The Legend of Zorro vs. Serenity

Well, as you know there are only three things to do in this town. Go to Wal-mart, watch stop-lights change colors, and go to the movie theater. I don't know about you, but personally, I prefer watching movies to watching stop-lights. As does the rest of the family, so consequently we go to see a lot of movies. In case you didn't know already, the theater here only has two screens, and the movies come into town quite a long time after they've been released everywhere else in the world. So last week we trooped out to go see Serenity, and this last weekend we saw Zorro II. What a contrast, lemme tell ya!
On the one hand, Serenity was amazing! Pretty good special effects, a pretty original plot, good acting, some cool fight scenes, and this really funny guy named Jayne who has the hilariousest lines!
On the other hand we have Zorro II, the needlessly resurrected movie with Antonia Banderas (+) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (-). There seems to be a recent trend in movies to have the Americans be the amazing, wonderful, sovereign people who just want to help everyone else, and the evil European group/guild/league/club who wants to blow up, destroy, ruin, steal from, etc America. Take National Treasure, Batman, and this movie, Zorro II, for example (Not to mention an annoying number of Two Movies; Zorro II, Shrek 2, The Mask II, Ocean's 12, Italian Job II is coming out, along with a number of others. Can't they come up with something new?). Zorro II, The Legend of Zorro, is about Zorro helping the Mexican people to become Americans, which has always been their life-long dream. Riiight. That's just plain stupid. They're trying to make out like the Mexicans actually wanted to become Americans instead of us forcing them to. So in that area, it's off historically, not to mention that they go on and on about the Confederacy and the Confederates 11 years before the Civil War. The brick wall in the middle of nowhere was also very convenient for Zorro when there's a giant explosion. Zorro's son is also present in this movie, altho he doesn't know his father is actually Zorro. Who wants to be the next movie will be Son of Zorro? Okay, enough about Zorro. It was cheesy, ridiculous, had some funny parts, and the horse was cool, but as a whole, I didn't like it too much. Let's go back to the first hand. Serenity.
Serenity is about this girl named River who's a psychic, mentally unstable, seriously cool karate girl who is being sheltered by the ship Serenity's inhabitants, a group of smugglers. Mal (short for Malcolm, not Malerie. It took me a while to figure that one out), who is uncannily like Han Solo, and his colorful crew, have taken River Tam and her brother, Simon in, but they are ruthless pursued by the evil Empire-I mean Alliance. I said it was somewhat original. So Mal has to make a choice about whether or not to continue protecting them, or for the sake of practical self-preservation, to dump them. Plenty of action, and shoot-em-up scenes, and River has two very cool fight scenes where she fights like, a bazillion guys all at once. I looked the actress who play River up on IMDB, and I found out she's a ballerina, which explains all the cool moves and the incredible amount of grace and agility. Summer Glau, the girl who plays River, did an uncannily good job at playing a psycho person. The Reavers were..umm...weird and sick and gross and that's all I'm going to say about them. Moving on...I liked the twist at the end, I wasn't expecting it. I love movies with unexpected twists. And the jump scenes! Hoo boy, the JUMP SCENES! They were amazing! I wasn't expecting any of them! Anyway, as a whole, I enjoyed Serenity very much. It was entertaining, funny, and the director kept the plot moving. Of course it can't measure up to movies like Lord of the Rings or War of the Worlds, but then again, no movie ever could-to me at least. The verdict on a scale from 1 to 5 with 5 being high:

Serenity: 4
Zorro: 2

Your ever-the-movie-critic blogger,

Katy