Serenity

Over the weekend I saw Serenity. For those that don't know, Serenity is based on the cancelled TV show Firefly. Firefly ran for about 13 episodes back in 2002 on Fox, before it was cancelled. I have never seen Firefly, but I do know a little of it's history. Firefly is a space western, and I don't really mean like Star Wars (though the influence is obvious). I mean western as in the ride horses and shoot six guns. They also fly around in space ships and have very advanced technology. Ask a "browncoat" and they'll tell you how it all fits together.

Fox didn't really know what to do with the show. Perhaps it was not really what they were expecting. The episodes aired out of order and Firefly never gained much of an audience at the time. The DVD box set is a different story. Apparently fans of Buffy and Angel: aka fans of Joss Whedon (2 shows I also have not seen) fans gave the show a chance and fell in love with it. The campaigning began and Serenity was born. -- I do know there were fans of the show when it aired and non Buffy/Angel fans who liked it too.

I like a good sci-fi movie so I decided to see Serenity. I wanted to see if the story would work, not knowing the character relationships or the back story. As a sci-fi action movie Serenity holds up pretty well. It's fast faced and fairly engaging. Enough back story is explained that I didn't have much trouble following the story. I didn't get a sense of the deep character relationships I had heard about from fans of the show, so I consider Serenity to be more of an action/sci-fi than anything else. True "browncoats" may be cursing my lack of perception, but I just didn't get much out of the characters themselves.

Grade B-