Science fiction for me is like live improv - 9 out of 10 times it is mildly entertaining at best, and when it's bad it is excruciatingly bad.  1 out of 10 times, however, someone is able to take the genre and make something with depth, using the not really real world (universe) to reflect back some truths about life back in the real world.

I have never seen the tv show, but came across the movie in a DVD sale rack.  Having read about the cult following the show had generated, I decided to give the movie a chance.  I would put it into the 1 out of 10 times category.  It wasn't perfect, but I thought it dealt well with the balancing act dilemma between the individual and the common good.

At times Serenity deals with this dilemma in the standard individual rogue good (in spite of the bad ruffian exterior) authoritarian government-corporation bad framework.  But the movie is able at the same time to explore a similar dynamic between the individual and the smaller but just as significant (if it not more significant) community of family-friends.  There isn't a simple good guy-bad guy duality when it comes between following the impulses of the individual versus the demands of the community of friends and family.

The films treatment of this dynamic gives it a humane touch missing in those 9 out of 10.  I use humane in the way Peter Rainer used  it to describe Alexander Payne's film Sideways, which I had discussed in a recent blog:

Sideways is the sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I’ve seen all year. I emphasize its humanity because most of what passes for comedy these days, whether it be low-concept or smarty-pants, is little more than gagfests peopled by joke-bots. In the movies and on television, it’s become hip to make comedies about nothing, à la Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, or, in the case of I Love Huckabees, everything—which might as well be nothing. Frosty facetiousness is the signature style of the new “intellectual” American jape, and until now, I would have lumped Alexander Payne...into [that] mix....But somewhere between his last film and his new one, Payne traded in his sarcasm for a soul. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Sideways is set in the golden pastoral haze of California’s Central Coast wine country. Or maybe it was just all that wine.

[I had to use the quote because in part it mentions Seinfeld]

Moreover, Serenity adds to the individual-community dilemma with the question as to how do we really know we are doing the right thing, that we are truly on the side of the good.

The assassin for the Alliance is a bad guy not because he was inherently evil, having chosen some form of the "dark side." He was a bad guy because, in spite of his desire to do the right thing, he put his faith in the wrong camp.  In this way, we can put him in with Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  

But the assassin's personal crisis at the end of the film probably makes him more like George Aaronow, which brings us back to soul of the film.

 

It definitely undermines the hope that springs eternal.

One hears actors talk about how much more fun or enjoyable it is to play the villain than the goodie. Probably the best current pop example of admiration of Vaderesque personality is the show Dexter. Before that it would be the Sapranos. And let's not forget Braking Bad. The list goes on and on. Personally, rather than having the Force choke, I would like to go all Jet Li on some folks.