I went to see Serenity this weekend. Mr. Bsag was away, but I just couldn’t wait, having heard great things about it. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m keen to see it again with him, because I think I would get even more out of it second time around.

I should say at the start that I’ve never seen the series Firefly on which the film was based. I’d queued up some of the DVDs on LOVEFilm, but they haven’t yet come to the top of my list. I’m sure that I would have experienced another level of depth if I was already familiar with the Firefly universe and characters, but I still found it an amazing film. In fact, I’m now keener than ever to get into Firefly. I am however, a big fan of Farscape; another highly original and unusual Sci-Fi series that—like Firefly—had a passionate cult following, but was dropped by the network after they treated it badly, and was then granted a brief, feature-length reprieve, partly because of its vocal fan base. So I have some inkling of what it must be like for a Firefly fan, who has a built up an understanding of the characters and their backstory, to watch Serenity.

The plot concerns a bunch of mis-fits aboard a ship called Serenity, trying to pull off heists to pay for repairs to their clanky old ship, and sheltering a girl called River. River’s brother, the ship’s doctor Simon, rescued her from an Alliance facility where she was being subjected to horrific brain experiments which made her psychic and a bit—well—mad¹, and now they are all being hunted by an Alliance assassin known as The Operative. Oh, and they all speak rather like characters from a Western, with chunks of Chinese thrown in for good measure. If that sounds cringe-worthy, it really isn’t.

The film has really gripping action sequences, sparky, dry humour and moments of almost unbearable emotional poignancy which ambush you out of nowhere. The characters are all believable and three-dimensional, and I even found myself worrying a bit about what would happen to the ‘bad guy’ at the end of the film. Joss Whedon has an impressive ability to inject surprising things into the middle of scenes without slackening the pace or killing the tension. Most blockbuster films have action sequences, comedy scenes and emotional scenes, but they’re separate and you can see a different kind of scene looming up from miles away. Serenity isn’t like that. As an example, there’s a brilliant chase scene where our heroes are being pursued by the psychotic Reavers. Jayne—a gun-obsessed meat-head with a heart—is being dragged on to the Reavers’ ship, but is hanging on with his fingertips to Serenity’s transport ‘mule’. Since being caught alive by the Reavers is a fate worse than death, Jayne tells Mal, “You shoot me if they take me”. Mal immediately aims his gun at Jayne, who yells “Well, don’t shoot me first!”. It’s a brilliantly funny moment in context, but it doesn’t interfere with the pace of the chase at all.

Serenity is also quite a thought-provoking film. None of the characters are really good or bad. Even the heroes do morally-questionable (if pragmatic) things. It also raises important questions about how far governments should go in trying to make people ‘better’. One review I saw suggested that Firefly and Serenity (I would also add Farscape) were unusual among Sci-Fi shows in assuming that human nature wouldn’t change in the future. Star Trek was set in a universe where everyone was shiny and happy and interested in doing good, and money didn’t exist², which—much as we’d like to believe in the possibility—we all know is never going to happen. Mr. Bsag is also of the opinion that the military hierarchy of Star Trek puts it in a dramatic straightjacket, whereas the anarchy of shows like Farscape makes for much more interesting interactions between people. I think that’s also true of Serenity. Even though they do have ranks on board the ship, and they all address Mal as ‘Captain’, there’s a lot of back-talking and friendly insubordination. You get the feeling that they follow the Captain because they think he more or less has their best interests at heart (and because they love him), not because of his rank.

In fact, Farscape went even further with the anarchy because the crew was made up (at various times) of a lost astronaut, five escaped convicts, one ex-communicated soldier, a spoilt and petulant gap-year girl, a completely barking guy with half a face who could take people’s pain at the point of death, a three-eyed old witch, and a bio-mechanoid who was fleeing enslavement. There was no Captain, and even Moya (the living ship) had her own mind. Going anywhere involved a lot of debate and argument between Moya and the crew, mediated and translated by the symbiotically-joined Pilot. I’m rambling slightly, but my point is that human nature will probably never change, and writing a drama set in any period without acknowledging the messy, complicated, contradictory nature of human motivation and relationships is not going to work.

Serenity is a remarkable film which somehow manages to succeed on a lot of different levels. It’s a blockbuster action film that engages your brain, a Sci-Fi film without aliens, and a tragi-comedy. If you don’t enjoy it, then you must be very hard to please indeed, because there really is something for everyone.

¹ In a moment of almost epic understatement, Captain Mal describes her as “a bit moody”. ↑

² I always wondered exactly how that worked. Communism doesn’t seem to work, so exactly how do you divide up resources? I’d love to believe that it might be true one day, but I can’t see how it would work.↑