Straight up, I can’t review this movie without a little bias and probably utter lack of synopsis of the film itself. Even 20+ years after its release, still dug watching this again. But it’s not just the movie, you have to watch the prequel first, the single-season actual ‘network television’ show called Firefly from 2002, if you were not aware. Every once in awhile, Not-Cable-Television accidentally did things right. Or at least kinda alright. They never even aired all the episodes of the show, and out of order to boot. Asshats.
What we gots here is a genuine Space Western. Maybe a little less obvious with just the standalone movie, but it may be a little hard to realize it separately from the series that was only 1 season, 14 episodes. And Broadcast TV episodes, so only 48-ish minutes apiece. Sure, some of the writing was a bit hokey here and there, but overall some fine stories and some damn good characters. I don’t know if Fox just didn’t know what to do with it, it was too expensive to produce, or what. But canceled even before they finished airing the episodes already in the can. Sad. This movie is basically the resolution to the interesting plottenings that Whedon set up through the show. But the highlight is the presentation of some excellent character work with some good dialogue and nice actions. And a proper setting of the tone with Nathan Fillion in the lead as Captain Malcolm Reynolds.
I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fanboy of the tv series, I didn’t watch it until like the weekend before the movie came out. The movie trailer looked like some good sci-fi, and some cable channel ran a marathon of the episodes as a precursor to the film’s release, and I’m like, Holy Crapper, this is actually pretty good! Why’d they cancel this? Then watched the movie, 3 years after the series got the axe. A bit of a challenge to wrap up in a 2-hour movie, but yeah, Whedon did as good of a job as he could here. Regerts for them not having continued the series? Yeah, but, well, they tend to fuck things up more then improve them, so at this point, I’m kinda glad with the way things played out. You can just watch the movie as a standalone and I think still have a really good time with it, some fun action and decent dramas, well paced, more cinematic than what was already a pretty cinematic show even with its smaller budget. Some of the exposition here is a bit much but it does pack a lot into a tight timeframe to give the uninitiated a bit of the backstory. But for ultimate enjoyments, watch the series first. It ain’t HBO, but I think it was one of the first actually purposefully shot television series in 16x9 aspect ratio even for the 4x3 antenna TVs back then. Well done. Warmed me up to the Westerns genre a bit. Then Deadwood hit and I’m holy fuck, ok, I get it now. Both Firefly and Deadwood probably in the top 10 of series for me. Good shite, mang!
