A Star Wars-style space opera adventure with a bigger brain and greater wit. It gracefully rides that old cliche of a Western story disguised in a sci-fi setting and it eventually turns into a rollercoaster-paced zombie movie. You don’t even necessarily need to see the short-lived Firefly TV series that preceded this in 2002, as writer/director Joss Whedon sums up everything you need to know about it in Serenity’s fast-paced first fifteen minutes. The series never got the chance to get great, but the movie makes up for that. Whedon gives Firefly fans what Twin Peaks fans didn’t get: a feature film that focuses squarely on everything that was likable about the TV show and that ties up its most intriguing loose ends.
Like Star Wars, Serenity is about rebels—ragtag outsiders, losers in a war—who stand against a powerful empire. Unlike Star Wars, the empire here aren’t evil black hats. They’re The Alliance, the multi-planet government of the far future, and they’re no more good or evil than any other government in the present free world. Most people live peacefully under The Alliance, but, as with any superpower, horror festers beneath the surface. In Star Wars, the root tension is Luke Skywalker’s choice between a hyper-simplified good and evil; in Firefly/Serenity, it’s simply the characters’ struggle to survive on the fringes. They do it by taking jobs smuggling, thieving, and occasionally shuttling people to other planets. One of their boarders is a mysterious psychic girl (ultra-lithe ballerina Summer Glau) whom The Alliance makes ruthless efforts to capture.
Like many cult films, this one rose out of initial failure. The Firefly TV series was botched by the network, who didn’t care enough to even show the episodes in the correct order and it was quickly canceled. The DVD set became a hit though, due largely to Joss Whedon’s fan following earned from his Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel TV series. That, along with Whedon’s own determination to finish his story, got the movie made.