Use of transitions in "Serenity"

Joss Whedon's "Serenity", the sequel to the series "Firefly" uses four distinct different scenes in the opening. What interested me about this was the transitions between these, which were all done in an incredibly smooth and planned out manner, and is very effective at linking together seemingly irrelevant scenes.

The film starts with an overview of the Serenity galaxy, explaining how humans dominated the skies. the camera zooms out, revealing the entire scene to have been an educational video, where a young River, who becomes one of the crew of Serenity, is being educated. River speaks up against the teacher, who then stabs River in the head with her pen. The mise-en scene all changes besides River, who now has a needle, not a pen in her forehead, and is strapped to a chair in a laboratory. She then escapes with the help of her brother, and before they get away, the film rewinds, zooming out to reveal that someone is viewing their escape through a 3D security camera tape. Although only simple cuts have mainly been used, each one fits together very fluidly. This has the effect of showing that the time, place, and characters have all changed, but link each one together, explaining a complex story.

I am studying this because we are near the end of the editing for our thriller, and transitions are one of the things we need to smooth out, and so learning this new techniques could be beneficial to the thriller. However, all of our shots are in the same place, time and star the same character, so if transitions are treated anything like the average paragraph (which from experience I think they are) then there should only be a fade in/out, fluid transition, etc when the place, time or protagonist change. We are currently looking to cut between shots on the beat of the song we have chosen, (which has been finalized as "The Four Of Us Are Dying") which will have the effect of engaging the audience and combining the non-diegetic sound and video to make them fit smoothly together and seem natural.