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Review: Terminator Salvation

The first “Terminator” movie came out in 1984 and helped to make James Cameron a household name. It would be seven years before “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” would grace the screens, again helmed by James Cameron, but those seven years were well-spent, as “T2” is largely considered the best movie in the franchise (and one of the best sci-fi movies of all time). “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” didn’t come until 2003, almost seen as a re-boot of the franchise, but this time without James Cameron directing. This one was decent, but probably the worst of the three.

Which brings us to 2009, and another re-boot of the franchise. “Terminator Salvation” takes place in 2018, after the machines under the control of Skynet had nuked the planet and started eradicating the human race (which the first three movies were trying to prevent). Basically, the first three movies centered around machines from the future sending back Terminators to the past to kill off John Connor, who would grow up to lead the resistance against Skynet. Well, all the details surrounding this fictional history are kinda complicated, but long-story-short, this most recent movie has jumped to the future where the actual resistance is occurring, giving us an idea of who this John Connor really is.

This movie, “Terminator Salvation,” probably falls somewhere between “The Terminator” and “Terminator 3” on my list of best movies in the franchise. It does many things well, including special effects and acting (especially in the case of Sam Worthington, a relative unknown that actually does a better job than Christian Bale, in my opinion). The story itself is mediocre, however. John Connor isn’t quite in control of the resistance, yet, but has many followers and commands much respect for his knowledge of the machines and Skynet. He learns that he and Kyle Reese (his father…as explained in the first movie…) are being targeted by Skynet, so he needs to find Kyle and save him. Marcus (played by Sam Worthington) is a new character that knows little of his past but, as we later find out (and as is implied in the previews), is actually a cyborg of sorts created by Skynet. John doesn’t trust Marcus, but from his previous experience with Terminators, knows that there are more to the machines than others think. John and Marcus, thus, work together to rescue Kyle from Skynet.

That whole “rescue” part is, by far, the best part of the movie. The whole first half sets things up, but pretty slowly. Once Marcus and John go after Kyle, we start seeing more Terminators, we get more action, and, in a particularly badass way, we get to see Arnold Schwarzenegger. How was this done? Well, advances in digital effects now allow a VERY convincing digital form of circa 1984 Arnold pasted on top of another actor. You have to see it to believe it. It’s uncanny.

Other than that, though, the movie is just “okay.” The effects are good, the acting is good, the dialog could be better, the story could be better.

In short, better than “Wolverine,” not as good as “Star Trek.” See it if you’re a fan of the franchise, but as you may have noticed from the description(s) above (if you even made it that far…), if you haven’t seen the previous three movies, “Salvation” won’t make much sense to you.

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Not quite how I remember it

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

This article in the New York Times outlines what an Explorers group (a Boy Scouts of America co-ed affiliate program) are doing in Imperial, TX. What is it these Explorers are doing? You know…camping, backpacking, getting leadership skills, etc?

Give up?

Being trained to fight terrorism and serve as border-patrol agents.

We’re talking 14- to 16-year-old kids using air pellet guns to learn to chase “down illegal border crossers” and to experience “more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out ‘active shooters,’ like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses.”

Now, I realize that not all Explorer posts are doing this, but at least according to the article, while there are other Explorer posts more focused in science, aviation and medicine, “more than 2,000 law enforcement posts across the country are the Explorers’ most popular, accounting for 35,000 of the group’s 145,000 members.”

I just generally don’t like it, but I’m not sure I have a valid reason. Many of the boys in my Boy Scout Troop growing up were the kinds of kids that went hunting with their fathers every Fall and didn’t generally go on to big name colleges, let alone graduate school. Law enforcement is certainly a viable career choice and well-suited to people that have gone through the Scouting program, but it somehow feels like these kids are being used as a breeding ground for more law enforcement agents. There are all kinds of other activities that the skills from Boy Scouts can be very useful, including leadership and survival skills, as well as the ability to cooperate with other people for common goals. These are abilities that lend themselves to a wide variety of jobs, not just law enforcement or military.

I guess I’d just like to see a bit more variety. And the idea of having 14-year-old kids learning to take down someone crossing into the United States illegally seems a bit excessive.

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More new toys…

So, you may remember awhile back when we picked up an Acer Aspire One netbook to replace Brooke’s current laptop. Well, that thing didn’t work very well…it couldn’t play an MP3 without skipping, couldn’t stream audio or video from websites, and just seemed overly slow overall. We returned it to Wal-Mart a few days after giving it a try, vowing to look into other options. Well, we later tried a few other netbooks that other people had, or at other stores, and decided that the one we had purchased earlier was just a lemon and it was worth getting something else.

Well, this time, we got a Dell Inspiron Mini 10. This one has nearly all the same features as the Aspire, but it has a 10″ screen (and a better keyboard, I think). This one is way better and does nearly everything it should. I’m not sure it streams video at full-screen mode perfectly yet, but it certainly does it better than the Aspire we tried earlier. Brooke took a picture of it with our new camera for your enjoyment.

