OK, for the actual DAY of my birthday, I didn’t put the NET back in SlantyNet.  I did that at about 11PM of the evening before.  But it was a present to myself.

Anyway, the wife and I had free movie passes so we went to watch another summer blockbuster on my birthday (We saw Star Trek a few weeks ago).  We watch so few movies in the theatre these days, I figure that when you go to a theatre, it should be for a movie that has will benefit from the big screen experience.

Cue the Terminator music.

Terminator Salvation follows the Terminator 3 storyline, where we discover “actually, no, you can’t change the future, you can’t change fate, some things are inevitable”.  The movie starts in the near future, with some of the early work on Terminators at Cyberdyne systems, but quickly jumps to 2018 — post-Judgement Day, with John Connor (Christian Bale) being a bad-ass.  Bale does a pretty good job of being a bad-ass who has the weight of becoming “the saviour of the people against the machines” resting on his shoulders.  And when I say “pretty good”, I mean its _very_ good for an action movie — its not exactly an Oscar winning performance about a tortured soul though.

The visual effects of the post-judgement day world are really good.  You’re introduced to a lot more of “the machines”, including some small creepy ones (waterbots), some big ones (house wreckers, really) and more.

There are two main storylines.  One is mostly to move the action along, and its about John Connor preserving the past and future by saving somebody important to his existence.  (The time travel dyamics are a little confusing and are probably best ignored.)  The other storyline is the interesting one about Marcus Wright and asks questions about free will and what makes humans what we are.

The movie is tightly edited, under two hours for sure, with well-paced action.

If you liked ALL the Terminator movies and action movies in general, you’ll like this one.

I personally thought the franchise should have ended after T2, but still enjoyed this movie.