Big, Sexy, Robot Fun

So, yeah. I really want to like this movie. For starters, I'm a huge fan of the Terminator franchise. Its a staple of my childhood. Secondly, I love robots. I watched Transformers once a week for three months after the DVD dropped just to see Optimus Prime throwdown against Bonecrusher for all of 30 seconds. Then there's the whole time-travel element. Chrono Trigger has reminded me how cool time-travel stories can be, and so I'm really in the mood for more time-traveling escapades. This partly explains part of my excitement for Star Trek.

Terminator Salvation has a ton of potential. I mean, according to the Wikipedia entry the film's screenplay was penned by Jonathan Nolan and Paul Haggis. Nolan, of course, is best known for involvement in The Dark Knight's script. Paul Haggis wrote and directed the must-watch Crash, and also helped write Casino Royale. Then there's Christian Bale, who is without a doubt the best choice to play John Connor all grow. All very, very good things.

What has me all frowny about this film is the director, McG. His resume is less than pretty. Charlie's Angels and its sequel were terrible on a mind-blowing level. We Are Marshall is decent, according to Rotten Tomatoes, but directing something like Terminator Salvation is a much different undertaking than directing a football drama. Just look at Quantum of Solace. It clearly suffers from Marc Forster being a fish out of water with that project. At least McG has his head in the game, issuing copies of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the cast to read and get in that "post apocalyptic" mood. Still, Charlie's Angels... was rough, and is just cause for concern.

All the same, this latest trailer is sextacular. There's a whole mess of robots of all shapes and sizes, including one big-ass Transformer-sized mufucka. Watching this makes me smile big-big, but no signs of a nergasm the likes of which the Star Trek trailer elicited. If you ask me, setting the movie in the future/past (depending on how you want to view it in Terminator timeline) was a smart decision. There's no more room for adventures that follow the typical Terminator story template. T3 was a convoluted mess that should be ignored, forgotten, and never repeated.

Dark, gritty reboots have seen a lot of success as of late. Casino Royale? Phenomenal. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight? Epic. If anyone can salvage the Terminator franchise, it's the writers from those films. My fingers are certainly crossed. But, at the very least, Terminator Salvation will be two hours of robot mayhem eye-candy.