A Movie Critic Next Door first: I get to review the same movie twice! Okay, so it isn’t really that thrilling, but I take my excitement where I can get it.
Instead of Walter Matthau, we have Denzel Washington as beleagured civil servant Walter Garber (not Gerber), though he’s still dressed sort of the same. The original character was Zachary Garber, but they changed it here as a nod to Walter Matthau. Nothing against Walter Matthau, but Denzel is easier on the eyes. Instead of Robert Shaw as big bad guy Mr. Blue, we have John Travolta as big bad guy Ryder (not as in subway rider — this is a tribute to the original Mr. Blue, whose real name in the first flick was Ryder).
And instead of a mere one million dollar ransom, we have a demand for $526,315.79 per person, or ten million dollars and one cent. The penny is Walter’s broker fee, apparently, though I’m pretty sure that’s a little low. I was also a little off on my earlier guess of a fifty million dollar ransom, in more ways than one, but you’ll see about that when you watch the movie.
It all starts out basically the same: the guns might be a little fancier, but Ryder and his goons still all board the train separately, do their maneuvering, and the next thing you know, there they are in the middle of a dark tunnel, just them, 19 hostages, and one indestructable laptop computer. See, they can be techier now, and they are, but they do a good job. I mean, it isn’t just techy for the sake of being techy. I really need to find out if this is a return to the original novel these movies were based on, or if they’re getting farther away. Yeah, just what I need, another book to read.

The New York Transit Authority, keeping the world safe for democracy!

Because this is the 21st century, it isn’t just the bad guys who have skeletons in their closets. Thanks to the internet, everyone’s little secrets start slipping out as things move along, making everyone distrustful. I was surprised people didn’t start suspiciously interrogating themselves. Google has much to answer for. Also, Ryder isn’t the calm, collected bad guy that the first Ryder was. John Travolta actually foams at the mouth at least once. Seriously. But he is organized, and very John Travolta-like. I’m not entirely sure myself what I mean by that, but he does have very similar styles for his bad guys. And his good guys, come to that, but it works for him. He’s actually very unnerving when he calls Walter his hero. Would you want to be the psychopathic killer’s hero?
Anyway, the supporting cast is just as good. John Turturo (The Good Shepherd) plays hostage negotiator Camonetti, and Luis Guzmán is Phil Ramos, one of the hijackers. I swear, that guy’s never out of work. He was also in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington as a forensic tech — your official MCND trivia for the day. And it’s a good movie, worth a solid three and a half idols. The half is because they didn’t do any product placement. Hooray! Except for John Travolta’s watch, which is a Breitling, which he’s the spokesperson for. Crap. Okay the half is because they remembered their roots and gave a nice tip of the hat to the original main characters. There.

Here’s a new featured piece:
New Friendly
It is similar to the smash hit “deliberate thought”, but with a lot more harmonic motion.
Also new, 2 pieces with solo voice…
Long Road Ahead in 2 versions.
Private Reflection
And…
Fast Talkin a noir-like piece.
Cheers all!

For some reason, when the sequels hit four, they tend not to put the number in the title anymore — probably a way to try to avoid the usual view of sequels as getting worse and worse. But the Terminator franchise is doing okay, really, maybe because they don’t rush. Four movies in twenty-five years isn’t exactly churning them out, but they’re still managing to attract the fans in droves. And the continuity people don’t even have to worry about what’s come before, because they keep time traveling and changing everything around. So Sarah Connor’s tapes to her son don’t sound quite the way they did in T2, but that’s okay because the whole timeline’s been messed with at least once since then.
They didn’t mess with time travel this time around, though, so they’ll have to watch it if there’s ever a fifth movie. It doesn’t seem like there could be, really, but I don’t underestimate the writers’ ingenuity, or possibly their desperation if they’ve got higher-ups demanding more. It does take some ingenuity to keep going past the world ending, after all… and this time, they even start out by killing one of the main characters. And they don’t time travel, like I said, nor is he a zombie. He’s Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, another one of those Australian actors who keep coming to the U.S. to steal acting jobs. Oh, and he was in Hart’s War.) and he’s on Death Row when the action kicks off. But when Cyberdyne gets involved, even death isn’t quite final.
You probably know from the previews (skip ahead to the next paragraph if you somehow managed to avoid the previews) that Marcus turns out to be a sort of hybrid, and I don’t mean a hybrid SUV. Every Terminator can look human, but this one believes that he IS human, which makes him extremely convincing, as you might imagine. It’s really cool, though, how they drop all the little clues as to what’s going on — the way he sometimes moves and acts like Arnold from the original, and even a little reference to him being heavier than he looks.

Because you need to have the dramatic image of John Connor and a scary, scary Terminator facing off.

Anyway, he’s pretty confused, unsurprisingly, when he wakes up to discover that the world’s been bombed within an inch of its life. The Machines are even more confusing, but luckily for him, he finds help in the form of the Los Angeles Resistance group. There are only two members, though they don’t make it clear if there were always only two of them, or if they just had some horrible casualty rates. In charge is one Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, Chekhov from Star Trek), and following along to help keep everyone out of trouble is Star (Jadagrace, who hasn’t been in anything before, but then, she is only maybe ten years old, tops, so give her time).
They join forces with Marcus, and believe me, they need the help. The Machines are doing something new, namely taking human prisoners, and the Resistance is worried. Enter John Connor (Christian Bale, the new go-to guy when you need an obsessed, driven, brooding sort of guy), leader of the Resistance — sort of. He actually isn’t, apparently, though he is in charge of a decent-sized segment of it, and lots of people seem to think he really is the last, best hope for humanity, like they’ve said all along. His wife, Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard, finally getting more lines than she had in Spider Man 3, at least) is there, too, now graduated from veterinary tech to people doctor, apparently.
You can’t blame them for not wanting to trust anything that smacks of the Machines, and in the grand Terminator tradition, things go amazingly wrong before they finally start going right. Now that the technology has caught up with the vision, things explode and machines turn into other machines like Transformers and people get half their faces blown away to reveal very realistic looking cyber parts. And it’s great to watch. The plot is a touch iffier in places, but really you don’t care while you’re seeing it all happen.
A solid three and three-quarter idols. The Terminators aren’t quite ruthlessly efficient enough, but the bad guys need to be slow sometimes so the movies aren’t too ridiculously short. But the characters are well-done, and the plot holds up if you don’t squint at it too much, and it’s just so fun to have another Terminator installment. (Rumor has it there might be two more Terminator installments, but we’ll have to see about that.) There are tons of little references to the previous films, but my favorite has to be the little boom box from T2, the one that we last saw blasting out Guns ‘n’ Roses “You Could Be Mine,” while the young John Connor and his friend with the terrible hair were cruising the streets. It gets to do that one more time, and that was really nifty.