A few weeks ago I told you that Yummy and I watched the original Terminator movie. She was house/dog sitting for someone over the weekend and they had Terminator 2 and 3. So we watched both of them before watching Terminator 4 which just opened in theaters.
The reviews for this movie have been pretty bad. We were warned against seeing it pretty strongly. But having seen 1-3 we felt compelled to see it. And really, it wasn't that bad. You do have to know what to expect. This is Terminator, not Shakespeare. We're not shooting for an academy award with this movie. Like the previous movies it's first and foremost an action movie. What makes them better than other action movies is an element of the storyline that makes you think.
Terminator 1: Bang, pow, hurt, by sending someone back in time to kill the mother of their greatest foe the machines ended up creating that which they wanted to destroy. Time travel paradoxes were fairly new to movies when the first one came out and it kinda blew peoples minds.
Terminator 2: Bang, pow, hurt, if the machines hadn't sent someone back in time we wouldn't have developed the technology to create the machines.
Terminator 3: Bang, pow, hurt, those sent back to protect John Connor from the machines were only there to protect him. There was never any hope of stopping the machines. We reach the climax of the movie with John Connor and friend breaking into what they think is a NORAD type hardened bunker that is the home of Skynet. Instead it's just an abandoned bunker where they can survive. That shock helps you forget how much you disliked the robot chick. So it's just a different kind of mind fuck.
I'm not gonna tell you much about T4. If you've seen the trailers you already know that one of the central characters is a robot with a human mind and organs who doesn't realize he's a robot. When you reach the end of movie you find an elaborate story about plots and counterplots and counter-counterplots.
At first I was blown away by the appearance of what I thought was a completely digital Arnold Schwarzenegger. The physical proportions seemed a bit off, but it looked like a real human being and I know Arnold isn't that buff or young any more. But I did a bit of research and it looks like they got a real human and put Arnold's face on him.
The digital people shown in "The Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris" were pretty damn convincing. Sometimes they looked real, other times they didn't. I had hoped that they'd made enough progress to get a realistic looking digital Arnold. No such luck.
T4 can be watched without having seen the previous three.
I won't be getting this on DVD but I am glad that I went to see it.
I am a bit annoyed that Fox canceled the Terminator TV series "The Sarah Connor Chronicles". It was a surprisingly good show.
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