What do you get when you mix a good old-fashioned western with a classic sci-fi adventure? While some of you may be scratching your heads with how to do that, director Joss Whedon answers with the best movie that anyone will see, ever: Serenity.
Okay, that may be a bit over the top, but this movie is amazing. Based on a short-lived TV series entitled Firefly, Serenity tells the story of a crew of space pirates living on the edge of society and the solar system, governed by the increasingly authoritarian “Alliance.” The crew, led by Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds, is a hodgepodge of veteran, cynical fighters stealing what they can and shooting what they have to. The movie is like a long episode of the TV show, circling through relationships between the characters while keeping a strong central plot of revealing what secret is being kept by a 17-year-old girl the government turned into a psychic assassin.
It may sound like a hokey plot now, but it does not come across that way in the movie. Everyone I know who has seen this movie thought it was outstanding. I know many people who have seen it multiple times already; my friends and I even half-joked about driving to another theater to see the next showing after seeing it the first time.
One thing the movie does well is its introduction of the setting and cast, even though it follows the TV series. It will not hurt to have seen the episodes, though, unless you are overly sensitive to quick rehashes of characters. It also manages to answer some of the questions that were left unanswered by the prematurely canceled show.
What it does even better is to create a storyline that the viewer is interested in, and characters that he or she cares about. From the first scene of the movie, it draws you right into the plot, and keeps you there until the last one.
The special effects, too, are marvelous, which is necessary for any good sci-fi movie. The spaceships and space battles look almost real, and are an improvement over the TV show’s graphics. Of course, that is to be expected given the larger budget.
What can be irritating throughout the movie is the number of one-liners. As you can tell from the trailer, the movie is chock-full of them. While they are all well-placed and always funny (“Dear Buddha, I would like a pony and a plastic rocket”), it can be slightly annoying to hear a character make a witty remark in some sort of strange vernacular every time something suspenseful (or even nothing at all) is happening. It is not, however, a serious detriment to the movie, and some would say it is one of the movie’s greatest assets.
Overall, this movie is for anyone. There are gunfights, love stories, space wars, and murders, along with tension, intrigue, suspense, and any other terms and situations you could come up with to describe a movie. They even show the kitchen sink in one scene. Do not miss this movie on the big screen.
