Serenity – The “Firefly” Movie
Review by Charles Miller
I was never much of a “Firefly” fan – I had a hard time getting around the mix of faster-than-light spaceship travel, handguns and steam locomotives. Even if these were colonies “on the edge of civilization,” I would have expected their level of technology to be similar to, or beyond, our own present time.
However, as I watched the show, I came to appreciate it based on the characters and their relationships. (And the eye-candy was OK too. GROWWWL ! To marry Jewel Staite, but to have Morena Baccarin on the side would be the ultimate “relationship”!!) As with any show that has promise and get cuts off prematurely, you always wonder just what the originator intended (example: Fox’s John Doe). Well, with the release of Serenity, we get to put together some of the more important story lines and have a resolution of the ideas.
Serenity had a well balanced blend of story, character involvement, and action. I think that Joss Whedon (creator/director) did an excellent job balancing the ‘need’ of the big screen to have action, and the requirement to complete the story that was his original vision. In fact, he did a better wrap-up job here than on his TV fantasy series’ Buffy and Angel because there were new storylines started with the last show of both series, but those are, unhappily, storylines that we will have to follow in comics and paperbacks rather than having the Joss-genius lead us to the conclusion of Buffy and Angel.
But, back to Serenity. Whedon put back together the crew, though several had gone their separate ways, in and outside the series storyline. A new villain has his eyes set on retrieving River Tam, the young girl the government had experimented on for years, but who had escaped some months earlier with help from her brother, Dr. Simon Tam. This new evil started using the no-holds-barred idea of torture, murder, and anything else he could think of to try to force the wayward crew members to give up the location of River, so our hero Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds comes to the rescue. However, some of our crew is killed anyway, and in getting involved Mal has found some secret that he decides to expose to all of civilization in hopes of both saving the girl and hurting the evil empire.
In the end we find out that, in an attempt to make the population docile and easy to control, the government has inadvertently created the dreaded “Reavers,” a group of insane humans that attack human outposts, eating some victims and converting others to their horrible way of life, and thus giving closure to one storyline by having River take on the entire invading horde as she tries to save the brother and friends who earlier had saved her.
However, there are other storylines that may never be resolved. Did River kill every Reaver? Will the villain chase after someone else, or is he eternally peaceful? And just who was Shepherd Book? The TV show made him to be more than he seemed when, in one episode, he was injured and taken to a government facility where he was treated like a former President, and then he and the crew were let go even though we know that the Captain was someone they would normally have thrown in jail for ‘general principals’. But in the movie Book was killed, so we will never know. HHMMMMMmmmmm.
Overall, this was a good movie, both for those devoted fans, and for those who never saw a TV episode.
[Discuss this review here.]
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