November 30, 2009

Schwarzenegger as a Hick

I just recently saw Terminator Salvation - when it hit Blu Ray - and was incredibly disappointed. The film seems like a confused mess. Is it about Christian Bale's John Connor, is it about Sam Worthington's Marcus character, is it about Kyle Reese; it never really decides and the movie suffers greatly as a result. I wasn't expecting the film to be great after the luke warm reviews, but I thought the idiotically named McG - the film's director - would at least be able to create some fantastic actions scenes because his brain-dead Charlie's Angels filmsdefinitely delivered over the top glossy actions scenes and this movie, with the exception of a cool helicopter crash scene, doesn't even have that. The entire film seems to be set in boiler room with four constants: smoke from an undetermined source; sparks raining down from an undetermined source; strobe lighting, again, from an undetermined source and finally balls of fire that randomly shoot up in the air, again, of course, from an undetermined source. The movie looks like it takes place entirely in the video for Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys.'

There are a lot of things missing from Terminator Salvation that made the series successful in the past, chief among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, (who briefly appears in a cheesy FX-created cameo.) Also missing is a villain, which is really inexcusable as this series has thrived on great villains, but also totally absent is any sense of humor at all. Easily the funniest (and funnest) part of Salvation is the tape recording of star Christian Bale having a hissy fit on the set. Other then that, this is an utterly humorless affair, and the story is too stupid to be taken totally seriously.
Which leads me to the above clip, which is a deleted scene from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, that I somehow missed on DVD. In this scene, we see an industrial video for Cyber Research Systems and we meet Sergeant William Candy, the US soldier selected to be the human model for the T-800 cyborg we would learn to know and love in the first three films of the series. My favorite part is when the guy says "I dunno about the accent," and the response, from a man with a suspiciously Austrian twang is "We can fix it."

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