August 12, 2008 - 1:43 am - Posted by Administrator
The fourth installment of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation is presently scheduled to be released in the summer of 2009, pushed back from an original Christmas 2008 release date. If first appearances are any indication, this installment will be a whole new beginning for the Terminator series.
For the first time, John Connor [Christian Bale–Dark Knight, Reign of Fire] will be the star of the show. No Arnold. For the first time, the Terminator world will be post-apocalypse, not a present day teetering perilously close to the brink.
In the trailer John Connor’s voiceover says “This is not the future my mother warned me about.” I’m running on pure speculation here, but I believe he is making reference to a darker, more horrific vision of the Terminator universe. The trailer seems to insinuate that John (and most of humanity for that matter) is a prisoner in a Skynet prison. He must escape with a female companion–likely Bryce Dallas Howard in the role of Kate Connor first played by Claire Danes in Terminator 3. Together they must face a post-apocalyptic world which Sarah conveniently forgot to tell John about.
According to a blog entry by director McG at the Terminator Salvation website, Arnold Shwarzenegger and James Cameron have been consulted regarding their ideas for the future of the franchise, and Christian Bale is reportedly working on the story as well. According to Visual Effects Supervisor Charles Gibson, McG is attempting to incorporate elements of the horror style as well so viewers can expect this installment to be scarier. Anton Yelchin has been cast as a teenage Kyle Reese, and Sam Worthington as a character named Marcus Wright.
This edition of the Terminator series reportedly happens after Judgement Day, but prior to 2029–the date when Skynet starts producing the Arnold-model T-800. We’re promised our introduction to the bigger, nastier T-600–the cyborg Kyle Reese alluded to in the original Terminator movie when he talked about the early terminators which were easy to spot because they had rubber skin.
For Terminator fans who were never big on the cheese-and-one-liners dimension of the original Terminator films, this one seems to be a departure from that. Terminator Salvation will be a meaner, darker type of science fiction, more serious in tone and bleaker in texture. On the downside,there seems to be a rumor floating around that Terminator Salvation will get a PG-13 rating. Let’s hope not.
Posted in 2009, Artificial Intelligence, Environmental Disaster, Post-Apocalypse, Robots/Cyborgs, The Future, Time Travel, coming attractions | No Comments »
January 9, 2008 - 10:20 pm - Posted by Administrator
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
Occasionally I take notes while I’m watching movies so I can refer to them later when I blog it. Here’s what I wrote for Final:
I don’t know if I can buy Denis Leary in this type of role.
What the hell is going on in this movie?
What the fuck?? Is that Jim Gaffigan?
Is something going to happen soon?
This is a science fiction movie without special effects!
After that my writing trails off on the page and ends in a stain that can only be the drool from where I fell asleep at about three am.
Here’s the deal. Final is one of those concepts that was borne out of a love for science fiction, minus the money to do it properly. Final is as low-budget as they come. Denis Leary is Bill, a man who wakes up in something that’s not quite a prison, but a little more than a hospital. We do not know exactly what Bill’s malady is, but we are treated to flashbacks from his life where he appears to be going through a very tough time. He’s the outcast of his family, he’s broken up with his fiancee, his father has died, and eventually he flashes back to his own apparent attempted suicide.
His therapist Ann (Hope Davis) is in charge of deciding whether he’s “recovering” or not. She begins work figuring out why he has delusions of being cryogenically frozen for four hundred years, and why he believes he will soon be executed. Just as you’re about to go, “OK, what the fuck??” and hit the stop button on the DVR, the story unfurls itself all at once and you find out that Bill hasn’t been frozen for four hundred years, but he is going to die soon.
The pacing in Final is terrible. Nothing seems to happen for the first half of the movie, then they reveal, like, ten plot points all at once, then there’s a long slow slide to the end. It’s like Denis Leary said “I’ve been frozen for four hundred years” and the doctors said “No you haven’t. Seriously.” Then as the movie viewer, you go “OK, whew. Cuz that would have been weird.” Then the Doctors say, “Instead you’ve been in a coma, your mom died, your girlfriend abandoned you to a science experiment and got remarried, we froze you, there was a terrible epidemic that ravaged the world, now we woke you up, but we have to kill you so we can save the world with your tissue cells because you were frozen before the pandemic burned into the human genome.” And all of that is revealed in less than five minutes. Nothing else happens. And the entire movie (except the brief flashbacks) happens in the hospital. Jim Gaffigan plays a hospital orderlie who hardly ever speaks.
