A Tale of Two Movies

[minor spoilers …]


Watched two summer flicks over the past week. Sadly, the wife and I don’t go out to see movies much* since the birth of our second little one, otherwise I would have seen both a few months back on the big screen. One film was a little worse than I thought it would be, the other was a whole lot better.

Terminator Salvation is a grim and gritty amble into the near future, where mankind, on the verge of extinction, is fighting with AI machines for mere survival. Everything is dirty and unpleasant. The story, thankfully, is not one of those convoluted time travel plots that are the basis of all the previous Terminator movies. This time the machines focus on attempting to kill Kyle Reese, John Connor’s teen-age father-to-be, in the present year, 2017 or so.

I mean, it was a good movie, worth a see, I guess. I liked the towering roaming robotic machines – they reminded me full-force of the nightmarish tripods from Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. There’s also an Arnold cameo, which left me wanting more. The special effects are as good as could be expected; nothing looked phony or cheesy. There is a very interesting new character who has about as much screen time as Christian Bale.

But there is a lot wrong with Salvation. First off, all the Terminator models had starring roles or cameos, except the molten-metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick’s character from T2). I mean, come on! And there is a “new” Terminator model that’s supposed to come as a surprise to the audience and shock us with the cruelty of the machines. It does neither. There’s a ho-hum ubiquitous testosterone chick, those muscled, tough gals that you see ad nauseum in every science fiction movie since Ripley in Aliens. Overall, the film feels long and everyone just takes too much of a beating.

What went wrong most, for me, was casting Christian Bale as John Connor. I know he’s been picking a certain sort of role lately, but he brings such grim joylessness to every character he plays. That anger of his that leaked out last February always seems just under the surface in all his portrayals, and it gets to be kind of a downer. Hey, Chris, you can turn down the intensity level now and then. Real people are not always set to eleven, you know.

A few days later we watched Star Trek, the J. J. Abrams reboot of the franchise. I went into it thinking it was going to stink really bad. Or at least I wouldn’t get it – my wife kept warning me it was aimed at a younger generation. You know, like people half my age and younger. And I was pleasantly surprised: it was quite the entertaining flick.

The movie tells the origin story of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et al. From Kirk’s days as a wild young Iowan and Spock’s emotionless rebellion on Vulcan, to their meeting at Starfleet Academy and aboard the Enterprise. But things do not go as buddy-buddy as we’re accustomed to between the captain and his first officer. In fact, Kirk isn’t even supposed to be on board the starship, and Spock comes very close to killing him. More than once. There are some very nasty baddies in an H. R. Giger-inspired spacecraft, CGI monsters, and a beloved place in the Trekkian universe gets surprisingly obliterated.

Yeah, there’s a time travel element to the story that convolutes things a bit, the bad guy leader, Eric Bana, is tad bit under-developed (or too cartoonish), and the CGI monsters are a little too Syfy channel. There are a couple of unorthodox relationships (well, one really) that purists won’t dig. Leonard Nimoy and his dentures make a geriatric cameo. But right from the opening minutes until the movie’s end I was riveted. The ships and the weapons technology were very, very cool.

I really liked it. I may or may not see Terminator Salvation again (it depends on which channel its on in about two years, and what else is on the other channels. But I’d rent Star Trek again, and maybe even pick up the DVD down the road.

Verdict:

Terminator Salvation: C plus
Star Trek: A minus


* We probably averaged 6 movies a year for the first six years together. Then, children came, and, well, you know the rest. Now we see one or two each, usually me with my buddy or my wife with one of her chick friends, while the homebound spouse stays home at watches the little eggs.