‘Star Trek’ and ‘Terminator Salvation’ — Spoiler Alert Discussion
Posted on May 26, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I love the Slate Spoiler Specials, discussions of movies for you to listen to on the way home from the theater. Because they allow the participants to include spoilers in the conversation, they are more satisfying than a review can be. I’d love to invite my readers to have a spoiler-permitted discussion as well. If you like, listen to the Slate spoiler specials on Star Trek and Terminator Salvation first if you like, and then weigh in with your comments, questions, criticisms, and spoiler-filled thoughts. I’d love to hear from you and will add a few of my own. Beware, though — do not read until you’ve seen the films.
I CALL SHENNANIGANS! Such BS! In T4, John Connor fights a brand new T 800 right? At one point he shoots a tank of molten steele pouring it all over the T 800. Did it melt? NO. he shook it off until the cool air froze for a moment. So is molten steele cannot stop a T 800, then how did the T 800 from Terminator 2 destroy itself with the same sh*t in the steele mill? And don’t spoon feed me that crap where the molten steele must be on him for a period of time to actualy melt him. In T2 as soon as Arnold gives the thumbs up, he shuts down. no more than a minute
I probably won’t see the “Terminator” movie. The first movie was really exciting, and the second was kind of fun because of Arnold’s switch from evil to good, but that is the extent of my interest in the series.
I listened to the Slate spoilers about “Star Trek.” To add my own two cents, they were sooooo right about the plot being almost incomprehensible. I had to think about it really hard the next day to make sense of it, but I totally disagree that the Vulcan mind meld old Spock did on young Kirk helped – it was obviously meant to explain the plot, but as a Vulcan mind meld, it seemed silly. This movie relied heavily on “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” which made a lot of sense, but I feel they maybe relied just a bit too heavily on it.
Having Leonard Nimoy as old Spock identify each major character as he met them may have worked for some people (“Why, if it isn’t Scotty!) but I found it again a bit silly.
Eric Bana should not play villains, IMO. He lacks the charm of some (Ricardo Montalban, Ian McKellen, Michael Dunn) but doesn’t have the necessary menace to pull off scary (Robert Mitchum in “Cape Fear”) so he just seemed creepy and not in an entertaining way.
Aside from Bana, I loved the cast for the most part. However, time travel reboot or not, I thought destroying the Planet Vulcan was deeply, deeply wrong for the Star Trek universe. Stuff happens, I know, but you can’t have the Federation without Vulcan any more than you could have it without Earth.