Since I found Serenity.

Tamara and I saw Serenity (the movie based on Joss Whedon's Firefly tv series) last night. Overall, it was very good. In fact, the story line seemed to work better as a movie than it was faring in the weekly series. The one problem we both had with the tv series was that it felt like it was going somewhere, but it didn't want to tell us where that might be. Basically it was like Whedon just expected everyone to trust him that he was going somewhere. We only got the vaguest idea where the various characters came from, how the universe was structured and where the story was going. Entire groups of people (like the reevers) were presented as major characters/plot points in the pilot and then forgotten about. Of course they weren't actually forgotten, Whedon was just trying to stretch the plot out as long as possible. And that leisurely build up was just too slow.

The movie, however, was much faster paced. Plus, the movie had a sense of seriousness and weight that the series lacked, especially noticeable when they killed off two major/popular characters. It just made it feel all the more possible that the heroes might not make it out alive, and they definitely wouldn't make it out unchanged--and that's rare in commercial action/science fiction movies. Plus, a huge chunk of the tv series plot was satisfactorily resovled, while still leaving plenty left for more movies. I'm definitely looking forward to a sequal focusing more on Mal and Inara, as well as more of Mal and Zoe's past.

-Tim