Serenity

Written at the time of the film's release...

Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) Enjoyable, if violent, genre-bendin' space-farin' Western spinning off from the one season wonder "Firefly." But Serenity (that's the name of the ship) passes the crucial test of movies that make the leap from small to big screen—you don't need to have seen the series to "get" the concept and enjoy the film (probably because the concepts are so familiar). Sharply written and directed by series creator Whedon, and played by the regular cast, it boasts an intensely underplaying Chiwetel Ejiofor as a government operative who ritualistically silences outliers.

And outliers are exactly what the crew of the "Firefly"-class "Serenity" is comprised of; pirates, soldiers of fortune, outlaws, the scrappy veterans of the Galaxy's last civil war, who bounce from system to system dodging government entanglements and making a living by lying, cheating and stealing. Plus, they do good while doing bad.

The conceit of staging a Western in the infinitely wide-open spaces isn't new. "Star Trek" was sold to NBC as being "Wagon Train to the Stars"--not exactly true, but the suits got the point, "Star Wars" used Han Solo as a space cowboy ala Hondo (which Chewbacca as his faithful dog...or horse), and the "Wars" rip-off Battle Beyond the Stars was "The Magnificent 7 in Space." There isn't that much of a light-speed leap from horse-opera to space-opera. After all, the umbrella-genres of westerns and sci-fi can encompass all sorts of story-themes from Shakespeare to cleverly disguised issues of the day.

The plot for Serenity back-tracks a bit* to catch movie-goers up with the story of fugitives River Tam (Summer Glau) and her doctor-brother Simon (Sean Maher) and then resolves the conflicts their paid passage aboard Captain Mal Reynolds' (Nathan Fillion) ship of fools has created, and turns River from loose cannon on deck to a reliable asset. Along the way the crew stumbles on a gone-wrong planet-wide government experiment being kept under wraps. And since they're being pursued by "the op," anyway, they "aim to misbehave."

The characters are broadly drawn, easily discerned, and everyone is given significant plot-time (with the exception of Morena Baccarin's space-zen-hooker Inara, whose role was edited for time). Though not a success at the box office, it did spur interest in the series and kicked its box-set collection into hyper-drive. Though Whedon constantly discounts it, the crew of "Serenity" may fly again.

2020 aside: I'd still like to see it, as the film inspired a deep-dive into the TV series for me, although getting Fillion back would be a task—not to mention writer-director Whedon. And, given how everybody's aged a bit, it's going to have to surmount the "Star Trek movie-issue" of providing a sufficient reason for everybody getting back together, assuming that characters have gone separate ways and forged bonds elsewhere. Still, it was Whedon working on something he WANTED to work on and that usually entails his best work. I think a lot of it has to do with that I became a fan after it died...All that there was had already been done. And it was finite.

Maybe it's best to move on. 

* In a film-starting series of illusions that nest together like Matryoshka dolls.