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Film review

Innovation at warp speed

The film cliches of space adventure are largely jettisoned in Serenity, replaced by unpredictable action and complex characters.

By PHIL DAVIS
Published September 29, 2005

Joss Whedon has made a career of raising the dead.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its supernatural spinoff Angel won the 41-year-old writer-director a cult following. His latest feat: resurrecting the failed cowboys-in-space TV series Firefly on the big screen.

The film, Serenity, shoots adrenaline into the heart of a genre plagued with wooden dialogue (recent Star Wars films) and ponderous opening sequences (all Star Trek movies). Whedon, whose writing earned an Oscar nod for Toy Story, delivers much-needed humor and surprising soul to a sci-fi movie.

It's 2507. Earth is used up. Space cannibals terrorize the skies. And they're only slightly scarier than the Universal Alliance's big government. Caught in between is the ragtag crew of the spaceship Serenity, who eke out a living robbing the rich.

Serenity also is home to an Alliance super weapon, a 17-year-old telepath (Summer Glau), whose brother (Sean Maher) sprang her from a government research facility and fled aboard the ship to the space equivalent of the sticks. The Alliance dispatches an assassin to take her out.

Mayhem ensues.

The story unfolds in a rich universe that skips the pointy-ears-makes-an-alien standard in favor of truer-to-life flawed human beings. Serenity's Capt. Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) struggles with his concept of decency in a harsh universe, pushing a man off a speeding hovercraft then shooting him dead to save him from a worse fate at the hands of the cannibals. The assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor) admits he doesn't fit into the perfect society he ruthlessly defends.

Instead of focusing on sweeping alien vistas, Whedon concentrates his visual energy on smoothly rendered spacecraft and stunning battle sequences.

Serenity is burdened with a few standard-issue sci-fi cliches: the hero dangling over an impossible precipice, the futuristic car chase equivalent and spacecraft dodging and weaving past swirling obstacles at eyeball-straining speeds.

But Whedon's sharp, funny dialogue keeps Serenity's plot moving. It is essentially a bigger-budget Firefly episode. The players are the same, but with better hair. It remains to be seen how well that will play with moviegoers outside Whedon's formidable fan base.

That Serenity made it to the screen at all is a testament to those fans. They howled at Firefly's cancellation and, most important, spent money (on DVDs and ads) until Universal Pictures gave a green light to Whedon's rebels without a pause sci-fi thriller.

"Sure as I know anything," Reynolds tells his crew, "I know this. I aim to misbehave." And if Whedon has taught us anything, it's that following the rules is no fun at all.

Grade: B+

Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, David Krumholtz and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Screenplay: Joss Whedon

Rating: PG-13, intense violence and some sexual references

Running time: 119 min.

[Last modified September 28, 2005, 10:06:07]