Serenity (2005)

Serenity, the feature film story inspired by the Firefly television series (see blog below) is an effective, albeit much darker story. The entire cast returns and writer/director and series creator Joss Whedon does a good job of quickly introducing the characters and relationships for those who had not seen the short-lived series.

The story revolves around the Alliance (i.e., powers that be) trying to capture River, who's hiding out on Serenity with her brother and who was once used as a human experiment by the Alliance to foster her psychic abilities. The Serenity ship and crew, captained by Malcolm Reynolds, does their best to avoid the authorities and other baddies while saving their own necks. The story moves with relative speed and the $40 million dollar budget shows up on screen with excellent special effects and action sequences.

What is missing from this film is humor and charm, two components that made the television series so effective. As the character Captain Reynolds goes, so goes the rest of the film. He begins and maintains and edge and anger that eliminates the sarcastic wit that made him so endearing on the show. It's as if we walked onto a ship where everyone's been on each other's nerves for the last six weeks. On the television show, the crew seemed more close knit, where you accept everyone's idiosyncrasies because they're considered family. In the film, they treat each other more like co-workers.

In the end, film is a different medium than television and the story reflects that. It appears that Whedon was going to take this one last shot and Hollywood money to encapsulate numerous seasons of the television storyline into one, two-hour film. In order to do so, you have to strip away the excess and get down to business. Unfortunately, in that excess is part of the elements that generated such a following of the Firefly series.

Don't get me wrong, Serenity is still a good film, but if you want to see what all of the talk is about in terms of the Firefly series, this film does not capture it. You'll need to rent or buy the DVDs of the original television episodes and indulge in some high-quality television viewing.