REVIEW: Serenity

No aliens, no warp drives, no mystical mumbo-jumbo or techno-babble plot devices... are you sure this is an SF flick? Hell, yeah!

Short review: Serenity is a cool, fun, good old-fashioned space adventure. It's what the next generation of Star Wars films should have been.

Longer review: It's based on a short-lived TV series called Firefly by Joss Whedon, AKA the guy who brought us Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but don't let that discourage you.

Serentiy hangs together so well as a film in its own right, it doesn't matter if you never saw the series that it is the culmination of. The characters may be obvious stock types: the gruff war-hero-gone-privateer captain, his hard-as-nails female offsider, the wacky pilot, the big tough guy, the spunky tech girl, the brooding doctor, the enigmatic child-like ultimate weapon... but their dialogue and interactions are funny, and they actually behave with *some* intelligence.

The story is set some five hundred years into our future, when humans as a race have conveniently migrated to another system with more plot-friendly planets and moons, and developed an enlightened peaceful civilisation fringed with an excitingly lawless frontier rim. Our gruff space captain spends his days figuring out how to feed his cranky crew and repair his clunker of a spaceship. What starts with a simple payroll robbery quickly escalates into a flight from the cannibalistic Reavers (who are so horrfying that civilised people refuse to believe they even exist), an ambush by a deadly government agent (terrific performance by Chiwitel Ejiofor), and the discovery of a secret that's killed millions. One heck of a ride.

Now, I'm no great fan of Whedon's work. Know next to nothing about it, except I thought Roseanne was a better than average sitcom for its time, but never got the big deal about Buffy.

But this is a fun little film. I enjoyed it enough to want to check out Firefly and find out more about the characters and their world, even though Serentiy is in essence the capstone to the series. And what a capstone. What a delightful surprise. It's not the greaatest piece of cinema around, and perhaps that's its biggest downside - that nothing really stands out. But it's like an evening out with friends - it's reassuringly familiar and it's entertaining - and you can't ask for a more enjoyable time that that.

Easily worth full price.