I recently burned my way through this series and film. We’ll start with what I thought of the series and then what I thought of the film.

Firefly:

Normally the first episode of a series is the weakest and I struggle to feel like I want to watch the rest but that really wasn’t the case with this one. I loved it from about 5 minutes in and never stopped loving it. The characters were amazing and the idea of space cowboys was pure genius.

I also really like the sense of humour everyone had and laughed out loud at a lot of points even though I occasionally watched episodes alone (for some reason it’s harder to laugh out loud alone). I think it helped that I recognised three of the actors from other sci-fi tv series and loved all the characters they had done before but I loved the characters in this even more. The bit where River goes cockney especially was a favourite.

For a tv series I didn’t seem to notice the lower budget as I normally would so that was a definite plus, generally I really really don’t understand why they were only allowed to do one series.

Serenity:

The film was not quite as good to start off with. They had deliberately tried to make it accessable without needing to watch the tv series and as such a few old issues between characters were rehashed for character development. I can see why they did it but I think I’d ave prefered they had assumed a little bit of knowledge, or set the characters up with new things rather than re doing an argument I felt had already been settled.

The action was a lot better in the film, however and did make up for the downside a little. It also added a few new characters but that worked and added to the general fun of it and I love that they finally explained the reavers. I had been hoping they would.

I actually though the series was better than the film though and I think I’d have prefered them to wrap up the whole thing with films that were just long episodes like Stargate sg-1 did when they were cut by their channel.