I’ve never seen any of the Firefly TV show episodes, mostly because I’m just not that big on watching TV in general. The bits and pieces I’ve caught of the new Battlestar Galactica or Lost have really interested me, but I just don’t pay attention to time/days of the week to remember to watch either.
To be completely honest, I don’t even remember hearing about Firefly when it was being shown on Fox originally. That’s how much TV impinges on my awareness. But I did hear about the movie Serenity, which is supposedly the final few episodes of season 1 and all of season 2 wrapped up into a quick 2 hour movie. The trailer looked pretty interesting to me, so even though I was going in “cold” so to speak, I wanted to see this movie.
It opened this past Friday and I made my plans to see it at a matinee on Saturday afternoon (since the husband had refused to see it with me). I’m glad to took the time to go see it, since the movie is great! I felt more of a connection to these characters that I’d never heard of before than I did to anyone in the last few Star Wars movies. Those were techno-glitter masterpieces that had no soul; they were more about the advances in CGI than anything else, since the human story lines were weak.
But Serenity was more about the characters than anything else. Yeah, it’s set in the future with spaceships and space colonies, etc., but that’s not the focus of the story. Or at least it didn’t see like it was to me. I didn’t have a lot of trouble figuring out the different characters, and the amount of backstory provided helped somewhat, but it wasn’t vital to enjoying the movie at all.
The ending “morale” of love being the big unifier of the universe was a bit hokey, but mostly in how it was presented I guess. It didn’t bother me as a plot device so much as make me groan somewhat in an “sheesh!” sort of way. The whole “wild west meets space opera” setting was one I liked, mostly because it’s different. I’m seriously looking into getting the DVDs to watch the 14 episodes that were made, because I think I’ll really enjoy them as well. Probably for the same reason that I enjoyed Babylon 5 so much – the characters seem so much more realistic in their flawed existances than any others I’ve seen previously.
So I’d give Serenity 5 stars and would definitely like to see it again. Now if I could only get the husband to go with me…