Monday at the Movies - February 23, 2015

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”  Joss Whedon is set to have the biggest movie of the summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sequel to his billion-dollar film The Avengers. To prepare, we’re going back to his first film from ten (Ten!) whole years ago.

Serenity (2005) – Here’s the thing about Serenity: it is barely a film, and I don’t mean that as the snarky insult it might initially seem.  Bear with me.  What Serenity is is a two-hour epilogue to the television show about whose cancellation much consternation has been made amongst its cult followers.  Indeed, it is for those followers that the film exists, and though I liked the show when I watched it a few years ago, I have the feeling that I would have enjoyed Serenity a bit more if Firefly were fresher in my mind.  And look, I don’t suspect Joss Whedon is out to make a proper film here; there is so much about Serenity, up to and including its overall refusal to (re)introduce the main characters, that suggests Whedon is catering to a crowd of diehards.  That said, as someone halfway on the outside looking in (someone certain that full devotees will love it), I enjoyed Serenity even without fully remembering all the nuances of the Firefly universe.  The element I liked the most, even more than Nathan Fillion’s swaggering space captain Malcolm Reynolds (think Han Solo by way of John Wayne), was Chiwetel Ejiofor’s villainous turn as a nameless apostle of the crooked transgalactic regime; Ejiofor does a very entertaining heartless disciple, a nice spin on the scenery-chewing villain most cinematic science fiction brings us.  The script has Whedon’s trademark sense of humor and an impressively tight cast of characters, though it does lose points for simply revisiting and not reintroducing or developing those characters (beyond killing a few off).

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!