Reviews

Firstly, in order for a science fiction movie to be worthwhile, it needs to have a plausible story line, with characters which are believable. Unfortunately, the overarching story arc of Terminator Dark Fate is so difficult to digest, that the viewer is unable to suspend disbelief to actually enjoy the movie. For example, the character known as Grace is supposedly an augmented super soldier sent back in time by the Resistance. However, in all of the earlier Terminator films the Resistance was always portrayed as a ragtag group of freedom-fighters barely hanging on to survival. Therefore, how in the world did the Resistance gain the ability to replace Grace's entire human skeleton with a titanium cyborg battle chassis? (The scene in which Grace is x-rayed in the migrant detention center.) There are simply far too many implausible scenarios throughout Terminator Dark Fate for the movie to make any sense, and because of this, it is simply not an enjoyable film. Something else needed to happen with the plot of this film, I'm not sure what, but maybe a visit to the place where the first Terminator CPU came from might be nice, but anything would be better than watching yet another film in which Terminators fight with the humans in an industrial facility out in the desert somewhere.

Secondly, since the election of Donald Trump, Hollywood studio executives seem to feel the need to go completely overboard when it comes to packing as many Social Justice Warrior themes into a film as possible, and Terminator Dark Fate is no exception. To begin with, the three main female characters are overly portrayed as being heroic, trustworthy, and self-sacrificing, while pretty much all of the male characters are portrayed as being deceitful, dishonest, and or cowardly. Think of the white male supervisor at the auto assembly plant in Mexico who planned on firing Daniella's brother, or Major Dean who is willing to sell classified technology to Sara Connor for mere money. Ironically, Major Dean is killed by the Rev 9 Terminator without even barely defending himself, as are most of the other male characters in this film. One of the main problems with Terminator Dark Fate is that strong female characters don't always equal interesting or worthwhile female characters, and that goes double when the strong female characters are being portrayed by actresses who simply glare into the camera as they growl their lines in a completely unbelievable deadpan fashion. There are other heavy-handed SJW themes woven throughout the film such as illegal immigration, migrant detention centers, and misogyny and when combined with the weak story-line, the film becomes completely unwatchable.

Lastly, the once likable character of Sarah Connor is reduced to an unfamiliar shambling old woman who speaks with a smoker's voice, and whose behavior and mannerisms are completely out of step from those in the earlier films. Part of what made Sarah Connor great in those earlier films was the fact that she seemed like someone you might actually meet in real life. Oh a waitress working in a burger restaurant, that seems completely believable. Now she's a survivalist nut who has just escaped from a mental institution. Well, that takes a bit more imagination, but I know that survival nuts actually exist, and I also know that people from mental institutions tend to act in highly eccentric fashion, therefore, the Sarah Connor found in Terminator 2 Judgment Day is still somewhat a very believable character, especially given the manner in which Linda Hamilton seemed to pour her heart and soul into these earlier renditions of Sarah Connor. However, by comparison, the Sarah Connor found in Terminator Dark Fate is a senior citizen with a noticeable osteoporosis hump on her back, yet we are supposed to believe it when she fires a shoulder mounted missile without bracing her feet, or when she stood on the rear ramp of a rapidly ascending C-5 Galaxy without being blown off by the tail wind. In the earlier films Sarah Connor was sometimes happy, such as when she made love to Kyle Reese in Terminator 1, and sometimes she was psychotically enraged such as when she ranted at Miles Bennet Dyson in Terminator 2. However, the Sarah Connor found in Terminator Dark Fate is just a dull lifeless character who recites her lines into the camera in an old lady's cigarette voice. Such a terrible disappointment after so many years for the return of Sarah Connor.

Starting with Star Wars in 1977, there was a non-stop march of blockbuster science films continuing on throughout most of the 1980s. However, things suddenly took a sour note with the release of 1989's Star Trek - The Final Frontier, and Alien 3 is really just a continuation of that ongoing downward trend in science fiction movies which began with The Final Frontier.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that between the years 1989 and 2000 there were only a handful of really good science fiction movies released; 1991's Terminator II, 1997's Alien Resurrection, and 1998's Deep Impact. Aside from these three films the 1990s were pretty much a harsh desert as far as science fiction films go. Moreover, it could even be argued that Terminator II isn't at all a science fiction movie, and it is really more of a story about a boy and his faithful dog(android). But, however, you slice it, Alien 3 cannot hold a candle to any of the better science fiction films of the 1990s, and it is simply a weak film in every category.

But what is it which makes 1992's Alien 3 such a weak film when compared to other great films such as its predecessor, Aliens, from 1986?

