Review of Serenity (2005) by Melanie J — 11 Mar 2014

Emotionally it's hard to separate Serenity from Firefly. That is to say, you probably shouldn't watch one without the other.

As such, Serenity's flaws speak mostly to Firefly's network axing after only one season. There are things hinted at in Firefly that I was really looking forward to getting explained once and for all within the two-hour playtime of Serenity. But alas. Not every gaping hole within the series gets addressed; most notably, Shepherd's backstory is sorely missing.

And within that which does get explained, some of it feels inconsistent with Firefly. Most of that can probably be attributed to needing to wrap everything up with a mere two hours of film, so some shortcuts were needed. Plus, I'd guess Whedon felt he couldn't assume everyone in the theater was going to have seen Firefly, so tried to smooth some things over to make a self-contained story as much as possible.

But logical explanations don't keep me from noticing and being somewhat bothered by these things. And since they aren't major, over-arching problems I can still rate Serenity pretty highly.