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As writer-director Joss Whedon proved in his long run on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (seven seasons) and his short one on Firefly (eleven episodes), he has two distinct yet complementary gifts: He can write quick, gabby banter for an array of heroes and oddballs better than any auteur since Preston Sturges, and he can dramatize the camaraderie within an ensemble better than anyone since Howard Hawks. Thus, Serenity—his big-screen expansion of Firefly, bankrolled by Universal because the DVD sold way beyond expectations—is a sci-fi saga that manages to be at once stirring and screwball, gut-busting and gut-wrenching, and more fun than you had at any bigger-budget movie this past summer.

Whedon knows you never watched the original TV show, and so he makes that fact not matter.

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With Serenity, Whedon proves once again that the storytelling and characterization featured by the best television writing are just as rich and deep—often more so—than anything in the cinema. The movie is suffused with a uniquely sardonic romanticism (humor and passion both tart and sweet). And it’s also an action movie that truly defines the term “space opera”: Serenity achieves a grandness—a heightened rapture—that few adventure films even have the imagination, or the idealism, to aspire to these days.

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