Terminator 4
I went to see Terminator 4 last Thursday - I haven’t written about it until now though because I’m already slacking at this second blog too.
In short, it’s almost exactly what you expect: lots of action, shooting, killer robots, not much plot, and a film that whilst it isn’t as good as Terminator 2, isn’t the worst thing ever. I rather enjoyed it.
There’s some excellent set-pieces in there. Like when the giant Terminator launches two motorbike terminators out of it’s legs, and then one of the motorbike terminators (which, inexplicably, has USB support) is flung around into the air and into an aeroplane terminator by the crane of a pick-up truck that is being driven by the heroes of the film.
And there’s attempts at Children of Men style really-long-shots-without-cutting bits. Adam & Joe derided a reviewer’s enthusiasm for the shot on their show last Saturday, but it is good when you see Christian Bale fly a helicopter into the air, only to come crashing down, land upside-down, and then to have him fall out of his seat and crawl out, all without a noticeable break in the filming.
The reason I’m talking up some of the action so much is because the plot is pretty thin - though looking for that in a Terminator film is pretty much like looking for an arms dealer in a morality convention.
One issue I did have with the film though, was the completely ridiculous design of future technology. Which isn’t exactly new to this film I guess.
Why, would a robot terminator need to display on his view text analysing what it sees? More to the point, why would a Terminator base, where everything is robotic, need computer consoles with seats, or computer consoles at all? And why would you need to break into the Terminator base to get some data when presumably, the whole of the bad-guy infrastructure is based on wireless communications. Why would the Terminators even design a human-compatible interface to their systems?
And why would an analogue radio signal serve as a kill-switch for all Terminator devices (I’m aware that - spoiler alert - it was just a decoy, but surely the humans should have figured this out by looking at the facts?). Surely, even if they were stupid enough to design such an easy point of failure, it’d at least be reliant on some sort of encrypted digital signal?
Basically, what I’m saying is that a film about killer robots that can travel back in time having taken over the world in 2018 isn’t very realistic.
It is very fun though.