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Speaking of “new camera,” we picked up one of those, too. 🙂

We bought a new point-and-shoot last year to replace Brooke’s old one, but we still haven’t been happy with it for certain applications. My Dad is something of a photography aficionado, and Brooke took a photography class back in high school, so we’ve both been exposed to the wonders of SLR photography. It’s something we’ve both wanted for awhile, but they haven’t been that reasonably priced until recently.

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This little bad boy is a Nikon D60 dSLR (we already had the cat…not anything new there…). We bought it as a bundle from Sam’s Club, so it came with a pretty decent lens that had VR (or “vibration reduction”) built-in (as Nikon, like Canon, builds that into the lens, not into the camera body). It’s a 10 MP camera and has all kinds of bells and whistles that I can’t begin to understand…but it seems to take decent pictures…

Brooke’s planning on re-doing her blog more along the lines of what The Pioneer Woman does (her most recent idol…), doing something involving photos taken on a daily basis, and sometimes taking pictures of her various food-based creations. We’ll see if it happens or not. 🙂

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Review: Star Trek

It’s no secret that I’m something of a “Star Trek” fan, and I’ve been looking forward to this movie ever since the first few images started coming out over year ago. Well, the day finally arrived and I saw it last night at 10:00 on a glorious IMAX screen…and lemme tell you, that’s a heckuva way to see it for the first time… 🙂

Basically, for those that don’t know, the story to the new movie is a prequel that goes back to the first voyage of the Enterprise, and how the “gang gets together.” In many ways, this movie actually mirrors the first feature film, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” in that the majority of the movie is spent getting everyone together to combat some evil that’s going to destroy Earth. The villain, Nero (Eric Bana), is good in his role, but it actually seems that he’s something of a minor character: someone that’s only in the movie to serve as a reason to get this origin story completed (as opposed to “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” where it was much more of a personal interaction between the crew and a particular villain). Don’t get me wrong: Eric Bana does an excellent job, but he may have been a touch underutilized.

But I digress. J.J. Abrams has put together a “Dream Team” of sorts to put together a compelling story that tells the tale of the Enterprise’s first mission. In particular, the back story of Spock and Kirk, their first meeting, and how they came to respect each other and solidify a friendship that would last 3 television seasons and over 6 films. The actors given these iconic roles pulled off the task admirably, making me forget entirely that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy weren’t the primary players in these roles (although, Nimoy does play Spock in the movie…). It’s said that Chris Pine (who plays Kirk) hadn’t really watched much “Star Trek” before being given the role, and it probably did him well because he made Kirk his own character: one where we could see a glimpse of what Shatner did for 3 decades, but something fresh and new. Zachary Quinto (who plays Spock) pulled it off beautifully, to the point where I couldn’t imagine anyone else taking on that mantle.

As the previews suggest, the effects are nothing short of spectacular. ILM did them this time around (they haven’t since, like, Star Trek: First Contact) and it really shows: I knew it was all CGI, but at the same time, it looked real enough that I was completely immersed in the experience. The ship battles were reminiscent of the new “Battlestar Galactica,” with much closer those of the ships, making things seem quite a bit more chaotic than in traditional “Star Trek” shows and movies. Personally, I find this to be a welcome change.

The movie was also genuinely funny. Not that it was trying to hard (as some lines from the Next Generation movies seemed to be…), but actually laugh-out-loud hilarious. The required “I’m a doctor, not a physicist” and “I’m not sure she can take anymore, Captain!” lines were in there, as well, and the audience cheered each time. The interactions between Bones (played by Karl Urban), Spock and Kirk made me think [DeForest] Kelley, Nimoy and Shatner were delivering them – the delivery, and the writing, were that “spot on.”

Another aspect I liked about the movie was the sense of scale. Because of all those close-up shots of the ship, you got the impression that these things were huge. We didn’t see much of the interior of the ship, besides the bridge, the hallways, and sick bay, but engineering is the one that stands out as getting a massive overhaul. Rather than a room with a blue-ish warp core in the center, now we’ve got a sprawling, factory-like room full of knobs, bells, whistles, etc. You know, like a modern aircraft carrier would have. It just seems a bit more realistic that a room of that size would be required to actually run a star ship.

The thing fans will have to wrestle with is the complete re-writing of “future history,” in that this movie essentially turns Star Trek Canon upon its head. I’m not really sure how else the movie could have been done, personally, so it doesn’t bother me so much. They do address the change(s) in the movie, suggesting “alternate realities,” etc. If you see it, and know anything about Star Trek, you’ll know what I mean…

In summary: the movie is badass. Go see it. I don’t care if you don’t like Star Trek or not. It’s just that good of a movie.

