselves in order to cope with the meaninglessness of existence. The limitations of these obvious programmed characters echo the limitations of our ontological quest for meaning.

That shit made me want to apologize to any Skyrim character I’ve ever made fun of.

So what did Serenity do wrong, exactly? I believe the film was not honest enough about the virtual reality plot twist. It is neither an original or clever idea. It’s been done over and over again. If Serenity had been more transparent about it, it could’ve hit with the ontological goodness right off the bat and Matthew McConaughey would’ve knocked these themes out of the park, like he did in True Detective. Patrick needed to be a character and not just a plot device.

So, Serenity was unsuccessful because it tried to be more clever than it actually was. It bet the house on a plot twist it didn’t even need in order to be interesting. But in the wreckage of this film lies a more interesting one that hasn’t been made yet. Someday, someone will watch Serenity and will be inspired to make a better version of it. It’s a bad movie, but it’s a bad movie with a really, really interesting thirty minutes about two-thirds into it.

4.4/10