After a bloated summer of mainly damp squibs, Serenity is a breath of fresh air.
At last, an exciting emotionally packed story with fleshed-out characters and relationships you actually care about.
After an explosive start, the film settles into a flowing easy pace which speeds up, along with the audience's adrenaline level, as the stakes run ever higher on screen.
In typical style, Whedon has managed to find the reality in amongst all the fantasy and delivers an intelligent, exciting emotional drama. This is enhanced by a quite brilliant cast of relative unknowns led by the marvellously swaggering Fillion and nicely offset by his chillingly intelligent Alliance counterpart played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Serenity is set in a refreshingly low-tech universe (think rough and battered western frontier town meets Blade Runner urban sprawl) where the locals beg, borrow and steal to get by, all underscored by Whedon's sharp and savvy dialogue - a slickly intoxicating flow of Buffy-esque slayer-speak, techno-gibberish, sharp one-liners and nice line in relentless Cantonese cursing.
Add to this some rather spectacular visual eye-candy, an evil empire bent on total domination and some very scary cannibalistic monsters called Reavers who do unmentionable things to unwary travellers and you have an unpretentious and intelligent action drama with bags of wit, charm and emotion to spare.
