Minneapolis Serenity

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Genre: Action/Adventure, SciFi/Fantasy
Release Date: 09/30/2005
Running Time: 119 mins
Director: Joss Whedon
Cast: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Sean Maher, Jewel Staite, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, David Boreanaz
Producer: Barry Mendel
Writer: Joss Whedon
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Offical Site: Click Here
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Box Office

2012, 65.2 mil, 65.2 mil
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Michael Jackson's This Is It, 5.1 mil, 67.2 mil
The Fourth Kind, 4.6 mil, 20.4 mil
Couples Retreat, 4.2 mil, 102.0 mil
Paranormal Activity, 4.0 mil, 103.7 mil
Law Abiding Citizen, 3.8 mil, 67.2 mil
The Box, 3.2 mil, 13.2 mil

Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Serenity

Resurrection devices don't exist in movies--only in real life, where Hollywood freakonomics can give a network-TV casualty like Joss Whedon's space western Firefly a big-screen comeback via the elixir of DVD sales. Yet even with the blood-oath loyalty of Whedon's fans, the best Universal could come up with is a Sci-Fi Channel budget and a chintzy two-hour running time. The result often seems rushed and cramped, especially in early scenes that cram a series worth of exposition into narrative shorthand. But more money might have scuttled the show's scrappy strengths: a cast of fresh unknowns, a plausible low-tech look, and the plain-dirt grounding of ambitious ideas in humble genre origins. The movie joins the scurvy crew of the transport ship Serenity in mid-flight, as hard-bitten captain Mal (Nathan Fillion, a Han Solo with Dudley Do-Right's mug) shelters the ass-kicking goth-chick telepath River (Summer Glau) from the evil Alliance and its plot to dose the unruly universe with weapons-grade Zoloft. Caught between the rhymed threats of hellbent war-crazed "reavers" and cold-blooded hyper-evangelical "believers" (aren't we all these days?), the Serenity crew tries to evade the Alliance's suavely confident assassin, who stalks the fleet with Zen-like calm. (Chiwetel Ejiofor plays him wittily as a riff on Orson Welles's Harry Lime from The Third Man; the gambit proves unexpectedly resonant when Whedon turns the character into Joseph Cotten's deluded naïf.) Though shot by Clint Eastwood's longtime cinematographer Jack N. Green, the movie doesn't have a style to match the distinctive oddity of Whedon's dialogue, a deep-space Old West patois that could pass for David Milch translating Klingon. But if Whedon the writer is more adept at dreaming up worlds--and spinning pop mythologies out of junkshop parts--than Whedon the director, the movie creates a quirky, lovingly imagined world nonetheless. Think of Whedon's sci-fi oater as the Star Wars cantina of post-boomer cinema history: a place where Glau's post-prom Carrie (or Buffy the Vampire Slayer) rubs shoulders with Gina Torres's James Cameron-esque tough gal and Adam Baldwin's scuzzy Peckinpah outlaw. For everyone dismayed by reports of a key character's death, I have seven words of comfort: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. (Jim Ridley) — Jim Ridley