If you’ve missed the series Firefly, you may go to Hulu right now and start catching up. It was canceled after one season but managed to produce not only a huge cult following but also a feature film entitled Serenity.
Following up on the series, and assuming for the most part that you know the characters and their ways from there, the film focuses on the desire of the
intergalactic alliance (think “the Empire”) to recapture River, a young woman who has taken up with a former freedom fighter (think “the rebel alliance”) and his crew–a posse that now steals and trades whatever they can to make a buck off of their Firefly Class spaceship named Serenity.
This is called a “space western” on many of the sites, and the name is apt (think “first three Star Wars movies, with their western hero Han Solo / Luke Skywalker”). Heck, so long as I’m making Star Wars references, there’s even a scene where the good guy and bad guy duke it out on some catwalks. But I digress.
A few interesting themes pervade the movie, and I’d encourage you, should you dive into this world with its cult following, to keep your eyes and ears open for them.
One of the characters is a “shepherd,” a futuristic sort of monk/pastor. He encourages the main cowboy type, Mal, to believe–even if he doesn’t believe in God, to believe in something. There’s a running theme in the film about the power of belief itself. It’s worth keeping your ears out for that.
One of the core conflicts in the movie seems to revolve around that idea of belief. The alliance believes that it can compel people to be better, to a better way of life. Mal and his posse represent the opposite. Mal says he doesn’t believe we can make people better.
As Mal dukes it out with a guy who always seems to be dressed in black (or dark purple), their different beliefs come to the fore again. Evil dude is a top flight assassin, who is striving to create “a world without sin”–a world that will hold no place for himself, he well knows. The conflict of the film is resolved when Mal presents an alternative means to that world without sin: not killing the girl, River, but telling the galaxies the truth about the Alliance.
In the end, Mal tells the secret of survival to River as they fly off for their next journey: love. It was love that enabled River to be freed from the Alliance in the first place. It is love that allows the crew of Serenity to survive.
Especially for a “space western,” this was a well-told story whose thematic riches might be easy to miss within the otherwise predictable action-hero adventure.
