we have an emotional invenstment in not just the story but the success of the film.

I have an emotional involvement in the weather. Oddly enough, it continues to rain and shine without paying any heed.

You can make the case that the TV show Firefly was never given a fair chance. You can't make the same case for the movie Serenity. If it does less well than we'd all hoped, well, that's show business. Great movies tank all the time. Casablanca (and I don't place Serenity at the same level) wasn't an All-Time-Classic when it came out. (Ask me about Faerie Tale if you want to hear about truly disastrous marketing.)

You can make the case that the TV show Firefly was never given a fair chance. You can't make the same case for the movie Serenity. If it does less well than we'd all hoped, well, that's show business.

Yes. This. I'm tickled pink to see the advertising blitz--on networks! Hit shows! Everywhere!

It's that time. Joss has been given the chance and his work is being held up to that standard. You can't win every movie goer over. It can't be done. And to think that you can is just craxy. I'm spreading word here in town, but I'm not promising people the moon. I don't want to set someone up for something they might not like. Viewers need to judge the work for themselves and not be judged on what they think.

FWIW, I think Joss should be proud that so many critics seem to like the film. It is really easy to make a shitty movie and Serenity isn't.

We've seen Simon be violent before in the defense of River ("Safe", "Ariel", "Objects in Space") and even for the sake of the captain ("War Stories". Even though he didn't kill anyone, he still shot at them with intent to do so.) So punching Mal in the movie did not seem out of character to me. It just told me "Woah, Simon is really pissed off."

We've seen Simon be violent before in the defense of River

We've even seen him be violent in pilot!Serenity, when he jumped on Dobbs (?) and then pulled a gun on him. Maybe not the most effective violence, but still....

I'm hoping Serenity will do well in foreign markets, DVD sales and merchandising of cunning hats.

I wonder how well it will do in foreign markets. For me, the writing, especially the humor, is one of the most important parts of the movie, and I'm not sure how well that will translate, even to other English speaking markets. I'm not saying it won't, only that it's not clear to me. On the other hand, I heard somewhere that it only needs to make $50-80 million for a sequel. I would love it to do better than that, but wouldn't it likely get to that range with an opening weekend of $13 million? I don't generally follow box office, so I'm not sure how much of a drop off there usually is. I know lots of people (non-Browncoats) who haven't seen it yet but are planning to, though.

Well, Joss did say that he would be able to have Wash and Book in any sequel, so he wouldn't have to go down the prequel route.

Flashbacks.

There's no other way I would have felt terror for each and every BDH, watching the gang make a last stand against the reavers. Nobody was safe.

This is why I don't get when people say that Wash's death was less plot related than Book's. Plotwise, while Haven needed to be hit, neither character really needed to die, and I would argue that Wash's death was more important in terms of the characters and the movie as a whole than Book's was.

By mere coincidence, I started watching "Da Vinci's Inquest" this evening and who did I see? Jewel Staite.

BTW, did you know this about Jewel (from IMDB):

Gained 20 lbs for the part of Kaylee in the TV series "Firefly" (2002/I). When the show was later adapted into a motion picture (Serenity (2005)), the show had been over for a little while and she had lost the weight. She was told that they weren't going to give anyone else the part anyway, so she didn't have to re-gain the weight.

I had heard this. I thought she looked better with the 20 pounds, but Mal did say that they were short on food, and it sounds like the intervening six months were pretty rough, so it works for me.

Here's my take, libkitty, on why Book's death helped drive the plot of the movie in a way Wash's didn't... obviously, this is simply my interpretation:

By the time Wash was killed, the plot had been fairly well played out - the crew didn't need Wash to die in order to get to the final showdown; they were headed there with or without him. They did, though, need Book's death (as a micro-level representation of what happened to all of the people/communities they had sought shelter with and, presumably, cared about in some manner) to have Mal become so enraged that he'd choose at that point to respond so aggressively to the threat that the Operative represented rather than just try to keep running and hiding, or, hell, even turn River over. That reaction of Mal's and his decision made out of that rage, for which Book's death was the catalyst, led them to Miranda, the next stop along the plot line.

Wash's death is less related to moving along the plot (which is almost completed by the time he dies), specifically, and more related to emotional impact on the characters and the audience. The two deaths are just used differently, in my opinion. I don't think one was more or less important; I just think they each served a different purpose. I don't have a problem with the fact that Wash's death wasn't a key plot point. It was plenty pointy anyway, emotionally.

I would argue that Wash's death was more important in terms of the characters and the movie as a whole than Book's was.

How so in terms of the movie as a whole?