Fanatical Pupil

See also: Like What You Like Already

I was just taking a survey in which they asked what kind of movies I like, and two of the categories were ACTION and SCI-FI. The examples for Sci-Fi were Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation. Fine. The examples for Action were Wolverine and Transformers.

On the one hand, I want to be like “How dare you co-opt Wolverine and Transformers as part of the Action genre?!?” but then I realized that it is merely another example of how Sci-Fi is the new Mainstream.

It strikes me as odd that I mentioned Terminator: Salvation in this post about The Spirit because it seemed to me like the latter came out almost a year prior to the former. It was actually only a mere 5 months (a few days less, actually), but it seemed like a virtual eternity for me.

Anyway, I saw The Spirit over at a friend’s house in full Blu-Ray definition, and wasn’t all that impressed. I think the main reason was that I thought it was going to be a more serious movie, and it was actually more “comic book”-y and funny than I’d expected. It’s funny how much of my enjoyment of a movie is determined by my expectations of it. Nevertheless, I’m afraid it’s not a movie that I could recommend to anyone. Maybe if I’ve ready the comics/graphic novels, I would have been more into it, but it just didn’t seem to all fit together for me.

(Trailer courtesy of TrailerAddict)

Things that could/should be good:

• Christian Bale seems like a pretty awesome John Connor
• I am still carrying a torch for Moon Bloodgood because of the canceled Day Break (and also Journeyman, which is in my Hulu queue, and also because her name is cool)
• Any opening sequence that uses the Terminator Theme, because it makes anything awesome
• Use of NIN in the movie and not just the trailer
• Lot of cool Skynet robots/machines
• Whatever that flashback is where the guy throws a chair through a window

Things that could be bad:

• It seems that one of the main plot points centers around John finding out that the Terminators are making themselves look human. This could annoy me because it seems like in every possible future (that I can think of), John would have to know that the machines are going to eventually look like humans since his mom was hunted by one that looked like the Governator, and he was hunted by ones that looked like a creepy emotionless cop and a really hot woman. If they explain it, then fine, but I’m afraid they’re more likely to just gloss over it, and it will nag at me for most of the 130 minutes.
• If they ignore what’s happening in the TV show. I have been watching the TV show on Hulu and I am getting super addicted (still have about 3 more episodes to watch and I am dying of anticipation)
• I see more than one potential love interest in the trailers. And considering that future John shouldn’t really have a love interest at all (at least in my opinion), this could be a big problem (for me)
• Too much stuff exploding. The Star Trek trailers looked kind of the same, though, and that has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I’ve heard it’s good because it’s character driven. Let’s hope that T4 is also character driven and not explosion/special effects driven.
• If they don’t acknowledge the time travel part. It seems like they could be setting up this first one (hopefully not the next two) to be fairly straightforward and linear. I’m a huge fan of time travel, and that’s one of the main reasons the whole Terminator environment is so fascinating to me

So, I did manage to list more thing that could be good than could be bad. The things that could (and should) be good don’t really require any explanation. Of course, I left off the biggest one: It just looks like it’s going to be good.

I might have to get T1 and T2 from Netflix to watch before I go see this one, just to get properly hyped up.