Serenity (2005) on Netflix

PG-1320051h 59mAction Adventure Sci-Fi

Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew smuggle cargo aboard the ship Serenity, hiding River Tam, a psychic teenager her brother Simon rescued from the Alliance. An operative is hunting her.

Netflix4.1/5
IMDb7.8/10317,256 votes
Rotten Tomatoes82%

Trailer

Plot summary

Humanity has spread through a new solar system, its central planets joined in the Alliance, which defeated the outer worlds that refused to join. Captain Malcolm Reynolds, who fought on the losing side of that war, runs cargo and smuggling jobs aboard the ship Serenity with first mate Zoe Washburne, her husband, the pilot Wash, mercenary Jayne Cobb and mechanic Kaylee Frye. Two passengers, the doctor Simon Tam and his sister River, are hiding from the Alliance. Simon got River out of the hands of Alliance scientists who had shaped the child genius into a psychic and an assassin; she read the minds of senior officials and picked up secrets the government wanted buried. An Alliance agent called the Operative has been sent to bring her back, and sheltering River has made work harder to find.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Serenity (2005)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Serenity was initially estimated at over $100 million and 80 days; Universal wanted to shoot abroad to cut costs, but Joss Whedon, reluctant to uproot his family, insisted on filming locally and the film was greenlit with a budget of under $40 million.
The production hoped to reuse the Serenity interior set from the Firefly television series to save money, but it was no longer available, so the ship was rebuilt using DVD images of the show as a guide. Twenty-three crews finished the new set on Universal's Stage 12 in 14 weeks.
SPOILER
All nine principal cast members of Firefly were set to return for the film, but Ron Glass and Alan Tudyk could not commit to sequels, so their characters were killed off in the second draft of the script.
The mule skiff chase was the film's most technically challenging scene. A gimbal and CGI like the Star Wars pod race were ruled out on cost, so the crew put a cantilevered arm on a trailer and shot the hovercraft riding up Templin Highway.
Carter Burwell was dropped from scoring Serenity a few weeks before the scheduled February 2005 recording because his other obligations left him little time to compose a new score. David Newman was brought in on Universal's music executives' recommendation.
Serenity became the first film to fully conform to Digital Cinema Initiatives specifications, which was called a major milestone in the move toward all-digital projection.
In NASA's 2009 online poll to name Node 3 of the International Space Station, 'Serenity' led the suggested options with 70% of the vote, but the poll was discarded and the node was named Tranquility instead.
Beginning in January 2006, Firefly fans with Universal's blessing organized charity screenings of Serenity for Equality Now, a human rights organization Joss Whedon supports; 47 were scheduled in five countries, coordinated as Can't Stop the Serenity.