re:mote voices

Title: Serenity
Cast: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Krumholtz
Director: Joss Whedon

After the end of the TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, creator Joss Whedon moved on to develop Firefly. Firefly being something of a space western, putting the wild west on the screen with the shape of frontier planets. Providing a Civil War in the shape of the rich central planet Alliance against the frontier planet Independents. At the core of the crew of the Firefly class ship Serenity; we have the captain and first mate, who fought on the side of the Independents - the losing side.

In the TV series they picked up a couple of passengers who turned out to be fugitives from the Alliance. This nudged the crew of Serenity into even more shadowy territory than they had already been engaged in. Taking legal shipping jobs where they could get them, and increasingly borderline and into outright illegal work. The TV series was cancelled after 14 episodes, with the film Serenity picking up sometime after.

It is not essential that the viewer should have seen Firefly before seeing Serenity. The film takes a good chunk at the start, establishing the characters involved. With this we are brought up to speed - River was a bright child, experimented on by the Alliance, until her doctor brother Simon broke her out and they went on the run. As well as being bright, and representing a large investment for the Alliance, it seems that during the time she was being experimented on River learned something she shouldn't have. So now a nameless, rankless, operative from the Alliance is on the trail of Serenity, and he is willing to kill, to kill everyone, to ensure the secret remains secret.

Serenity is easily one of the best science fiction films in years, with more depth and substance than most films that end up merely using SF as a backdrop to something much more mundane. While you can watch Serenity without having seen Firefly, it certainly helps to have seen what there is of the series. It helps to inform the idea of the environment events take place in, as well as the relationships between characters. Additionally, it is also evident that there has been a shift in budget and scale in moving Firefly to the cinema. From the cities we see on the various planets to the space battles that are bigger and more animated than those in the series.

Serenity is not perfect, there are aspects that will leave fans of the TV series frustrated. Questions left essentially unanswered, but given the job of delivering a film that works as a film and deals with the main issues of the Firefly/Serenity story this is a pretty successful outing. The big question that is left outstanding is what next? Will there be more TV or more films, or is Serenity the end of Firefly?

Regardless, Serenity is must see cinema - great dialogue, great action and great fun.