I am not a browncoat. Not even a digital one.

And yet Wednesday night, at a screening of the upcoming movie Serenity, I found myself surrounded by them.

Browncoats are the fans of a science fiction series with an even shorter life than the Star Trek cartoon series: Firefly. The screening was the tail end of an innovative marketing campaign, designed to spread word-of-mouth among fans, and to take advantage of their feedback. Read more about the phenomenon, here.

Judging both by the results, and the enthusiasm of the fans, I'd say they've succeeded. One high-schooler I spoke with claimed to have seen the film four times. "We got to meet some of the actors, too. Dorks. We're just total dorks," he said, as only one confidently 'bedorked' can.

Firefly was canceled after 11 episodes - currently being rerun on the SciFi Channel - but the sharp dialogue and down-to-earth characters earned the show the dreaded cult following. The crewmembers on Captain Malcom Reynolds's Serenity are losers in a solar civil war, reduced to being outlaws to make ends meet. They're also harboring a psychic, trained to be a lethal fighting weapon (being a psychic would help in, say, anticipating your adversary's next move). The winners in the civil war, the Alliance, have dispatched a British-accented assassin to track down and kill the psychic before she can be turned against the Alliance.

The producers are smart enough to understand that they'll need to expand their audience beyond the fan base of the half-season TV series, all of which is explained in a pre-credits 15-minute sequence. All I can say is watch those transitions.

The film itself follows Serenity as it fights to survive while unraveling a terrible secret about the Alliance. That secret involves yet another party, not a side in the civil war, the "Reevers," monsters who could be Orcs Release 7.0, but who, in fact, are human.

Serenity works on two levels: as an ensemble piece about Serenity and its insubordinate crew, and about the nature of the perfectibility of man. Like most one-part ensemble pieces, there's no time for more than a facet or two of each character. But since stories about leadership are more interesting than stories about followers, we get to see more of Reynolds' wrinkles than the other characters.

While the crew acts as voices for the conflicting values that Reynolds must balance, it's not as though they don't have personalities. They're all likeable, and the Browncoats' affection for them is palpable. The witty, smart dialogue doesn't reduce them all to smart-alecks, but...