Bakery of the Poets

Views and Reviews -- Serenity

Home | The Mission | de Bergerac's Page | Archives | Contact Me | (A?)musing de Bergerac's Blog | BotP The 'Zine

serenity.jpg

Serenity

Mal...Nathan Fillion
Zoe...Gina Torres
Wash...Alan Tudyk
Jayne...Adam Baldwin

Serenity is fresh, fun sci-fi with well earned scares, engaging characters and great dialogue. It has all the elements of a cracking story; heroes that are truly heroic as well as funny and a bit rough around the edges; villains that are like something from out of a nightmare (though the true villains of the piece never actually show their faces) and a worthy adversary. There is enough crash-bang action and good old-fashioned (and some new-fangled) fisticuffs, to please action genre fans, and occasionally they blow some things up, really well.

500 years from now planet Earth is gone and the Alliance rules humanity with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Planets closer to the seat of Alliance power where their control and influence is absolute, streets are clean and practically without crime, everything is well-run and beautiful, the inhabitants are happy and prosperous. Those planets on the Rim further from the center of Alliance control, closer to the blackness of space the Alliance’s grip is slipping, the velvet at the fingertips of the glove is frayed, so their influence is more intermittent but when it is felt, it is felt with the heat of gunfire and the force of jack boots. Things are less save, less well-run, in fact, life on the Rim can be nasty brutish and short.

Our heroes live in the space between these to realities (literally, in the space), they fought in the war for independence from the Alliance and lost. Lost decisively at the battle of Serenity Valley, after which Captain Malcolm Reynolds has named his ship.

Now, the war is over and there is no place in the Core for a man like Malcolm, or those on his crew. They scratch out a living making legal cargo runs and shady smuggling runs and the odd illegal armed robbery. Whatever it takes to survive and still fly under Alliance radar, going undetected has been complicated by the arrival of two fugitives. The Alliance want River Tam very badly, the brilliant troubled girl along with her older brother are being hunted from one end of the galaxy to the other. They have found temporary shelter with Mal and his crew. But can it last? Especially now, with the brilliant and mysterious Operative, brilliantly played to frighteningly gentle perfection by Chiwetel Egiofor.

Serenity is a good movie. The performances and costumes are very good. The production values show the 40 million (something like half the budget usually allotted to film of this type) budget a the seams from time to time but it is a cracking tale told with energy and a great sense of fun.

E-mail
email3.jpg

Please remember that all works protected under United States Copyright law, either by Bakery of the Poets, the individual artist and/or their agent(s). No images or text may be downloaded, copied, transferred or stored on any electronic retrieval system or otherwise.