First of all, when mourning your favourite TV show, heading to TWoP to read episode threads to see if there are any insights there that you might have missed is not the best idea.
It fills one, it filled me, with a sense of melancholy and loss that is most unpleasant. There are ways in which I am glad that TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES has ended as it has - on a high note, having done honour to the characters of Sarah and John Connor; having added to Jim Cameron's story and, in some ways, surpassed it by demonstrating that you can stay true to the story without being beholden to it.
I thank Josh Friedman and his writers and Lena Headey and the cast and crew for giving Sarah Connor (and John) back to me. TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES reintroduced me to a favourite story I had lost. And the care and attention and respect Josh Friedman and his cast and crew gave these characters is something that FOX cannot cancel. As the song says, even if we never meet again on the bumpy road to love, this is something that I'll always have the memory of...
Looking ahead (and I find it terribly ironic that, in canceling TSCC, Kevin Reilly has created the type of fan movement that he credited, however mendaciously and facetiously, for encouraging FOX to renew DOLLHOUSE), the next TERMINATOR movie, and there will be another (I'll get to that in a moment), has the potential to be something truly extraordinary if Halcyon and McG have the wisdom to look at how Josh Friedman and his writers room pushed the boundaries of what makes a TERMINATOR story beyond an endless series of chase flicks and explosions.
And if they have the wit to solicit a pitch from Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz, who surprised me by becoming the franchise players of the TSCC writing room (and are the sort of major league TERMINATOR fanboys you need to make these movies work), even better.
And in the meantime, can anyone tell me what the hell Catherine Weaver's game was? And why did Cameron go back to the future? Anyone? Anyone?
Bueller?
A gaggle of friends and I went to see TERMINATOR SALVATION last night.
Going to see the soulless big-screen version of your dearly-loved, character-driven TV show is also not a good way to mourn the latter. But, contrary to what you might have heard, TERMINATOR SALVATION is not a terrible movie.
Unfortunately, it is not a good movie, either.
The theatrical release of TERMINATOR: SALVATION falls into the great, mediocre middle-ground of summer movies: far better than WOLVERINE, failing where NuTREK succeeded in making well-traveled characters seem fresh and, more importantly, relevant, but visually arrested and genuinely thrilling in a 'wave your hands in the air and gasp' way.
For all that, I have never seen a movie that has been quite so aggressively or obviously edited to death. Action sequences flow with a deft flare that is better than anything in either Wolverine or NuTrek: surprising coming from McG, who's aesthetic work on Charlie's Angel's was unremarkable at best. The movie's look at feel is so good that it's hard to believe the character stuff is so bad. It makes me wonder if, like Ridley Scott's KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, there is a better movie, about 20 minutes longer, that the studio wasn't prepared to release - possibly terrified that, after the similarly grim WATCHMEN failed to break wide, they needed to get as many asses in seats in that all-important first weekend.
Still, there is stuff to like about TERMINATOR SALVATION (and I want to make clear that TS is a far, far better movie than the ponderous WATCHMEN): unlike TERMINATOR 3, TS takes the TERMINATOR story seriously. In addition to the best action sequences I've seen this year, TS lacks the self-referential winking, irony infesting so many action films like Athletes Foot these days and that's a good thing: this is a story about people facing extinction and it takes that idea seriously (something NuTREK with its 'don't worry, feel happy' approach to surviving genocide would have done well to consider). It also takes the machines themselves seriously - McG conjures up a few scare moments as the machines go after the human characters, making me jump in my seat and gasp (and then grin).
Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin and Moon Bloodgood all acquit themselves well, although Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard seem to have had their roles cut to the bone, making judging whether or not they're good in their roles a bit like judging a skeleton in a beauty contest. Without the flesh, good bone structure and bad bone structure look a lot alike.
Would I see TERMINATOR SALVATION again? Yes, I would. As I said, it's generally thrilling in places and the current edit actually makes a movie that you can take your nine or 10-year-old to see and which they, probably far more than I, would find thrilling.
No, it's not THE TERMINATOR and it's not TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES but it's not TERMINATOR 3, either.
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