Did you miss Joss Whedon’s Firefly when it was on TV? Honestly, who didn’t? The show was cancelled about halfway through the season, and I have yet to find anyone who actually watched it on Fox. Fortunately, the DVD sales were incredibly high, so the movie Serenity is coming out this September.
Malcolm Reynolds (actor Nathan Fillion, the Buffy villian Caleb) is a ex-soldier from the losing side of a galactic civil war. His speech involves a lot of “reckon” and “ain’t”, to keep him from sounding too much like Hemmingway. With his misfit crew, including another Buffyverse bad guy, Gina Torres, he sets out to engage in petty theft and fight the Evil Galactic Empire ™.
I swear this is different from the last 20 anime films I’ve watched.
It’s like a good episode of Star Trek: Next Gen without all that tedious moralizing about the Prime Directive and without the goofy futuristic utopia feeling. In Firefly‘s future, there are no replicators and no benelovent federation, just a crew of people with believable motivations in unforgiving space.
The character interactions are really Firefly‘s strength. There’s no female ensign who talks to the computer, no token alien team member and thank goodness, an ensemble crew without a precocious kid. In addition to the crew, there is a geisha, a pastor, a shy, nerdy doctor and a female mechanic who’s cute AND knows her way around an engine. All of Firefly‘s characters are surprisingly well-developed, with the exception of crazed deus ex machina River. (But I trust this would have explained if the show’d gone on a bit longer. Right?)
Serenity is a stand-alone story, but don’t tell my boyfriend, since I plan to use the movie to convince him to watch all the Firefly episodes. And there are hints that if Serenity is sucessful, this might be a trilogy, and we all know how many movies there are in a sci-fi trilogy…
Edit: My boyfriend, who doesn’t even particularly LIKE Firefly sent me this news:
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