Terminator 4, Part 2 (of 2)

Terminator 4: Salivation was everything I expected it to be, and less. I went in blind, only hearing the Christian Bale little-bitch rant online, nothing more. I didn’t know who directed it, didn’t really care. But, I promised a friend I would see it, so…

Walking in the theater, which was crowded with young executive hipsters and comfortably same-sex couples (which you don’t see in the red state of Florida, save for Gay-day at Disney, provided you can push past the fundamentalist Christian protestors to get in), a dude dressed in street clothes and holding a coffee asked me if I needed help. I told him I didn’t, but he expressed how he was there all day, bored, drank too much coffee and needed something to do. I realized then, he worked there.

He asked me what I was seeing, and I told him, with the comment that I never saw the third installment and wondered if it would hurt me. He told me it wouldn’t, and that the franchise is pretty much writing that one off. Why not? It’s all about profitability right? Now, if only we could talk George Lucas into writing off The Phantom Menace.

My only real disappointment with Terminator 4 was once I saw who directed it. McG is probably one of the cheesiest POS directors making films today. I can barely watch his films, let alone admit that I have. Lucky the Kabuki Theater made the screening an experience, because nothing else could have. The movie really felt like a post-apocalyptic Charlie’s Angels for a while there. And, Helena Bonham Carter? Why? I remember when she was the cute, Merchant-Ivory girl, now I wonder if she knows how to say “no” to anything. I mean, Tim Burton, right?

T4 itself had all the bells and whistles of a watered down, dressed up Terminator movie. You forget how much Arnold made the first two and how noticeable his absence is in the latter ones (or, are they?). The action was okay, with McG actually toning down the cheese factor, save for the lame, unexplained backstory on the new terminator, and a couple other clichés—the playing of Alice and Chains “Rooster” on a car radio for no reason, and the Guns n Roses song from the first Terminator, ironically played on a 1987 boombox by John Conner himself.

McG seems to not really care about acting, and left Bale to the Jack Bauer, intense whisper school of acting. But, seeing the movie in Skynet’s future central headquarters, in an amazing theater which pays more credence to the experience than the gate, I have to say it all worked.

If anyone out there truly loves movies, DEMAND theaters like the Sundance Cinemas in your town. If the movie industry is going to continue churning out cookie-cutter, CG-laden super-action movies, at least we could have unique and comfortable theaters to ease the mediocrity. Maybe if theaters improve, we can prevent cinema from becoming the Wal-Mart of art.