Terminator rides again.

For the past few months I've been trying to figure out whether Terminator: Salvation is a sequel or a prequel. The John Connor of the future sends his dad back in time to stop the the Terminator from killing present John Connor's mother before present John Connor could be born by Connor's dad who is younger than future John Connor, so by the time the first movie starts the future's already happened and we're looking at the past but it takes place in the present time so it's now. So Salvation begins before future John sends his dad to the past so that two sequels could be made but yet it still happens in the future and after the events of the first three movies but at the same time before them.

Fuck there's blood coming out of my left ear.

As a picture, Salvation is a very pretty one that visually fits better with the series than did the third movie. There are also touches here and there that tell me the movie was made by people who actually care about the franchise and paid attention to details. Unfortunately these caring individuals can't write a good twist so by the end of the movie I felt a bit cheated at how inept and human they made Skynet. Also some of the robots were clearly men in rubber suits. That was a shameful detail considering how expensive this movie was to exist.

On the very plus side, sound was fucking excellent and I really wanted to see more of the obsolete endoskeletons so I could hear their joints move. The title animation for this film puts Bay's Transformers to shame. It's too bad that Bay's movie has fun being dumb while Salvation is hampered with a nearly suffocating seriousness at times. Oh well, it's either that or Terminator 3 again and if something that awful happens again I'll shoot myself seventeen times.

If this review sounds confused and muddled well...it is. I can't really figure this thing out. I enjoyed myself and didn't want to hide my face in shame like I did while watching Wolverine, but I still wouldn't call it a good movie. I guess if you had to put this movie on the "Omni Consumer Products Scale of Goodness" it'd go like this:

Terminator 1&2 ≥ Robocop
Terminator 3 ≤ Robocop 3
Salvation = Robocop 2

EDIT: Ha ha I just noticed Star Trek already used "The Future Begins" tagline so you fail, Warner Bros.

ReStar Trek

The long-awaited and newest entry in the absolutely elderly Star Trek franchise is a welcome addition to both the sci-fi and action genres. The film starts with a bang as we see a fast-paced and explosive ship battle and the stride rarely slows from there. The few lulls in the movie seem placed to allow the viewer to rest from the heady action but allow for a good deal of character development and humour. When dealing with Star Trek you inevitably have the theme of time-travel woven into the plot and that does a good job of explaining the many contentions one might have with what they've done with the events tied to some of entertainment's most beloved characters. It doesn't really explain the ship and tech design changes but the re-imaginings of things like the communicator and the Enterprise itself are done with great respect to the source material and 'feels' very Star Trek.

Die-hards are going to pick these things apart but everything was done so well I have little argument with the way things were presented. A couple of plot devices used seemed a bit silly, but it was of little demerit when measured up against the rest of the film. The movie only seemed to be an hour long despite its 127 minute run time, an extremely telling yardstick of how engrossing it really is.

I can't help but say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys an exciting feature. I know I'm gushing and it's perhaps not the Star Trek I was expecting but it's definitely the Star Trek Paramount needs.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is quite the uneven fare. The first third of the movie plays out fairly well, sticking to latter-day Wolverine mythos better than expected whilst appending some new details into canon. It also does a very good job of not stepping on the toes of previous established fact from earlier films. Characters are introduced dutifully and with barely more than the necessary number of lines but it gets the job done and provides for entertaining action. I was ready to call this movie better than X-Men 3 until slightly beyond midway when they introduced Gambit. He seems to have been shoehorned into the movie rather clumsily and scenes including him feel unnecessary. And most everything after that felt to me like I stepped into another film. I suppose if I were walking into the theatre to see Fantastic Four part 3 I'd expect lots of camp but not in this series.

My beef isn't so much with the liberties they took with regards to accuracy; I notice but easily forgive it. It's the sheer lack of forethought in the placement of events and people, and the film lacks the feeling or meaning behind the first two X-films (a problem which plagued X3). If the first outing of the Origins sub-franchise is this mediocre then I fear it won't get any better.

Pluses: Airwolf
Minuses: No cajun accents :(
Potent Notables: I was too impatient to sit through the credits so if you could tell me how that went...

I gave away the best surprise.

I just finished watching Re-Cycle, a Chinese horror movie known in the east as . It is the latest and greatest film out of Hong-Kong that I've seen, and watching this forced me to face the realization that I'd completely wasted my time watching The Ring and Dark Water. Perhaps it would have been more to my benefit to watch the original versions rather than the fuckups from the US.

At any rate, the first feeling one gets from the spookier bits is an air of familiarity. I couldn't help but compare what I was seeing and hearing to Silent Hill; the filmmakers decided to utilise dim lighting and dilapidated setwork seemingly inspired from that series, not to mention tense moments punctuated by a very Yamaoka-ish score. It didn't really help that they used the reprise of "Promise" from Silent Hill 2 in the deleted scenes montage.

It starts off creepily enough, but about halfway through it forgets it's a horror movie and does this sort of Taiwanese Alice in Wonderland thing as the main character tries to escape The Nothing by jumping from set to set with Exposition Girl in tow. It's not until shortly after the Hall of Fetuses that the director remembers what he's doing and reintroduces the big bad, who's apparently been on the protagonist's tail the whole time. After a stop in a field of flowers, we learn that the undead don't accept credit cards and are led to the resolution that, while a tad preachy, is still rather touching. Of course, like most good horror what haunts us never really leaves and oh my did I spoil that? You should be ashamed if you expected anything else.

I could take the movie apart further but when it comes down to it I enjoyed myself amid the fantastically-realised visuals and well-characterised lead and her phantom cohort.