Terminator

Just in time for Christmas, one of my favourite movies of 2009 is now out on DVD and BluRay - Terminator Salvation.

After the three original movies focussed on John Connor getting a) born, and b) living past Judgement Day, Salvation brings us right into the middle of the war against the machines. Connor is a soldier in the human resistance, and Kyle Reese is still just a teenager.

I had to share this video this morning - it's from the people at How It Should Have Ended, who make funny videos with alternate endings to popular movies.

Their latest takes the two best-known time travel movies and mashes them up, with SkyNet sending a cyborg killer back to kill the inventor of Time Travel - Dr Emmett Brown. Enjoy!

After hearing mixed reviews about Terminator Salvation, and harbouring a healthy dose of scepticism for the idea of a new Terminator trilogy, I went to see the movie last night.

'Salvation' jumps right into the middle of the war between humans and SkyNet, giving us Christian Bale as a grown-up John Connor. Connor is more than aware of his own legend. He still listens to those old tapes his mother made for him. He still carries around that old photo of Sarah taken by a kid in a Mexican gas station in 1984. In a nice piece of continuity with T-3, he's married to Kate, presumably Catherine Brewster as the Terminator in the last movie predicted.

Plot

The plot revolves around a Death Row inmate called Marcus Wright, who signed his body over to Cyberdyne Systems. The body was later used to create a prototype Terminator infiltration unit that was a hybrid of human and robot. Unlike other Terminator units, Marcus retained his name and his memories, and until captured by Connor's unit, believes that he's human.

The Guardian examines why Terminator Salvation received such a critical bashing. In an interesting article, David Cox suggests that the threat of cyborg invasion has been watered down significantly since Arnold Schwarznegger's T-800 blasted onto cinema screens back in 1984.

When you consider the intervening 25 years have bled stories of artificial intelligence and post-apocalyptic human slavery dry - check The Matrix, I, Robot and many, many more - perhaps the one thing the Terminator is vulnerable to is the jaded cinemagoer.

The second (and final) series of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles ended with a bang, didn't it? I know I'm late to the table with this review, but I drifted off the show for a few weeks and spent a bit of time catching up today.

It's been remarked upon constantly that the series really recovered its credibility in the last few episodes, and the final two episodes were a brilliant return to form. The shocking death of Derek Reese, the frightening escalation in John Henry's abilities and an attack from a futuristic attack vehicle on Catherine Weaver's office all contributed to a stunning conclusion of the series. Hell, even The Turk from the first series made an appearance!

Airlock Alpha reports that while Fox are considering renewing Dollhouse, but the signs are growing that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will be cancelled after this the current run.

The article reports that the show’s low ratings and high production costs coupled with the forthcoming Terminator Salvation movie are contributing factors for the show being cancelled:

Once "Salvation" premieres, it seems Warner Bros. will have little use to keep "Sarah Connor" on the air, and likely will not continue to provide a licensing fee discount for a third season. That almost assuredly will allow Fox to make the move it normally would've done before New Year's, and that's cancel the show.

As I’ve watched the second series, I’ve found myself wondering what the hell the producers and scriptwriters were thinking. They had some interesting storylines to play with - Catherine Weaver’s experiments with the rebadged Cromartie were thought provoking, making us wonder if Cromartie’s connection to the Internet and his rapid learning rate would make him the prototype for SkyNet.

Jesse, having Riley's freshly shot corpse in her bedroom, has been busy straightening up and buying an exact replica of the table that got destroyed in the last episode. Today Is The Day contains the following:

• Sarah and Derek separately suspect that Cameron killed Riley. Sarah tries to convince John  that Cameron cannot fully be trusted, especially after she discovers Cameron's stash of spare parts.
• Ellison has to work out John Henry's riddles in order to find Weaver's daughter Savanah, who has gone missing in the office building.
• Jesse starts a fight in a bar as a cover story for the cuts on her face. She also has a series of flashbacks to a submarine operation in the future where a reprogrammed Terminator seemingly double-crossed his human handlers. She uses this as a rationale to Derek that Cameron needs to be dealt with.
• John visits Riley's body in the morgue and discovers the cuts on her hands and face. It's not clear whether he still is starting to suspect Cameron.

After several less than exciting episodes, Ourselves Alone returns the Connor clan to their murky, badly lit house. Two big things are going on - Cameron is glitching: she's got pigeon-crushing hand spasms, and suicidal future-girl Riley pays a visit on John, but receives a frosty welcome from Sarah.

Now, by this stage, it's clear that Jesse and Riley are involved in some human-led futuristic plot involving John. What I'm not clear on is whether Uncle Derek is involved or has any idea what's going on. For the moment he seems content to pick random people from the phonebook and spy on them in case they're involved with SkyNet. Ho hum...

Sarah Connor is having trouble sleeping. Which is funny, because if she had to sit through the monologue she gave at the start of this episode, she'd nod off within minutes. That rambling intro could match one of Mohinder Suresh's duller introductions in Heroes.

To get some rest, she checks into a sleep clinic. But, in the tradition of Sarah Connor Chronicles, she walks straight into a SkyNet experiment. The sleep center which is monitoring the sleep states of its patients is also surreptitiously recording brain data for some strange reason.

In between times, Sarah returns to the nightmares she's been experiencing. Except they play out in a linear pattern, giving a story within a story. Here Sarah confronts the man she shot in the desert factory a few weeks back.

In the aftermath of the explosion at the desert factory, the Connor crew visit the town where the factory employees lived. They mingle with the grieving relatives in the town square. Sarah meets the wife of the man she killed at the factory, who seems totally oblivious to the fact that he was an evil expendable henchman (all those Austin Powers jokes about henchmen's families coming back now?)

Many reviewers are aghast at Sarah Connor Chronicles, and this episode could be at the epicenter of their irritation. Where last week's episode had Sarah mostly talking for ages to a cross-dresser/transsexual, this week she has endless boring discussion with the woman she unknowingly made a widow.