Serenity

LINKS
— Overview (multimedia)
— Overview Basic (dial up speed)
— Other Reviews
— Cast and Crew
— Photo Pages

I can’t think of a time I’d ever had so much fun at a movie.

Most science fiction puts a super-evolved men in situations which would freak out the average person. Man becomes either ever-more-intelligent but evil, or, a la Star Trek, more enlightened and unbelievably benign. Not so in this movie. And I think this is what appeals to me.

These are characters that are just like us. They respond in ways similar to how we might respond if given the same circumstances. For me this is why the story works. It is why the dialogue, with its guttural humor and street smart fee,l works. The story is indeed unbelievable: “90 pound girl beats up a whole room full of bad dudes� a couple of times. But boy is it cool when she does it. And as a movie in itself, it is most fun and lively.

More ingenious than other sci-fi stories is this movie's lack of aliens. There are no aliens! Just humans, who have been maligned, manipulated or abused by the various human systems which have been devised over the centuries. Everyone—the cannibalistic Reavers, our heroes in the stunningly crappy spaceship Serenity, and the government agents that come for them—is being used in one way or another. Maybe the lack of aliens was a financial decision, but I’m thinking not. The story works this way.

This movie portrays some serious themes but does them in such a light-hearted, believable way. The acting was fine and the suspense was genuine. The dialogue was clever, in that it was believable. But there are times when you laugh out loud at the sight gags, the one liners and the sarcasm. Maybe this is what made Serenity seem so much fun. I heard lines that any one of my friends might have said given the same scenarios. Don’t get me wrong; the lines are not always all that clichéd and predictable. It’s just that the hard-scrabble characters are portrayed winningly normal.

I’ve never seen the TV series called “Firefly� that this movie comes from. Serenity didn’t have to spend much time introducing characters or establish a premise for a story. I admit I was in a theatre full of hardened fans. My wife and I may have been the only two in the theatre that night that weren’t familiar with “Firefly�. So I won’t try my hand at critiquing the details of this film. But even for me, the movie seemed to be able to engage us without our knowing the score, so to speak.

Apparently this movie is breathlessly anticipated by the Firefly-a-phones. None that I had any contact with were disappointed. I think Serenity is a winner; a fun thrill-ride of a winner. Wow!