To begin with, the over arching story line is too improbable for most audience members to buy into it. An audience will buy into a weak story line if the film has enough other redeeming qualities to make up for the film's weak story line. A crew of blue-collar workers manning the commercial spacecraft Nostromo is believable, a platoon of colonial marines sent out to investigate the disappearance of a colony is believable, however, prison inmates left alone unsupervised on a shut down factory planet is not believable! Maybe if they'd portrayed the prison planet as being more like the real life settlers who lived in early Australia, with men, women, and children, then perhaps it would have been more believable, but they didn't do that, they just put matching uniforms on a group of men and said, "Here, these guys, are in prison, you figure out why there aren't any guards, even robotic ones, around." It is hard to buy into the characters found in Alien 3, because unlike the colonial marines found in Aliens, the inmate characters depicted in Alien 3 are completely lacking in dignity, heroics, or individuality.

Unfortunately, Alien 3 lacks enough redeeming features to overcome the weak premise of its story line, and what little action that does takes place is done without the suspense found in the two earlier films.

When the audience witnesses an inmate being eviscerated by an alien, the feeling is pretty much, Oh well, we've seen this type of gore before in the two earlier films, maybe the next scene will be better. As each secondary character is killed off by the aliens, there is no suspense, and the audience isn't left wondering how the group will go on surviving after the loss of this particular individual. To make matters worse the acting found in Alien 3 is stale in comparison to Aliens, and at times it even seems that the great Sigourney Weaver is phoning it in.

When Commander Spock was temporarily killed off towards the end of Wrath of Khan, the audience fell the sting of his death. However, after Sigourney Weaver's Ripley character did a black flip into a pool of molten lead, the only thing that the audience felt was, "Well, I guess I have to pick up a few things at the grocery store on my way home from the movie theater."

Additionally, Alien 3 is plagued with pointless and sporadic action sequences set mainly in dimly lit stone corridors. The visual effects are underwhelming even by the standards of the early 1990s (keep in mind that this came out approximately one year before Jurassic Park), and due to the absences of high technology throughout most of the film, Alien 3 does not seem to fit within the same universe containing Alien, and Aliens.

In reality Alien 3 is simply a cheap B movie, and if it had been released ten or twelve years earlier, then it might have done very well at the box office. However after more than a decade of films such as Blade Runner, The Thing, The Terminator, and Aliens, the audience expected much more. Sadly, however, by this time the studios had figured out that all they needed to do to turn a profit was to slap a popular franchise logo onto a turd, and the science fiction fans would come running to shell out their hard earned money.

To be honest, I've been disappointed by so many science fiction movies lately that I almost wanted to hate Alien Covenant, and I really wanted to pick it apart. However, while I don't consider Alien Covenant to be the best movie from the Alien franchise thus far, it is easily, in my opinion, the best Alien movie since 1997's Alien Resurrection, and thankfully this film didn't fall into the same terrible clichés which ruined the two most recent Terminator movies.

Although this film has its high moments, it also, unfortunately, misses the mark in a few key areas which caused me to sometimes feel somewhat slightly cheated.

When the Covenant space ships arrives in orbit above the newly discovered Paradise planet, it is implied that this is one of the most Earth-like planets ever encountered by human beings, but there are no really awe inspiring scenes of the pristine planet slipping below the ship in orbit, and there are no scenes of the crew marveling at the planet's much touted natural beauty. I would have expected at least one awe inspiring scene similar to the introduction of the Genesis Cave in Star Trek The Wrath of Khan, but instead we are treated to "Oh this seems to be a very nice place, why don't we see if we can live here instead of that other place we were planning on going?"

The movie also fell a little flat when the crew of the Covenant arrives at David's fortress and finds the surrounding grounds littered with thousands of withered corpses of the Engineer species. No one is upset by the huge display of carnage, and no one from the crew of the Covenant, people whom you would assume would have scientific backgrounds, really seem curios regarding how the thousands of beings outside the walls were seemingly struck down in place so quickly.

There is also the issue with the hapless idiot who once again places his face too near the xenomorph eggs, the scene where the Alien gets blown out the airlock once again, and the scene where the bookish female crew member inexplicably acquires a bad ass attitude and combat skills. However, these are probably all over lookable flaws that people shouldn't get too hung up on. While the character development is much better than what it was in Prometheus, a few of the characters are not fleshed out very well, and it is never really explained why certain crew members of the Covenant star ship know how to handle advanced combat weapons?

However, the film absolutely hits it out of the ball park with the evil sociopath android character named David, and in my opinion the David character is the most powerful character since the original Ellen Ripley character played by Sigourney Weaver! David is not merely an evil Frankenstein's monster who goes about blindly smashing things for no reason, David actually hates mankind, perhaps partially due to the daddy issues which he seems to have with his creator, Peter Weyland, and also perhaps due the to physical damage that he suffered towards the end of the earlier film, Prometheus. David's evilness is almost a more important factor in the story than the Aliens themselves.

Another high positive is the fact that the technology and set designs depicted in Covenant seem to fit right into the same universe as the original Alien movie from 1979, and unlike the horrible Alien Vs. Predator movies, this film actually has the same look and feel of the first two films.

While it is not the greatest science fiction of all times, it is clearly a very good movie by any reasonable measure, and I think that most people will come away feeling satisfied when the final credits roll.

