John Berry
5 – 23 - 09
----------OK so I am on a bit of a work vacation over here on the west coast. As such I am out of touch with my comic book shop and my movie schedule. I finally got to see Terminator Salvation last night at the 9:20 showing in a theater in San Leandro. Don’t ask me where that is, I can only tell you that it is about 30 minutes from Oakland California. I am working on a sculpture commission of Marylyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin that seems to never end. As such I have been falling behind on my publishing schedule. Ninja Shminja will get a couple page bump next week to catch up.
---------Now lets get down to brass tacks. Terminator. I liked it. I am not saying it was the greatest thing to happen to the franchise. But it was a fun ride. The pacing was good. I rank it below T2 and far above T3. T1 is still of course the king of Terminator movies. My hopes are that this movie will generate enough buzz to get Fox to bring back the Sarah Conner Chronicles. That poor show was a victim of the Friday night slot of death. Why is it that Fox puts every good sci-fi show on Friday night and then cancel them when the ratings tank? Digression has occurred. Lets bring it back to Terminator Salvation. To me the future did not seem as dire as the previous Terminators portrayed it to be. According to the movie humans held pieces of territory that Skynet couldn’t penetrate. I always thought of the human resistance as being a bunch of dirty tunnel dwellers popping out of the sewers attacking with molotov cocktails. In this they commanded a good amount of military hardware. So that was different than I imagined. I liked the whole prophecy aspect of the movie. Usually prophecy doesn’t belong in hard-core sci-fi genre, however they set it up with previous movies and time travel. Seeing Arnie in his prime as a CG model was cool. It certainly sets the stage for sci-fi sagas in general. Once you make it so dead thespians can still be used it opens up some options. I am sure we will see more of this in the future.
----------I felt like the acting was good. Bale was believable. The lack of a big love story was refreshing. It was nice to see he had his woman and she was pregnant. This was all good, but where they excelled was by not chewing up a bunch of screen time with a romantic storyline. So many times I will see a movie and the creators must have felt compelled to put in a love story even though it is irrelevant and a waste of screen time. In closing I would say this movie is a nice addition to the Terminator franchise. If you are a fan you will probably like it. If you are not a fan, I don’t know anybody who isn’t even my mom likes Terminator, then maybe you don’t need to see it. McG still has to make up for the Charlie’s Angels films, however this was a step in the right direction in my opinion.
----------Next week I will be in SoCal and will have access to my full collection of comics so I will dig up some obscure titles and talk about them.
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