Serenity (PG-13, 2005)

500 years from now, humans are colonizing space, terraforming planets in far-flung solar systems, jumpstarting civilizations in their own image, and wreaking havoc based on assumed values and prerogatives. Two sides have formed amid the expansion, the mighty Universal Alliance and the scrappy independents. The Alliance is not only interested in colonizing worlds, but also minds and bodies. A prominent experiment along these lines is River (Summer Glau), an extra-sensitive telepath, brainwashed in Alliance classrooms as a child, then electro-refitted in an Alliance lab until her brain essentially blew out. She wears gauzy goth dresses and teeters between anxious passivity and deadly accuracy, able to climb walls, cling to ceilings, break bones when "weaponized." Her brother Simon (Sean Maher) rescues her from the lab, and they take refuge on the Serenity, a ship captained Mal (Nathan Fillion). His crew -- tough guy Jayne (Adam Baldwin), warrior Zoe (Gina Torres), her partner and ship's pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk), and mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite) -- worry that they are carrying these risky (paying) passengers, as the Alliance is sure to track them down.

SERENITY makes the future quite like the present. That's not a bad thing. Though occasionally clunky in structure and execution (some images reportedly culled from unused footage from Joss Whedon's TV series Firefly, from which the storyline and characters are drawn), the movie is entertaining and the dialogue often witty.

Styled like cowboys, Mal's team resists the Alliance for all the right reasons. If the brutal, brave, confused adolescent is a favorite trope for Whedon and his fans, the tormented but also irredeemably fated River is also here a sign of resistance to conventional thinking. River's telepathy -- which makes her (seem) crazy and grants her way too much information pertaining to everyone around her -- is related thematically to the film's most idealistic notion, that media exposure -- via a character with access to all angles of dissemination, Mr. Universe (David Kurmholtz) -- might save the 'verse.