Movies To Damn Well See: Serenity

There are a lot of movies I'm anticipating this year. I'm thinking The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy should be pretty good (I'm reading the books now) and Star Wars Episode III might actually be decent. I definitely am pumped up for War of the Worlds and Batman Begins, and I am quite certain that Peter Jackson's King Kong later this year is going to kick ass. No doubt there are plenty of other movies, as well, that I'm not even thinking of right now and, as is usual, I will surely find many smaller movies to get excited about over the course of the year.

However, the movie that I most want to see this year, without question, is Serenity. This is a science fiction flick that is coming out September 30th. Now, this is a movie that you've either probably heard of and are excited about or you have never heard mentioned before. Serenity is a movie written and directed by Joss Whedon which also happens to be a feature film spun off from the television show Firefly, which aired for eleven episodes on Fox before the evil, evil network just up and canceled it after screwing around with the show's scheduling, airing and promotion. Basically, they killed it and it never was given enough of a chance to find an audience.

The show was awesome, period. It was absolutely brilliant. It was a science-fiction-slash-western that had people flying through space with six shooters. They wore western type get ups and flew around in a beat up, run down ship that half the time barely stayed in the air. There was nothing clean and sparse about the sets like you saw with Star Trek but instead was dirty and gritty and none of the characters—save for Inara, the prostitute—were particularly couth or refined. Within the show's future universe, you have the Alliance as the overarching universal government (which is all clean and sparse and sterile) and then you have the cobbled together crew of Serenity (the ship in Firefly) who are rebels and outlaws and shifty characters who are looking to keep away from the Alliance for a variety of reasons, often keeping to the outskirts of the universe. But these people are not villains or evil, they're more scruffy heroes that maybe have had some clashes with the law, but who are ultimately good people simply trying to avoid an oppressive regime.

If the show had been allowed to live, it no doubt would have gone in some incredible directions. As it was, the full fourteen episode run as found on the DVD set was amazing, but it left many storylines unresolved.

Then, somehow, this failed and canceled series was given a greenlight by Universal to be turned into a full fledged motion picture, which is the sort of miracle that makes this world sufferable at times. It was given a fairly big budget (though a bit small by major sci fi movie standards) and Joss seemed to be given quite a bit of artistic freedom to make an awesome movie based in the Firefly world with the Firefly characters.

So what's the point of all this? It's to tell you that the trailer for Serenity has been released today and is available on Apple's movie trailer site. I've watched the trailer four times so far and it is magnificent. All the characters I know and love are back and the wit seems to be there, as most evidenced in the "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die" line, which is pure Joss Whedon funny. The action scenes are clearly bigger and better than anything ever seen on the television show and the special effects look to be very impressive. The show was incredibly entertaining, with humor and action and great character development, fun dialogue, excellent acting, a fascinating future world and intriguing plot developments, a great bad guy in the Alliance and horror movie type monsters by way of the Reavers, not to mention all kinds of convoluted relationships and personal secrets and so on. I expect the movie to be the same, but on a much larger and more impressive scale. Which means you should keep your eye on this, because this is a movie to see. It's the movie to see this year.

Go watch the trailer. Do it!

(Cross posted to Blogcritics)