Serenity

Obviously, I was particularly predisposed to like this movie, being that Joss Whedon wrote and directed it. That being said, I was extremely pleased when Serenity surprised me by being even better than I anticipated.

Based on Whedon’s short-lived television series, Firefly, Serenity is set 500 years in the future when humans have colonized and terraformed a vast portion of the galaxy, which is governed by the Central Alliance. A small crew of rebels—the last survivors of an army on the losing side of a war against the Alliance 10 years earlier—now tries to make their living smuggling and heisting in a beat-up old ship named Serenity. Since the crew survives by remaining under the Alliance’s radar, the ship serves as the perfect place for Simon Tam and his sister, River, to hide after Simon brazenly rescued her from Alliance captivity. River, it turns out, is a psychic who was being brainwashed and trained by the Alliance for use as a weapon. Unfortunately, as many higher-ups in the Alliance parliament had recently observed River’s progress, they freak out upon learning she has escaped as her psychic abilities would have allowed her to read their minds and discover dangerous state secrets. Unbeknownst to the crew of Serenity, a methodical and brutally efficient Alliance assassin, whose sole purpose is to recapture River no matter what the body count, is now pursuing them across the galaxy.

Serenity’s captain, Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), is at first reluctant to help his two new passengers, as his main concern is the safety of his crew; however, it quickly becomes evident to him that the Alliance is desperately trying to hide something far more sinister than their military intentions for River, and the crew must discover what it is in order to save their own lives. Unfortunately, their flight from the Alliance is fraught with Reavers—a savage, cannibalistic group of men who annihilate anyone and everyone for no clear purpose other than a love of extreme violence. There aren’t any aliens in the movie, however, so the Reavers become all the more frightening to the audience by their nature as human.

The first 20 minutes of the movie were slightly difficult to follow, and I found myself having to pay extremely close attention in order to keep up with the fast-moving plot. Whedon had to squeeze an entire season’s worth of plot and character development into the first half hour of the movie in order to fully tell what turned out to be an immensely creative and gripping story. There were only a handful of fight scenes in the film, but each was well choreographed inasmuch as I could actually differentiate between characters versus watching a jittery, grayish blur. The space fight toward the end of the film was also really exciting to watch, and I loved the realistic, non-CGI appearance of the ships as well as the battle itself. The dialogue was very well written and often funny, which worked especially well in the context of a space saga because it was so unexpected and added to the film’s overall appeal.

Watching this movie made me feel disappointed that Fox cancelled the television show, because I got the definite feeling that there was a lot left unsaid in the movie, with hints of more developments and surprises that could have been revealed. I highly, highly recommend this movie, even for people (like me) who never watched the television series, and I really wish there were more films out there like this one.