Serenity (Steelbook) (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet)

Even better than the series
This is one incredible movie. No, you don't have to be familiar with the series to enjoy it, but the familiarity will make several moments in the movie that much more tragic. The action here is incredible, and unlike several of the Star Trek movies, the characters don't deviate from their series personnas. The emotional impact of several scenes is so intense it was hard to stay seated (a crash landing sequence can almost give you motion sickness). This brings a satisfying end to the storyline the original series had started. It's a shame the show never got to tell this story in its entirety. You can see where some parts of the movie are rushed in a way. Something that could have been stretched over weeks in a series had to be handled in minutes, and that robs it a little. But you have to applaud Whedon for being able to tie up all the loose ends he started with just two hours. Shame on the network for cancelling this, but congratulations to Whedon for giving the fans--both old and...

You Can't Stop the Signal
It wasn't suppose to happen like this...

Back in the summer of 2001, Fox announced that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" mastermind Joss Whedon would be creating a new television show that was a cross between Science Fiction and the Western Genres... For months Fox spent millions of dollars promoting the one "sure fire series of the season" but then the problems started... the pilot was too slow, Executive Heads Clashed, and Baseball season all got mixed into the mixing pot... and in the end fans where left with an out of order, mixed up, tale of identitify (which is ironic if you think about it).

But the fans of Joss Whedon and of the character he creates would not let this be the end of the "firefly" universe, and after much fanfare, petitions, and literal Bitching; Universal Pictures did something rather uprecidented: they green lite a "big-screen' movie which Joss Whedon describes as "a thank you to the fans."

And that is exactly what the film version of...

Outstanding Space Opera
A wonderous vision of the future started in the all too short run of the TV series Firefly continues in the big screen version of it, Serenity. The TV show and movie is about the crew of a star ship that is as much unlike the USS Enterprise as it can get. It's a ranshackle freighter skippered by Mal Reynolds, a man part Han Solo, part Jesse James. He was on the losing side of an intersteller civil war against the Alliance, a buraucratic, oppressive government that seems to consists of people who believe quite fervently they know better than other people how they should live their lives. Captain Reynolds and his motley crew, including his former second in command from the war, her husband the pilot, an engineer who is as cute as she is sharp with the hyper drive, a muscle bound mercenary in a constant state of mutiny, a preacher, a courtesan, and a doctor and his troubled (to say the least!) sister eck out a thin living doing odd jobs out on the frontier, some of them not exactly...

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