Drove over to the west si-eede Saturday for an UltraScreen presentation of Serenity.

“Wow.”

Let that be synonymous with whatever over-the-top expletive that tickeles your particular fancy. “Damn” is also acceptable.

I won’t spoil anything in the plot, but I will say that the movie picks up a few months after the last episode of Firefly. Needless exposition is kept at the bare minimum, if you haven’t seen the show it shouldn’t be much of an issue. Except for the fact that your a complete gibbering idiot and should be lanced from the gene pool like an unsightly mole.

The writing is pure Whedon, for better and worse. If you don’t read at the 11th grade level at the very least you probably won’t get some of the humor and may confuse that with an in-joke. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can refer to the mole initiative described above. Don’t misunderstand, there are some in-jokes, but that’s staple Whedon and quite frankly the fans and cast deserve at least SOME self-referential funnies. Screw the rest of you bastards.

I’m not ashamed to say that more than once I was genuinely shocked, saddened and elated by this movie. Again, staple Whedon. When you write story and dialog with actual emotion in it you will evoke actual human emotion in your viewer. I know, crazy.

Anywho, it’s currently sitting at a very solid 80% on Rotten Tomatoes with the entirety of the negative reviews being ridiculous in their stupidity. “It’s a TV show, ZOMG SUX!” … idiot. The other portion of the negative reviews cut out the middle-man and go straight for the “it’s a movie that GEEKS like” and therefore must suck. Yeah, keep spankin’ the monkey to mindless garbage like Desperate Housewives you mass-market douchebag.

Bitter, table for me? Yeah, I suppose so. Serenity should never have existed. It should have been the second season of Firefly. Such is the curse of shows that expect the audience to be smarter than the average brook trout, or 3x smarter than the average Fox programming executive.

update: 2nd place for the weekend, 10m vs Flight Plan’s 15. It showed on 1300 fewer theateres though, take that with a grain of salt. I’ll see it again next weekend, probably won’t drive back across town though. Stupid ghetto east-side 🙁