Take my love, take my ticket, show me to my seat in the theatre

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
A tale of a Firefly Class Ship
That started from Serentiy Valley
And took a cinema trip…

Firefly was cancelled and sent to the land of the DVD box set before Joss Whedon had a chance to tell his story. Thanks to Universal Pictures, Serenity has taken to the black once again.

I’m not a fan of movies based on Television shows, for the most part I find them to be dumbed down, formulaic bits of nostalgic fluff designed to separate me from my cash. Entertaining, but of little to no redeeming value. I think that it’s possible that Joss Whedon feels the same way, as Serenity was not at all a bit of nostalgic fluff.

The story picks up the characters several months from when we last saw them. Work has obviously been difficult for the Captain to find, but there has been no shortage of trouble. One small time heist quickly sets the crew onto a larger scale adventure then any episode of the show gave us before. Which is exactly what this movie should be centered around, a story too big for the small screen.

The look and feel of this cult show is alive and well, but the scale has changed. Firefly never got the budget that the show needed to really show us much of it’s universe. We saw a settlement here, a spaceship there, and even sometimes we saw a civlized world. Now we get to see broad shots of spaceships in flight, stark lighting contrasts, and many new sights. We even get to see character and plot risks taken by Whedon, things that I highly doubt that a network would have allowed him on a weekly series.

If you liked Firefly, you will enjoy this film. If you have not seen Firefly, fear not you will be able to follow this movie. While there is no contrived “explanation sequence” the characters dialogue at the beginning of the movie is enough to bring you up to speed. If you did not enjoy Firefly, you most likely won’t take the time to go and see this movie. I plan on seeing this movie in the theatres again, it was worth separating from my hard earned cash.

written September 28, 2005 after pre-screening