Yan Feldman as Mingo
Rafael Feldman as Fanty
The movie faced a challenge: sell the universe of a short-lived cult show to a broad audience, without alienating the original fans. This raised the likelihood that the film would begin with the Grand Crawl of Infodump that has cursed SF and fantasy films since the original
Star Wars (which at least had the excuse that it was imitating the old serials). Whedon rises to the challenge, and begins
Serenity with a clever sequence that draws us further into his world. An infodump voice-over becomes a classroom teacher speaking over a holographic projection. Her debate with the young River Tam becomes a memory of the teenaged River s, who is the subject of experiments that resemble an SF-amplified MKULTRA. We then see Simon Tam s rescue of his sister, referenced but never seen in the original series. Their escape becomes, in turn, a security record examined by a sinister character called the Operative. The Operative, played with disturbin