Firefly (2002)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2002
	Creator: Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV-series)
	Actors: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk (Dodgeballs), Summer Glau (The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV-series), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men, 2012)
	Country: USA
	Genre: SF, Adventure, Western
	Conditions of visioning: August 2014, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: Mal (Fillon) runs a group of bandits, looking for jobs from planet to planet, in a Universe controlled by the Alliance.
Review: I had heard several times about the cursed TV-series by Joss Whedon, in particular since Sheldon Cooper is a big fan in The Big Bang Theory. It was cancelled after only half a season (14 episodes) but generated a community of hard-core fans that did everything they could to keep the series alive, even years after, and who took no small part in the decision to make a movie in 2005. A documentary on the first Blu-ray in the set helps understanding the pressure the creators had to sustain because the series could be canceled any minute. My first impression was that the digital Special Effects look cheap but that's because the series is twelve years old. It actually won awards back then for those effects. The pilot introduces the characters as in all series, and then the series immediately settles to a slow pace, showing different worlds and challenges at each episode. Then we start to feel the urge to tell better and better stories to prevent the series from cancellation, with more and more allusions to a larger story, recurrent enemies, culminating with the best episode for me: Out of Gas, that includes flashbacks of when the crew members first met. Throughout the season the quality varies, I found the episode The Message (the return of an old friend) poorer, while Objects in Space displays a very special atmosphere thanks to the character of Early, and Ariel interestingly shows the inner planets for a change. There may be some variations in quality, but it is clear to be that the series shows a great potential and shouldn't have been cancelled. The Universe created by Whedon is so rich in ideas... About the atmosphere of the series: it is of course Science Fiction, but actually more Western. Some episodes are even entirely Western (Safe, Shinding, Jaynestown) and one reminded me of an A-team episode (Heart of Gold). Indeed the idea is that the settlers in most planets live this kind of life: work the land, ride horses, try to survive, shoot guns and don't trust strangers. This atmosphere makes the series really special, and I was surprised to realize that it influenced my favorite video game Borderlands (in particular the second one) in the atmosphere, colors, music (a lot) and one detail: the design of the maglev train  shown in the episode The Train Job. The Western and space bounty hunter atmosphere is something that existed already in the Cowboy Bebop Japanese animated series (1998) but Joss Whedon gave it a new angle in a live action series, which was quite a challenge. An example of the details that make people like the series: it is supposed to take place a few years after the end of a war between the Alliance and the only other remaining block from the Earth-that-was: the Chinese one. So all characters speak Chinese, and do use this language when they have to curse, which made it OK to be shown on American TV. A few other curses in English are modified ('gorram'), preceding of the 'frak' of Battlestar Galactica. Right after the series I watched the movie made three years after under the pressure of the fans: Serenity.
Rating: 6 /10