Think of it this way: “The Dark Knight” got a 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 264 reviews) and “Star Trek” is currently sitting at 96% (out of 219 reviews). Whether you like science fiction or not, it’s a great movie and a great re-imagining of the franchise.

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Playing For Change

Brooke was listening to Morning Edition this morning and heard this article about “Playing For Change.”

The general premise is that Mark Johnson, a producer in California, got this crazy idea to record street musicians performing well-known songs (like “Stand By Me,” above). The hook of this is that he (and his crew) traveled the world and recorded other street musicians singing/performing the same song, and then edited them together.

Really, it’s a neat idea and it gets you thinking about how a simple thing like music can bring people of completely different cultures, creeds and colors together like never before. The video above went viral on YouTube awhile back, but there are 6 other episodes on the website. They also have a CD/DVD available for purchase.

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Review: X-men Origins – Wolverine

One of the first movies to start the “super hero movie craze,” way back in 2000, was “X-Men” (followed shortly thereafter by “Spider-Man” in 2002, which really got it going). Arguably, the breakout star of “X-Men” was Hugh Jackman, who played the iconic role of Wolverine…and pretty damned well, by all accounts.

Well, after two more X-Men movies, they’d either killed off the most famous X-Men, or pissed off the stars enough that they weren’t going to return for another one…leaving the franchise-runners an interesting option: prequels. Thus begins a new series of movies under the “X-men Origins” heading, the first of which is “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (“X-Men Origins: Magneto” is currently in early production). Hugh Jackman was happy to reprise the role, and since the comic book hero, Wolverine, doesn’t really “age” in a traditional way, it wasn’t too big a stretch to have him act in a prequel.

The movie itself is loosely based on the “Weapon X” mini-series of Marvel Comics that essentially sought to explain how Wolverine was given his adamantium skeleton and claws (as they aren’t really a part of his mutant powers – they were grafted onto him in a particularly painful procedure referred to in “X2: X-Men United.” By “loosely,” I mean that William Stryker (the main bad guy) was in the comics, but never as the leader of the Weapon X program. The mutants that appear in the movie (including Deadpool and Agent Zero) were indeed involved in Weapon X, but not to the same extent as in the comic. Oh yeah, and Gambit…not so much in those series…

All that plot shenanigans aside, how was the movie? Well…it was alright…

The story mostly made sense…the effects were generally cool…and the fight scenes were pretty sweet… Hugh Jackman was mostly born to play Wolverine, and I can’t imagine anyone else in the role. The other characters, on the other hand, just weren’t in the movie all that much. Like, Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) was only in the movie for, like, 10 minutes. The actual history of Wolverine and his brother, Victor, was given during the credits rather than in a series of scenes. They compressed a relatively complex story into a two-hour time frame that probably should have been split into two movies, as they had to devote a lot of the time that could have been given to plot into fight scenes. Essentially, I just think the movie could have been a lot better (and garner higher reviews) if they developed the characters over a longer period of time. They just tried to do too much with a limited time-frame.

And while the effects were generally excellent, they really need to consider using actual claws on the close-up shots, ’cause those CGI claws only look good at a distance.

Anyway, even with all those qualms, I’m glad I saw it. It was a fun movie and I wasn’t expecting anything Oscar-worthy. If you liked the previous movies, you’ll probably like this (and I think this was better than “X-Men: The Last Stand,” if that means anything to you). I just hope they focus more on the story for the “Magneto” movie, as his story especially would be done a disservice to focus more on action sequences, rather than his life and friendship with Charles Xavier.

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A Technical Note

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and, while the site appears to generally work, it has started loading _really_ slowly. So yeah, it isn’t just you…

At this point, I think it’s the computer itself, not the ‘net connection, as it takes awhile for it to load when I’m pulling it in from within my own network.

I’ll figure it out. Eventually. 🙂

(on another note, I just bought tickets for ‘Star Trek‘ at the Ronnie’s 20 IMAX for next Thursday, May 7th, at 10:00 PM. w00t!!)

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My Top 10

So, in preparation for the greatest day of my life, I’ve been watching all 10 previous films in order. I just finished “Insurrection” last night, so “Nemesis” is the only one left (and will probably have to wait until this weekend before I can get to it).

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually ranked them in my order of preference, so here goes:

1). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
2). Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
3). Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
4). Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
5). Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
6). Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
7). Star Trek Generations (1994)
8). Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
9). Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
10). Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

As you can see, they definitely follow with the “even numbered films are better than odd numbered films” rule of Star Trek movies. Really, “First Contact” and “IV” should probably be tied, as they’re pretty close together, but “First Contact” really is a great movie in its own right. “VI” is one I’ve always liked, especially after watching the “making of” featurette and realizing it was almost entirely based on the Cold War (I was 9 when it came out…didn’t quite catch the symbolism…), but mainly because it was SO MUCH BETTER than the movie that preceded it.

Anyway, that’s my list. Just figured I should put it out there… 😛