cyrus_aman

I really wanted to like this film. I truly did. I'm a big fan of the others (even the oft criticized T3), and was really looking forward to this one. I gave it some time (about 20 minutes) before the "ughs" came out. First of all, the writing was horrid. I felt that I was watching the equivalent of a decently made fan-film. Terminator Salvation though doesn't have the excuse of a super-low budget YouTube production. To the contrary, it has fantastic special effects and a Hollywood casting.

The first Terminator was, aesthetically, an influential film. Like Blade Runner, Terminator has shaped the look of Sci-Fi films following it. What's tragic about Terminator Salvation, is that it (whether the writers were conscious of it or not) stole so much from other movies: The quiet little girl was Newt from Aliens. The old lady with the long gray hair, Common's character, the Terminator machine "fish", and the SkyNet computer providing a sloppy explanation of the "meaning-of-everything" to Sam Worthington's character reminded me of items out of Matrix Reloaded.

There were other quirks too:

• The little girl was a completely expendable character in the script. She became an annoyance. She had zero impact on this film. Not to give away to much, but she does push a button at one point in the film. However, another character could have completed the task.

• Sam Worthington is Australian. However, I honestly didn't realize this until about halfway into the film when his American accent slips and he sounds very, very Australian for part of a scene. This was distracting, to say the least.

• The ending was completely ridiculous. However, at this point of the film it didn't matter for me, it was already a bomb.

To be fair, the few things I DID like:

• The mega-sized Terminator with the detachable Terminator motorcycles.

• The digital overlay of Arnold near the end of the film. Very impressive technical work. It was as if they brought the young Arnold of 1984 to the movie set in a time-machine.

• Sam Worthington (minus the accent slip) as an actor. He did really well. As did the actor who played the Kyle Reese character.

• The scene where Connor hot-wires the Terminator motorcycle. Cool scene.

In short, my advice to would-be watchers of the movie is to wait for the DVD/Blu-Ray release or just re-watch T1, T2 or T3.

I truly went to the theatre with high expectations for this one. I am a fan of the Halloween franchise, and a fan of Rob Zombie's films. I REALLY wanted to enjoy this film, however it was bad all the way through. Zombie's reinterpretation left me with the same feeling of disgust I had watching Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: I left the theatre wanting to see the original. Mind you, I wasn't disappointed because I expected a frame-by-frame remake, I just was expecting the usual one may want from a good-to-great movie: character development, believable dialogue, and good storytelling. Zombie's film lacked all three.

Stay away from this DVD as if it were the black sludge in Creepshow 2. I'm an avid fan of the first film, and I have a soft-spot in my heart for the second one (I watched these movies repetitively as a teen). The first two movies even prompted me to read the EC horror comics they were modeled after: Haunt of Fear, Tales From the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror.

The charms of 1 & 2 were their great stories and comic-book-style format (pages turning between stories, comic panels transforming to live-action, etc.). Creepshow III has NONE of these elements. WARNING: This is a Creepshow release by TITLE ONLY. The film truly resembled the quality one would expect form a YouTube indie film produced by a high school student: Horrid acting, a total of TWO shooting locations (a cluster of houses and an apartment building), and stories that either made no sense or went nowhere.

It was a real shame, as I looked forward to the release of this film. You've been warned!