Leah and I went to see Serenity last Friday night, and wow, I was impressed. I’d been preparing Leah for the movie earlier in the week by making her watch the first few episodes - understand up front that my girlfriend is one of those people who doesn’t watch TV. Yes, you heard me right. In the entire time we’ve been together there have been about 3 TV shows that she has made an effort to watch. So when she commented how much she enjoyed watching the few episodes of Firefly, I was somewhat surprised.
I think the thing we both agreed upon was the fact that the setting (spaceships, futuristic scenery, et al) played second fiddle to the story, characters, atmosphere and back story the entire way throughout the film. From the cussin’ in Chinese to the western music and feel, right back to Mal asking Buddha for a pony, this a slick, well thought out production with characters that you actually like and want to follow. But most importantly, there were incredibly creepy, sick bad guys and kickass space battles. Oh the space battles… The story for Serenity is also much darker than that of any of the episodes in the Firefly series, so be ready for some pretty intense scenes.
Short review: this is quite possibly the best science fiction movie I’ve ever seen - I will definitely be going back to see it again. It gets about 17 extra stars for the simple fact that it had some fairly full-on, scary scenes, spaceships and western music and Leah still enjoyed it. If you haven’t seen the Firefly pilot episode – go see that first, but otherwise you really won’t regret seeing this movie!
You can watch the first 10 minutes of the movie here ? http://video.vividas.com/CDN1/3929_Serenity/web/index.html