I bought the short-lived "Firefly" series on DVD last year and fell in love with it. Though definitely not for kids - fine, fine, I know - it is one of the best sci-fi shows I've ever seen. Witty, strange, sad, creepy...great writing.

I mean, come on. How often do you think of the wild west mixing well with a space story? Yet it does.

I have been waiting for the movie to come out for over a year.

"How often do you think of the wild west mixing well with a space story? Yet it does."

I always spotted "Old West" quality to Pitch Black. first there's the desert landscape. Cole Hauser is the bounty-hunter lawman complete with drawl and quickdraw. Claudia Black and John Moore are the ever-adaptable pioneers, Lewis Fitz-Gerald the citified "dude", Keith David the "preacher", Radha Mitchell the "stage coach driver" with Simon Burke as her quickly deceased partner riding "shotgun". The film even has "the man with no name" (who in reality was Vin Diesel's stunt double) and the Vinster, naturally, is the "outlaw".

But Serenity is much more overtly "western" sci-fi. Betcha I know what Julie would KILL for...

a screen-accurate Zoe vest

They also have the Malcolm Reynolds "Brown Coat" for you, Eric. That way you'll have a nice way to carry around your new iPod. ;-)

Julie, I guess I'm going to have get the DVD set...I'm reading a lot of reviews like yours. Makes me wonder why the series didn't make it, although it's been a long time since quality was sufficient to ensure the survival of a TV show.

I'm assuming the emphasis on your comparison of sci-fi to westerns is on the "mixing well" part. Because the "wild west" theme has been a consistent aspect of space adventures for as long as people have been writing speculative fiction. "Space as the final frontier" is a pretty common theme, and while I haven't analyzed any single movie to the extent Mr. Freen has done with Pitch Black, it's really easy to pick out similar analogies. Han Solo in Star Wars? Gun-slinging outlaw with a heart o'gold. How about West World...that's as direct a comparison as you'll find.

The thing is, too often that wild west theme has been employed as a gimmick to avoid having to create any new and imaginative worlds and characters. If your special effects budget and/or creativity is limited, default to the cowboy-with-antennae theme.

Serenity manages to avoid that feel, using the anachronisms to its advantage. (Still...still...one can't help wondering why, in an era of space travel, most of the personal mayhem is created with bladed weapons and old-fashioned kung fu. ;-)

I just got Firefly discs 1 and 2 in the mail this week from NetFlix. It's all I can do to not watch them tonight, but I got them so that Beau and I can watch them together. He's not here this weekend.

Serenity is a fun movie that I still keep thinking about. Good, solid entertainment.

The reason sci-fi is like westerns is...because both genres, and many more, have the same characters based on the idea of the hero's journey.

There's a book by Joseph Campbell called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" which shows how in myth and story through the ages, similar characters show up and we are naturally drawn to a certain kind of story and hero. But I'm going to blog on this later so I won't waste your comment space. It's really an interesting topic once I got to reading about it.

The DVD set is great. Whedon wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer and worked on Toy Story - good writing. Of course, BtVS and Firefly won't make it on an Christian lists of things to watch, just so you know. For starters, in Firefly, there's the whole prostitute thing. I don't know if they had that in the movie (haven't seen it yet) though I'm assuming her character was in there.

Being a Buffy/Angel super fan, I watched Firefly from the beginning, pleaded for folks to watch it on my blog after Fox was thinking of pulling after airing it out of order.

All that to say that my opinion is probably biased.

I loved the movie, it made me want to go back and watch the DVD of the series.

I would say that for the fan like myself, the last half hour was extremely difficult to watch and ticked me off a little bit but that does not diminish how much I enjoyed the movie.

Go watch it if you haven't and then go watch the DVDs of the series. Or the other way around.

There I have done my Browncoat duty.

Shucks, Eric.

I just dashed that comparison off the top of my head.

You don't give yourself enough credit. Your reviews invariably have a bounty of analysis on a given film's subtleties.

As you and Julie both pointed out, many good movies are simply re-tellings of archetypal story concepts.

Btw, Joss Whedon also wrote the script for Alien: Resurrection and Serenity was built over the pit that was dug for ?Alien: Resurrection? for the underwater sequence .

oohhh... Bladerunner.
Haven't seen that one in years. Guess I need to Queue that one on netflicks.

BTW - I remember briefly watching Flrefly and really liked it. I didn't know this movie was the same. Thanks for the review.