Review: Serenity

by Joshua Sharf

I am not a browncoat. Not even a digital one.

And yet Wednesday night, at a screening of the upcoming movie Serenity, I found myself surrounded by them.

Browncoats are the fans of a science fiction series with an even shorter life than the Star Trek cartoon series: Firefly. The screening was the tail end of an innovative marketing campaign, designed to spread word-of-mouth among fans, and to take advantage of their feedback.

Judging both by the results, and the enthusiasm of the fans, I'd say they've succeeded. One high-schooler I spoke with claimed to have seen the film four times. "We got to meet some of the actors, too. Dorks. We're just total dorks," he said, as only one confidently ‘bedorked’ can.

Firefly was canceled after 11 episodes - currently being rerun on the SciFi Channel - but the sharp dialogue and down-to-earth characters earned the show the dreaded cult following. The crewmembers on Captain Malcom Reynolds's Serenity are losers in a solar civil war, reduced to being outlaws to make ends meet. They're also harboring a psychic, trained to be a lethal fighting weapon (being a psychic would help in, say, anticipating your adversary's next move). The winners in the civil war, the Alliance, have dispatched a British-accented assassin to track down and kill the psychic before she can be turned against the Alliance.

The producers are smart enough to understand that they'll need to expand their audience beyond the fan base of the half-season TV series, all of which is explained in a pre-credits 15-minute sequence. All I can say is watch those transitions.

The film itself follows Serenity as it fights to survive while unraveling a terrible secret about the Alliance. That secret involves yet another party, not a side in the civil war, the "Reevers," monsters who could be Orcs Release 7.0, but who, in fact, are human.

Serenity works on two levels: as an ensemble piece about Serenity and its insubordinate crew, and about the nature of the perfectibility of man. Like most one-part ensemble pieces, there's no time for more than a facet or two of each character. But since stories about leadership are more interesting than stories about followers, we get to see more of Reynolds' wrinkles than the other characters.

While the crew acts as voices for the conflicting values that Reynolds must balance, it's not as though they don't have personalities. They're all likeable, and the Browncoats' affection for them is palpable. The witty, smart dialogue doesn't reduce them all to smart-alecks, but…

As for the perfectibility of man, the Alliance and its assassin seek "a universe without sin," while Reynolds is bored by sermons and embraces human flaws. But those who might mistake the Alliance for a caricature of American religious conservatives should be reminded that traditional conservatism takes man's flaws for granted. It's modern liberalism that's driven by the belief in infinite human perfectibility. (See Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions for a further explanation of this point.)

The creators have simplified matters considerably by not including aliens. The solar system in question was settled by colonists from Earth, and evidently didn't harbor indigenous intelligent life. Good. While some might lament the loss of stand-ins for "diversity," there's not much room for Vulcans in a story about fallen man.

As always with space science fiction, the special effects count for a lot. I only found myself shaking my head twice, once when the gas from the ship clearly clumped up as though it were encountering resistance in the vacuum, and another where the Serenity's hard landing reminded me more of a Dr. Who episode than a big-budget flick.

But these moments stood out only because the crew has gone to great lengths to get other details right. The ship's opening sequence for instance, features an atmospheric re-entry that actually remembers that there's heat and friction involved.

In fact, the movie's whole look smacks of realism. Whedon and his group have mastered the futuristic-grunge look, the one that started with Blade Runner and seen most recently in Minority Report - the one where dirt and disorder coexist nicely with nifty new technology. In one scene, the captain casually tosses a paper-thin video capture onto his chaotic desk. And believe me, I know chaotic desks.

And that's the real strength of Serenity, the reason that with any justice, it should run for weeks at the top of the box office. It's irreverent without being self-parody. It's deep science fiction that doesn't take itself too seriously, the way The Incredibles did for superhero cartoons.

Now, excuse me while I check the listings for the Firefly marathon.

Taking his craft back to space.

Out-of-this-world fan support for a futuristic TV show helps Joss Whedon resurrect it as a movie.

by Maria Elena Fernandez

It's fitting, and sweetly vengeful, that a television show born of a writer's zeal for frontier life is now itself conquering new borders.

"Serenity," the new incarnation of the futuristic space western "Firefly," which briefly aired in 2002 on Fox, will premiere as a Universal Pictures feature on Sept. 30 — with the TV cast intact. So how has director-writer Joss Whedon been able to take his failed television series from the small screen to the big?

That's simple, says Whedon, also the creator of the cult hits "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel."

"Probably more than any project that I can think of, the fans made their voices heard," Whedon said. "For a major motion picture, that's a little bit unprecedented. I give them giant props because they have earned them."

After Fox yanked the show off its schedule, the loyal fans launched websites and bought more than a million copies of the DVD (which featured extra episodes). It was enough to convince Universal in 2004 that the story of the ragtag crew of the starship Serenity was worth telling.

"I always thought the show would catch on slowly, and it's done exactly that," Whedon said.

The crew of mercenaries and misfits aboard Serenity is led by Capt. Mal (Nathan Fillion), who has ended up on the wrong side of a galactic civil war against ominous forces, known as the Alliance.

Whedon's challenge was to take his episodic tale of people living aboard a transport ship 500 years in the future and flesh it out into a two-hour film that would satisfy the devoted as well as audiences who never saw his TV series.

"Luckily, I did have an overreaching arc, a grand conspiratorial story of adventure that they were going to get caught up in," Whedon said. "The basis of the movie was 'Let's take the most mundane people in the universe and let's stick them in a truly epic situation and see how they react.' "

Whedon conceived the pilot for "Firefly" after he finished reading "The Killer Angels," an account of the Battle of Gettysburg, one night in London when he was jet-lagged.

"Reading that kind of book just flipped the switch and made me realize that I have a deep love for this particular frontier story," he said. "When you're dealing with science fiction, if it has any kind of history in it, everything is interesting and everything is useful. Frontier stories are always so unique and secluded and harsh and interesting and I just thought that's what it must be like to be aboard a spaceship, when you're trying to make a living and you're living hand to mouth flying between planets."

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