Go See Serenity: Last night, Diana and I had the pleasure of watching a bloggers' preview of the upcoming Serenity movie, due to open this Friday. We had previously seen a very rough version of the movie back in May, and the final version is better, and nicely done. In particular, the soundtrack and the visual effects are polished now.

The story line is the same as before, following the characters from the cult hit television show "Firefly" in their next adventure. And although the movie is sure to appeal to fans of "Firefly", the writers also do a good job of setting the background and establishing the characters in the first few minutes of the movie so that audience members who aren't already familiar with the TV show will also be able enjoy the movie as a stand-alone story. What I especially liked was the fact that the movie felt like a real *movie* (as opposed to some of the Star Trek: Next Generation movies that often felt like bad 2-hour episodes.)

The storyline was exciting, the visuals were engaging, and the characterization was crisp. In particular, the external dramatic action scenes nicely mirrors the internal conflict faced by Mal Reynolds, captain of the smuggler ship Serenity.

Unfortunately, I have to be deliberately vague here since I don't want to give away any plot spoilers. But I want to give it my full recommendation to any science fiction fans out there who somehow haven't already heard of this fine movie.

(I also think that the movie studio has adopted an interesting marketing strategy by asking bloggers to review the film in return for being able to attend advanced screenings. If this works out for them, then we should expect to see a lot more of this in the future. BTW, here's Diana's review.)