'Serenity' brings easy familiarity to a standard sci-fi plot

"Serenity" is a sci-fi adventure film that goes where "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" have gone before. But the journey is surprisingly entertaining, with a sly tone that mixes action and humor and even manages to beam a message about morality and hypocrisy.

Fans of television's "Firefly" will know that writer-director Joss Whedon (creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel") reassembled the cast of that short-lived show to make his feature debut and continue his saga of a ragtag crew of space cowboys at home aboard a raggedy ship they call Serenity.

Universal Pictures 'Serenity' B The verdict: A surprisingly entertaining sci-fi adventure Director: Joss Whedon Starring: Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau, Chiwetel Ejiofor Run time: 119 minutes Release date: September 30, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense violence and action, and some sexual references. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Serenity'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

For the rest of us, a short, sharp opening sequence time-travels 500 years into the future to tell the back story of refugees from an overcrowded Earth who've colonized another solar system. After an intergalactic war won by a corrupt and controlling coalition known as the Alliance, renegades from the losing side (such as the Serenity gang) ride the frontier range of the outer planets, much like righteous outlaws of the Old West. Also roaming about are the Reavers, nasty space Vikings who eat their victims — alive.

The present story gets flying as the captain of the Serenity (Nathan Fillion) rescues a young doctor (Sean Maher) and his unstable sister, River Tam (Summer Glau) — a 17-year-old with the feral looks of a hippy chick and the superhero skills of a telepathic fighting machine. And because River knows a secret that could undermine its Orwellian order, the Alliance sends a true-believer assassin (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to terminate her.

Like the characters, the plot is pretty standard stuff. But Whedon works plenty of smart pop-culture references into his genre-jumping script. Best of all, the Serenity crew speaks a kind of weird old American lingo that resembles the language of "Deadwood," though not as naughty (the swearing tends to be in Chinese, one of the movie's amusing futureworld touches). And instead of an overload of computer-generated effects, we get ongoing riffs of clever dialogue and real scenes, played out by an ensemble cast with the kind of easy familiarity more common to television than film.

Still, at nearly two hours, "Serenity" may be a hard slog and a head-scratcher for those not already part of the "Firefly" cult.