“Serenity” is the movie version of the short-lived 2002 television series “Firefly,” and it is one of the finest TV-to-film translations ever done. It’s also a very good movie in its own right, the story of a ragged crew of fugitives and ex-soldiers trying to make their way in a hostile, frontier-like future, a movie blessed with great dialogue, great characters, a full, rich world, and deft direction, as well as a heart and a sense of fun.

Much of that greatness is inherited from its parent television series, in which those characters and that world were developed. It is a credit to director Joss Whedon’s (“Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” “Angel”) extraordinary abilities that he was able to make the jump from small to big screen while both being true to his core audience and constructing something new that would make sense to casual moviegoers. For example, the story picks up well after the series ended, so fans don’t have to be dragged through familiar territory; on the other hand, the space-western elements so prominent in the series are smoothly downplayed in the movie, making it more accessible.

Everything else is there, though, wholly unchanged: the quirky phrases, the snatches of Chinese, the dashboard dinosaurs, the mix of high tech and low people. Welcome to the new sci-fi, the child of Gibson and Stevenson which assumes that new technology is a given (since, after all, don’t we already live in the future?) and instead spends its time exploring characters and cultures. Captain Malcolm Reynolds, as played by Nathan Fillion, is a brilliantly grown-up Han Solo, all the rogue but with the 1970s swinger replaced by proper 21st century bitterness.

Although “Serenity” avoids the weird distortions that shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” endured when they jumped to the big screen, it does lack a certain scope or grandeur that you might expect from a space movie, and the story feels hurried—presumably both stamps of its television heritage.

And as good as “Serenity” is, it does not undo the wrong done when the series was cancelled after a dozen episodes, and I would gladly trade the two hours of movie for another season of “Firefly.”

directed and written by: Joss Whedon
starring: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Summer Glau and Ron Glass
rated PG-13 for sequences of intense violence and action, and some sexual references