Serenity, or Firefly writ larg(ish)

"Serenity" opened in the UK this weekend. Despite the good press the movie has been receiving all around, especially among British critics, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I walked into the Odeon screening room in Oxford (where the screen is about the size of a large television set). I've always had great admiration for Joss Whedon (as evidenced by my unabashed admiration for the Buffy series, supra) but even on Buffy and especially on Angel he has always been uneven as well as unpredictable, and I was imagining the myriad ways in which he could fail to deliver.

But I needn't have worried: "Serenity", whether you've seen the "Firefly" episodes on DVD or at a newcomer to that universe, does not fail to deliver; not only is it coherent as a movie, but it manages to pick up roughly where the series left off, which means that for a fan it doesn't too much time on what we already know yet manages to introduce the premises of the futuristic setting and the characters in a few deft strokes. What is missing, of course, is the cosy familiarity one develops with the characters which is perhaps the biggest advantage of television over feature films: one comes to think of the "Friends" cast as one's friends; the detectives on "CSI" as one's collleagues at the workplace; "The West Wing" is at once a workplace drama and a family drama, with the president as a father figure presiding over a house. And (returning to "Serenity") anyone with any familiarity with Joss Whedon at all will know that he never has "clean" victories but that there always is a price, so I wouldn't count it as a spoiler to say that I knew even as the movie began that not all of them would make it; but I nevertheless lurched in my seat when it happened.

The other reviews I've been reading have focused a lot on the transition to "the big screen", but because of the venue where I happened to see it, four feet away from a small screen, UK projection dimensions (there's a difference in aspect ratio, i.e., a strip lopped off the top and bottom) in a theatre without DTS nor Dolby decoding (rather like the Mac, which uses its own mixdown even if you play a Dolby disc on it), it felt like a good, long episode: a season-ender, say. So is it the new Star Trek or even the new Star Wars? No, no. But I think it's fair to say that it might be the new Joss Whedon, which also does less disservice to all concerned.