Serenity

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, SciFi/Fantasy
• Release Date: 2005-09-30 Nationwide
• Running Time: 119 min.
• 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
• Official Site: Serenity Official Site

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)