Serenity: A Movie Review

Having recently seen the cult sci-fi series Firefly, I couldn't help but feel a little excited about seeing "Serenity". Continuing the plot of the orginal film, Serenity feels more like a great three episode story arc then an actual film. Anyone who has seen the majority of the "Star Trek" flicks without any biasis knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Besides a few surprisingly dramatic moments, the film as a whole is as flat as a pancake. You've got the typical sci-fi plot invovling human superweapons and evil empires, while throwing in a bit of Wild West salt in for good measure. That in and of itself isn't a bad thing, since the orginal Star Wars films were about as generic storywise as you could get, but the film itself has always been a breath of fresh-air for sci-fi fans. Serenity in comparison, isn't even worth a second glance.

One of the major issues I had with the movie was that it didn't set itself apart from its source matieral. When you're making a film continuation, drawing upon the series isn't a bad thing.. but in this particular case it keeps the film from feeling worthy of the big screen. It feels as if Joss Whedon (the writer and director of the film and series) took one of his Firefly scripts and just added a few extra fight scenes to pull the entire thing together.

For anyone interested, here's the trailer for the film. Worth seeing if you're sci-fi fan or a fan of the show, don't get me wrong. Just not a particularly good movie.

Oh! And let's kill off two characters that everyone loves and hardly have any emotinal reaction from the rest of the crew. I can understand killing people off to raise the stakes, but in Serenity's case, they don't dwell upon the deaths long enough to leave an emotinal impact. It kinda goes like this: "He's dead, we're sad, we're over it." It's like X-Men 3 all over again!

This film is riddled with plot holes. Points where you wonder if the story had been created by a bunch of lucky fan-fiction writers. The plot itself isn't bad, wit a few suddle tweaks to keep the movie fresh. But when you start to look at the events from a logical standpoint, the entire thing starts to fall apart. Why wouldn't the Alliance just nuke the planet if it was that much of a threat to their order (the geeks know what I'm talking about).

The movie wasn't all bad. Infact, I found myself fairly entertained for the two hours the film lasted. It has a cool style, some nice one liners, and a likeable cast. But it could have been so much more then it was. There was a few scenes I thought were quite neat, such as the spaceship battle bewteen Serenity and a horde of Alliance ships. But this isn't anything you haven't seen before in deeper more emotinally rewarding sci-fi pictures. As a Firefly fan, I was dissapointed. Which too bad, because the only people who will enjoy this film are those who have already experienced the TV show. If you haven't.. good luck trying to figure out all of the different relationships and plot points. This is a film for the fans only! And more then likely, they will love it. Does that make it a good movie? No.

Rating: C+