Some time ago I heard for the first time about a science fiction movie called "Serenity". I downloaded the trailer and it looked pretty cool. So I searched a bit more and found out that the movie is picking up the story of a TV series called "Firefly".
The series - set in a 500-year-future - evolves around a group of hoodlums, lead by a former soldier who fought on the losing side of a civil war (those rebels were later called "browncoats" while the winning "Alliance" is now the established government of the galaxy). It is set in a universe where mankind has settled many planets of our galaxy, but despite highly developed technology, in the poorer outer regions of the galaxy there are many sparsely populated planets with a western-like setting.
This group of people travels the galaxy in the Firefly-class spaceship called "Serenity" - thus the names of series and movie.
                  [img]http://www.strangefinger.com/fireflylogo.jpg[/img]
My interest was roused and I read more about it. Firefly was a series created in 2002 by director Joss Whedon, who also made "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" (which I both did not like very much). It was first aired on FOX, but they did not start with the pilot and showed the other episodes in random order, also changing the schedule for the show, and in the end they cancelled it without even having aired all of the first season.
That should have been the end of this tv series, but there was a large amount of fan letters and internet activities, and after some time, the Sci-Fi channel bought the rights for the show, re-airing it. This time, it was quite a success, and when the DVD-box came out, it became a top seller.
Unfortunately, the possibility to continue the series for the SciFi-Channel seems not to be given, because FOX still owns those rights for 5 years. But now the whole crew of the series have made a high-budget movie called "Serenity", which will be shown in US-cinemas from September 30.
             [img]http://www.cinemas-online.co.uk/wallpaper/serenity2_thumb.jpg[/img]                  [img]http://www.cinemas-online.co.uk/wallpaper/serenity1_thumb.jpg[/img]
By now, I have watched the series and call myself a fan of it, or as the community calls it, a browncoat. I liked the series from the start, and this feeling has grown with every episode.
Thinking about the reasons why I find this show so great, I reckoned that it has to be the crew of the "Serenity". I am generally a fan of science fiction, but most of the more recent serieses looked cheesy and uninteresting to me.
So what makes "Firefly" different? There are some new ideas in the setting (i.e. combining SciFi and Western genres, having a galaxy full of inhabited planets but no aliens) and the single stories are highly entertaining, but none of these things is the real reason for my fandom.
In "Firefly", I think for the first time ever in a series, I love each of the main characters! They are a strange mixture of people from completely different backgrounds, put together for totally different reasons (which is nothing really new), but they totally fit together. Each of them has a deeply developed personality, with bright sides and dark sides, some of them have done things that would normally rule them out to be regarded as "heroes" or even to like them, but I still do. Each and every two of them seem to have a special way of feeling about each other and treating each other, there are secrets that they have from each other or even (apparently) from the viewer, they reveal new talents and weaknesses from time to time, and still you always feel like you know these people.
            [img]http://www.serenitymovie.com/nonflash_site/gallery/images_filmstills_01.jpg[/img]
So now I am sitting here in Germany and waiting for the movie to come out. It will be some time, until then, but I will bypass it by watching the series a second time, I guess, reading forums and websites about it and keep the fingers crossed for the slim chance that somehow they can resume this new favourite tv series of mine.