Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…

 

–Opening theme from Firefly

Writer Joss Whedon reportedly pitched his television series Firefly as “the anti-Star Trek,” so it’s interesting to note that the show has followed a similar path as that classic series: unloved by network executives and cancelled before its time, Firefly, like Star Trek before it, spawned a fanatically loyal cult following that clamored for the show’s return, which it did this weekend in the form of a Whedon-directed feature film, Serenity. The difference between Firefly and Star Trek, however, is that Trek ran three seasons in its original incarnation; it held a sizable presence in the collective pop-cultural memory even before years of syndication made it into a household name. Firefly, by contrast, lasted a mere ten episodes before it was canned, and only 14 episodes were actually filmed.

Think about that. Most series that fail to run a complete season (usually 22 episodes these days) vanish without a trace, quickly forgotten by a fickle viewing public. But this show, which didn’t even make it half a season, somehow garnered enough attention after its death to come back on the Big Screen. Even if you don’t give a womp-rat’s exhaust port about cultish science-fiction media properties, that’s got to impress you because it’s so mind-bogglingly unlikely.

The setting for Firefly and Serenity is some five hundred years from now, when humanity has abandoned the used-up Earth and settled on dozens of terraformed worlds and moons elsewhere in the universe. Some time before the start of the series, there was a revolution against the totalitarian government known as the Alliance. The freedom-fighters lost, badly. Now one of these former rebels, Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, runs a broken-down transport ship, a Firefly-class vessel called Serenity (hence the respective titles of our two interrelated properties). He and his crew of assorted misfits, outlaws, and eccentrics take whatever work they can get, legal or not, but like all good roguish heroes, they have certain ethical boundaries they refuse to cross. When we first meet Mal and the others, they’re just scraping by, but they’re at least avoiding the attention of the Alliance authorities. Then they take on two passengers, a wealthy young doctor and his seriously strange little sister, and almost immediately the Serenity is on the run from government agents, assassins, the military, and a dozen or so criminal elements who all want that young girl and her mysterious abilities.

So far, it sounds like nothing special, right? A mish-mash of elements from a dozen other “space operas.” However, there are two things that distinguish Firefly from the sci-fi pack: its Wild West trappings — speech patterns, clothing, and even whole storylines are cribbed from Zane Grey — and Joss Whedon’s knack for creating complex, likable characters and crackling dialogue. (To be honest, I had a hard time with the Western elements at first — horses and spaceships appearing in the same frame caused me a lot of distress — but I eventually figured out that there were good “in-universe” reasons for these seeming anachronisms, and I grew to quite like them because they do give the show a unique identity.)

As the movie begins, Mal has been hosting his fugitive passengers, Simon and River Tam, for some eight months and tensions are brewing aboard ship. Some crew members are questioning why they should be risking their necks to protect Simon and River, with no apparent return on their investment. Those questions become even more intense after River’s apparently unstoppable hand-to-hand combat programming is “activated” in a portside saloon and she indiscriminately pulverizes everyone in her path until her brother stops her. For their safety, the dissenters are saying, the crew of Serenity ought to drop her off somewhere, or just put a bullet through her head. But Mal has picked up on something that happened during the bar incident, something that could explain a great many things and possibly even give the former rebel a weapon to use against his hated Alliance.

Whedon walked a difficult line with Serenity. To make a good Firefly movie, he needed to touch on all the elements fans loved about the short-lived television show, but to a make a good movie, he had to be certain not to alienate the mainstream audience, the vast majority of whom probably had never heard of Firefly. Not an easy task, even for the man that many of his fans call “God.” So did he succeed? Well, yes and no.

I suspect Serenity will probably come closer to pleasing the hardcore fans than the uninitiated. That’s not to say you won’t enjoy the movie if you’ve never seen the series; I think you probably will, as Joss skillfully weaves in all the exposition you need to get through two hours in the theater, and the film clicks along at a brisk pace with plenty of action and humor that needs no translation. But you’ll be missing out on a lot, too. With the exception of Mal and River, the characters will seem shallow to you because you don’t already know them (the entire nine-member cast of the series returned for the film). You very possibly won’t be moved by the Very Big Death that occurs near the film’s climax for the same reason, because you’ll have no history with the person who dies. (A quick side note: not only does Joss Whedon create complex, likable characters, he often kills them off for effect. Just because he can. I still haven’t forgiven him for Buffy’s mom, and he made me cry a couple of times during this film, too. Bastard.) And in the end, you probably won’t be left with much except a pleasant couple of hours in the dark.

As for the fans, well, everything important from the series is in the movie: the humor, the moral commentary, the Alliance, the evil government agents, the conspiracies, the frontier settings, and even the cannibalistic Reavers. All the major plot threads left over from TV are resolved and, as I mentioned, many things are explained. The explanations are good ones, too; I suspect a lot of the ideas that went into Serenity would have comprised the second season of Firefly, had there been one. However, the cost of wrapping it all up in a single movie is high. As I already mentioned, the movie focuses on Mal and River, to the detriment of all the other characters. Shepherd Book (played by Barney Miller alum Ron Glass) is relegated to the status of Wise Old Black Man in a couple of scenes that amount to a large cameo, and the beautiful Inara is little more than set decoration. The complicated feelings she and Mal share for each other, a major storypoint in the series, is barely touched upon here, and there is no attempt at resolving the matter. Also, the mystery of River’s psychosis is solved rather easily, given the build-up it received in the series, and the consequences of Mal’s actions during the climax are glossed over with a single line of dialogue.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though: Serenity is a good movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It puts a satisfactory ending on a story that was cut short just when it was getting started, and it does leave room for another story, if the Men in Suits are so kind as to commission one. But I couldn’t help but think it should’ve stayed on the small screen. Even blown up large and sporting improved special effects, the movie feels like a television segment, somehow, and a four-hour TV miniseries would have provided a little more breathing room for Whedon and his characters to do their thing. The movie was good enough as it is, but it could have been more. I guess I shouldn’t complain, though; it’s a rare gift for a cancelled series to get any kind of second chance…