We're also introduced to River Tam (Summer Glau), the young psychic on whom the Alliance doctors are experimenting her surgeon brother Simon (Sean Maher), who rescues her from their clutches and the nameless Alliance operative sent to bring her back, a gentle-voiced assassin played with understated elegance by Chiwetel Ejiofor ( Dirty Pretty Things, Melinda and Melinda).
In the course of this triple gainer, we learn that humanity has relocated to a new star system with dozens of terraformed planets, ruled with quasi-benevolent tyranny by a government called the Alliance. Whedon manages it with a wicked bit of narrative jujitsu in which a schoolroom history lesson is violently subverted-it is, in fact, the nightmare of a girl undergoing psychological experimentation in a lab-and then that subversion is itself subverted.
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One of the challenges of bringing a series like "Firefly" to the big screen is introducing the show's history and main characters-there are nine of them-without loads of painful, expository dialogue. Even when Mal gets his Big Speech, it concludes on a note as roguish as it is resolute: "I aim to misbehave." (In fact, here it's the bad guy who's the latter.) It's a refreshing change from the hermetic, CGI airlessness and ponderous sanctimony that has characterized the last three Star Wars pics. Like the spaceship for which it is named (or, for that matter, Han Solo's Millennium Falcon), Serenity is pleasantly rough around the edges: In this universe, dust and debris are omnipresent, guns still fire old-fashioned bullets, and heroes are more apt to be petty crooks than selfless monks. By turns witty and harrowing, clever and weighty, it is closer in spirit to Star Wars than anything George Lucas has produced in a quarter century. Serenity, released on video last week, is terrific. That windfall, and Whedon's perseverance (he'd even kept several of his cast members employed with stints as villains on "Buffy" and "Angel"), persuaded Universal to bite on a $40-million feature-film adaptation.Īnd thank goodness. Calling themselves "browncoats"-after the defeated rebel forces in "Firefly"-they wrote letters and showed up at sci-fi conventions and, when finally given the opportunity, voted with their wallets: When a DVD set of the entire season was released in late 2003, it vastly outsold expectations.
But while the show's audience was small, it was committed. "Firefly" faced the opposite-and more difficult-challenge of persuading a studio to back a film based on a cancelled series. Unhappy with the way his dark comedy had been lightened during rewrites, he resurrected his heroine for the small screen.
"Buffy" itself was raised from the ashes of the eponymous movie, for which Whedon had written the screenplay. In their inscrutable wisdom, network executives decided to air the series out of sequence when it struggled to find an audience, they pulled the plug after eleven episodes.īut, as fans of "Buffy" and "Angel" know, Whedon has a penchant for bringing things back from the dead.
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(The movie is named for the vessel, which in turn was named for a battle Mal fought in-none of which could be accurately described as "serene.") Created for Fox, "Firefly" was Whedon's first big-network experience ("Buffy" and "Angel" aired on the WB and UPN), and it wasn't a happy one.
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(Tellingly, the latter is, if anything, more touching.) The two scenes form an apt pair of bookends because, to the extent this can ever be said of a major Hollywood release, Serenity is a product of love-that of fans of "Firefly," the cancelled TV series from which the film was spun off, of the cast, and most of all of Whedon himself.įollowing the successes of his cult hits "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel," in 2002 Whedon left the horror-comedy realm to launch "Firefly," a picaresque, Western-themed sci-fi series that followed the interplanetary wanderings of Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a former soldier in an unsuccessful interplanetary rebellion, and the crew of his ship, Serenity. S erenity, writer/director Joss Whedon's exuberant space opera, opens with one nod to the power of love and closes with another: the first concerns a brother's affection for his sister the second, a captain's for his spaceship.
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