Serenity (2005)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2005
	Director: Joss Whedon (The Avengers: Assemble)
	Actors: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk (Dodgeballs), Summer Glau (The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV-series)
	Country: USA
	Genre: SF, Adventure, Western
	Conditions of visioning: 25.08.14, 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. One member of his crew River (Glau) escaped from a governement secret lab where she was experimented on. They would do anything to get her back.
Review: I understood the frustration of the fans of the TV-series Firefly when it was cancelled: they started to get attached to the characters and wanted to know more about the Universe created by Joss Whedon. Also probably there were not many good SF series at that time (it was before Battlestar Galactica) and something different from all Star Trek spin-offs was refreshing. Even if it doesn't bring Firefly back to life (on the contrary it even seals the tomb), Serenity the movie brings some kind of closure to it, and I am glad I could watch it back to back with the series. It was written so that it can be watched independently from the series, but then it probably looks like an average space opera (which are too rare to be ignored anyway as I always say). You definitely appreciate if better if you know the characters and are already attached to them when the movie starts. Serenity feels like a 2-hour long episode of the series but looks much better thanks to the much larger budget: there are many more actors on screen, the sets are bigger and the special effects (mostly spaceship, shown at their best during an impressive space battle) good-looking, even if still poor for the 2005 standards (that's the year of Star Wars III). Joss Whedon cleverly adapted the story to give the viewer the satisfaction of witnessing part of the larger story plot, and in a way that is out of the stand-alone TV-series format, i.e. that at the end of each episode nothing has changed, so that you can watch them in any order. For example in such format you cannot have one of your main characters die. All in all the movie was a pleasant experience. I forgot to mention that Serenity is the name of the ship is which the crew lives (also the name of the last battle fought by the captain in war) while Firefly is its model. Cool ship design by the way.
Rating: 6 /10