Serenity

Last night I was one of a small number of bloggers who had the opportunity to see Serenity in New York City, amid a packed house of people who, based on pre-movie conversations, had little knowledge of Firefly, the TV show which was the progenitor of Serenity.

Going in as someone who found Firefly to be one of the best things I have seen on my TV screen in many years, I had two major concerns:

1. Would the transition from the small screen of TV to the large screen of a movie theater, with the attendant increased budget, allow for the intimacy that the Firefly watcher was familiar with; could an audience member easily become reacquainted with the crew of the ship and become emotionally connected to the characters and their story?

2.  Would those who were naive to the charm of Firefly be able to connect to the story and characters without any previous knowledge to build upon?

The answer to both questions were a resounding "Yes!"

Not unexpectedly, the movie version offers much more action and much less character development than the TV series; however, there was ample time to introduce the varied characters, all of whom represent three dimensional human beings, and none of whom were overwhelmed by the scale of the action.  I was not disappointed in the depiction of the relationships among the varied members of the crew, all of whom I felt I knew well from the series.  As a Psychoanalyst, I was impressed at the ability of the actors to express their complex, ambivalent and conflicted feelings toward each other within the confines of an action/adventure movie (though I recognize I added several layers of complexity from having seen the series.) 

More importantly for the ultimate success of the movie at the box office, the audience seemed to have no trouble connecting to the crew, as well; they laughed in all the right places, and to my surprise, universally applauded the movie when the final credits appeared.

Joss Whedon has produced a brilliant science fiction space opera, with the sweep and panorama of the great stories of the past (Star Wars) albeit on a smaller than galactic scale.  While the series has been called a Science Fiction Western, the Western aspect had to be minimized in order to answer many (not "all") of the questions that were left hanging by the series.  Nonetheless, the "cowboy" mentality clearly animates the crew and especially, the Captain, of Serenity.  The idea of a band of misfits doing the right thing, even at the risk of all they hold dear, is an enduring motif of the American Western.  It is comforting to imagine that wherever there is a frontier, the American cowboy will be able to find a home.