But then maybe I was just drunk.
** Two Stars
Posted in Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Suspended Animation, The Future, Time Travel, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
December 18, 2007 - 2:07 am - Posted by Administrator
A Sound of Thunder is a classic Ray Bradbury story, a tale of time travel and the dangers of corporate greed. Although the film came out in 2005, many movie fans are unaware of it. It made few waves at the box office, and when I asked my sci-fi friend Rat if he’d seen it, he said he hadn’t. I mean, that’s almost scientific. This movie is underground.
Actually, A Sound of Thunder is a Peter Hyams movie, and although I’m a big fan of some of his films [Outland - 1981, The Relic - 1997], this one is not his best.
Edward Burns stars as Travis Ryer, a scientist working for Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley), the CEO of “Time Safari”. Together, they take big-dollar clients on safaris to hunt dinosaurs, all the while being careful to “stay on the path”–a path which they must not step off lest they alter the past, and possibly the present. When something goes wrong, a client accidentally alters the past, and soon time waves are rippling through the present as the world changes in terrifying and unexpected ways. And this is where the movie starts to dissolve into a mess.
A Sound of Thunder tries too hard to be all things to all people, which comes as no surprise considering the screenplay was written by three people. It’s a science fiction time travel film. It’s a dinosaur movie. It’s a monster movie. And the hardest thing to take… it’s a CGI-heavy vision of the year 2055, and in places, the computer effects are almost too good. There are several scenes early in the movie where characters are having discussion outside on the sidewalk, and the computer-generated traffic going by in the background is so distracting that I couldn’t pay attention to the dialogue. The lighting is too good, the cars are too clean, and the traffic noise is too quiet. Plus there are little continuity errors that bugged me as I watched. For instance, to travel through time, the travelers strap themselves into some kind of sled and get shot into a time tunnel, but when they come out the other end, they are inexplicably on foot.
I frequently hear complaints from critics when movies move too slow and trudge on for three hours… this is one of the rare flicks I think they could have taken more time on. It clocks in at 105 minutes, and another twenty minutes could have produced more character definition and a smoother transition between some of the action sequences which come later in the film and seem almost forced into a pre-determined pace.
I should say, I’ve watched this movie twice now, so despite the negative things I’ve said about it, I’ll give it four stars because it was good enough to watch twice.
*** Four Stars
Posted in 2005, Four Star Rating, The Future, Time Travel | No Comments »
December 16, 2007 - 10:19 pm - Posted by Administrator
The USS Nimitz is cruising on maneuvers just off Hawaii. The aircraft carrier’s decks are crammed with modern jet fighters. Suddenly, the Nimitz steams into a strange magnetic storm. When the ship emerges, the crew find themselves transported to 1941. December. Just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kirk Douglas plays the duty-bound Captain, faced with the question… “If I can prevent Pearl Harbor… should I?” As a guy who’s always been intrigued by Alternate History, I’d love to see a series of movies where we did prevent Pearl Harbor and how it would have changed the course of history.
My memory of the marketing campaign before this movie came out is that everybody was talking about the premise. “If you could, would you?” There was an unusual amount of buzz.
The Final Countdown is in my book of “must-see time travel movies” but fell short of excellence in my opinion. Good movie, but not great. Primarily because I always felt a little bit cheated that I didn’t get to see a squadron of Japanese Zeroes taken out by some American jets, and the question posed by the movie never really got answered. I will reveal no more than that in case you haven’t seen the movie.
This movie is big with Navy men and women, and many have commented on the accuracy with which Naval operations are portrayed. This is another one I’d like to see them re-make.
*** Three Stars
Posted in 1980, Three Star Rating, Time Travel | No Comments »
