And since the event was so blogcentric, I thought I'd better post something here immediately. The dead-tree journalists would make you wait until tomorrow to hear their opinions of the movie. Can you afford to wait that long?

Clearly not. So: it was good. I had only seen an episode or two of Firefly coming into it and had developed a favorable impression, albeit not a strong one. This was a very conventional plot, and Matt seemed to think that its scope didn't really serve the franchise. The second half did feel a bit like Whedon's usual ensemble routine was being stretched over a story that was a little too big.

But hey, I guess that's what you do when you turn a TV show into a movie. Like I said, it was good. You should go see it.

Anyway, slight spoiler behind the cut. For more, Variety has a review here, which is worth reading if you've never read anything from Variety. Which apparently I hadn't. Is the whole paper like this? How do they keep angry citizens from burning the building down? How are they going to keep me from doing it?

But the evening's most important revelation: the Doom movie features shots from a first person perspective, complete with a gun in the foreground. It's just like the videogame! After a few minutes' reflection it's clear that this effect must be a lot harder to use effectively in a movie than it is in a preview, but still — this film could be marginally more interesting than I had imagined. It's still guaranteed to be terrible, of course. But for FPS junkies, it might be kind of fun.