A good movie, well-written, although the dialect grated after a while. I found myself wishing for captions.

They did clean up the astronomy a bit, although the idea of abandoning our entire solar system to terraform another one strikes me as a lot of overkill. Question for the audience: What exactly could you do to the Earth that would be harder to fix than terraforming a hostile planet? At another star system? "Cowboy Bebop" was more realistic from that standpoint, assuming massive terraforming of planets and moons in our own solar system when the Earth got dicey.

River was seriously cool. So was the bad guy. The moral ambiguity in the movie was interesting, but one suspects that this much ambiguity in a real person would not tend to hold up well under stress.

Boo to Joss Whedon for gratuitously and in one case, completely arbitrarily, killing off two favorite characters, including the one my daughter dressed up as for the midnight premier, complete with plastic dinosaur. Talk about a depressed kid.

I suppose he does this to cement his reputation as a "serious director." Back in the 70s it was vogue for "realistic movies" made by "serious directors" to arbitrarily kill off main characters, not for any dramatic reason or noble cause, but simply to show how crappy life was*. I got real tired of it, and so did a lot of other people, which is why directors like Stephen Spielberg, who had been completely snubbed as a "serious director" until he made a Holocaust movie, got rich, rich, rich. When he threw away the Benchley book and saved Richard Dreyfus's ass from the shark in "Jaws," I was a fan for life. Hey, I get plenty of reality out here, and reality often IS crappy. I need to pay money to go see some? If this makes me a slopebrow, so be it. I would have liked to see the whole gang in a sequel or two. Well, I suppose there's always the "Planet of the Apes" style prequels...

...

*The third Alien movie, which didn't even have the excuse of being made in the 70s, was the absolute worst offender in this regard, having killed off characters we grew to love in the second movie for no other reason than that they were in the way of the plot, and the writer was too damn lazy to come up with any other solution. As far as I'm concerned, the series ended with the terrific "Aliens."