Serenity

[The Queen]

I'm a Joss Whedon afficianado so I fully expected to enjoy myself, and I did. After the highly disappointing cancellation of Firefly, this was just about perfect: I finally got the answers to almost all the questions that got left hanging. Just imagine if they cancelled "lost" and then gave you a 2-hour movie in which they explained what the hell the numbers mean and a perfectly acceptable reason why you have to push the button every 108 minutes.

I loved the pace, I loved that some folks are always just a little smarter and faster than you are inclined to give them credit for being, and as with any Joss project, I just love the dialog. The only thing that ticked me off was that they didn't just kill off Ron Glass (who I never liked), they had to take out Alan Tudyk, too (who, I loved. Not as much as I loved Jane - he was great - but stilll....).

Looking forward to whatever Joss does next.

[King Bob]

Just saw this (again) and realized that I had never posted about it, so then searched and found this thread.

I have to say that I was so/so on Firefly - the characters and main idea were good, but some of the episodes were pretty weak and didn't advance the plot of the series at all (also true of early episodes of Buffy). 

This is good because it ties up all the loose ends of Firefly although it might be confusing to newcomers to it. And it looks great. Highly recommended.

[Drunk Monk]

I'm a fan of Fillion and Baccarin, so it's been on my Netflix queue forever, and KB's post, along with some post-Deadpool discussions about Morena, got me to watch this finally.  

I never got into Firefly.  I don't know why.  It was recommended to me by many, but the space cowboy motif just never engaged me enough.  It's sort of like Dr. Who to me - I've seen a few key episodes and respect it but it just wasn't my cup o tea.  So Serenity didn't make a whole heckuvalot of sense on some levels to me, but I watch a lot of Asian films without subtitles, so I'm used to that.  I was amused by odd moments of Chinese dialog.  It was simple stuff they were saying so I could understand some of it - it's just that their Chinese was so bad - no tones - that it was incomprehensible to me.  That seemed Bladerunner derivative.  

But speaking of derivative, I was really struck by how much Star Wars: Rebels is derived from this.  Both focus on a small mercenary band, bouncing from job to job in a ragtag ship (echoes of the Millennium Falcon) with a rogue Captain (Mal & Ezra - echoes of Han Solo), under an oppressive regime (Alliance vs. Empire).  Both have a parallel crew: a woman of color pilot (Zoe vs. Hera), a heavy-handed gun man (Jayne vs. Zeb), a spunky tech gal (Kaylee vs. Sabine).  And of course, using swords when everyone else was using firearms.  Wash, Ezra and Chopper (the droid) don't quite fit but the crew dynamic is startlingly derivative.  
It was a funny role for Chitwetel.