Admittedly I've never been a huge fan of the Star Wars franchise, and when I went out to see The Force Awakens today, I kinda expected too see an overblown kid's movie wrapped in mind blowing CGI effects.

Instead, however, what I found was a film that managed to be completely predictable, even though it was riddled with plot holes to sink the Death Star! For example, if the Galactic Empire had been defeated thirty years earlier, then why did the First Order (presumably the direct successors to the Sith) still have legions of white armored storm troopers at their beckon call, and shouldn't these storm troopers have been serving the victorious Galactic Republic, instead of the evil First Order? Also, why is there still a Resistance Movement if the war ended thirty years ago, and the Republic has supposedly regained control of the Galaxy? At first I tried to dismiss the growing mountain of plot holes by telling myself to relax, and by reminding myself that The Force Awakens was just a kid's movie, but the straw that broke the camel's back came when the huge planet sized Starkiller (an upgraded Death Star) was introduced without any real explanation.

How did the First Order manage to build such a huge death machine under the collective noses of the victorious Galactic Republic, and how does the atmosphere on the surface of the Starkiller manage to stay in place, once the Starkiller moves away from its home star? (The surface of the Starkiller looks a little bit like the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with tall pine trees, and snow capped peaks in the background.) Seriously, what was the purpose in putting an Earth-like land mass across the surface of the Starkiller? It can't be meant as a form of camouflage, because the Starkiller has a huge yawning rectangular shaped chasm about the size of Indonesia spanning its equator? Anyway, C3P0 is reduced to only a minor character in the film, while R2D2 is hardly given any screen time at all, and instead a cute new robot named BB-8 is introduced just in time for Christmas. Also, too much time is spent focusing on a cootish looking Han Solo, and a disturbingly bloated raspy Princess Leia.

The long and short of it is that The Force Awakens is not a worthwhile kid's movie, it completely lacks the energy and charisma of the first three movies, and it also lacks the mind-blowing action and CGI effects found in the most recent films such as Revenge of The Sith.

I began to feel somewhat uneasy about the storyline when during the opening sequence of the film, the huge NASA lander was suddenly struck by a violent hurricane force winds on the surface of Mars. The huge multi-story lander ship becomes at-risk for toppling over in the strong winds, and for the next few minutes the camera frantically cuts back and forth between a computer screen indicating the ship's angle of tilt in the wind, and several crewman who are excitedly urging the captain to launch in the middle of the violent wind storm. Presumably the sequence in which the lander nearly topples over in the wind storm was supposed to build suspense, but rather than building suspense it simply came across as a tired sci-fi cliché, reminiscent of the scene in the movie 2012, in which all of the main characters watched a digital clock count down the number of seconds until the monster wave arrived. Come on Hollywood, the audience is smarter than that!

For the most part Matt Damon does a passable job of pretending to be an astronaut stranded on Mars, but his character lacks any of the emotional depth displayed by Tom Hank's character in the movie Cast Away. Although Damon's character eventually looks like he could use a shave and a haircut, he always appears as though he just stepped out of the gym, and his eyes are always twinkling for the camera. (I suspect that middle-aged mothers taking their young sons to see this movie will enjoy Damon's character.)

Additionally, I really wanted to believe that Jeff Daniels was capable of playing the complex role of a NASA bureaucrat, but Daniels' character seems more like a shallow blow dried character from some anti-Wall Street movie, rather than someone with a scientific background.

The rest of the NASA ground crew is made up of the usual predictable quirky nerd characters, and absolutely none of the Earth bound characters seem real, or deliver performances that are memorable or worthwhile. Another annoyance with this film is the fact that Damon's character constantly proclaims that he will use "Science" in order to stay alive, but the film itself is absolutely choked full of all sorts of glaring scientific flaws, beginning with the hurricane force storm at the beginning of the movie.

The bottom line is that "The Martian" isn't a tense science fiction thriller, with at least some pretense of accuracy (Contact, Deep Impact, or Gravity) but on the other hand the film also lacks any real action or suspense such as "Mission to Mars", or "Red Planet". It is a very confused film. The only saving grace this film has is the stunning vista shots of Mars, which appear to look absolutely authentic. Go ahead and see it, but a few days later you won't even think about it afterwards.

To begin with I really disliked the Technicolor's Oz process used to give the film its bleached out appearance, and this completely removed any of the vivid sense of reality found in the earlier Terminator films. Terminator Salvation looks and feels like a poorly conceived graphic novel, and due to the sharp stylistic break from the earlier films, it is very easy to forget that it is supposed to be a continuation of the Terminator franchise.

Bale's interpretation of the John Connor character comes across more like a stiff generic cutout hero figure, that could easily be pasted into any CGI summer action movie, and it is absolutely impossible to believe that this is supposed to be an extension of the same John Connor personality that we earlier saw in Terminators 2 & 3. The lack of a convincing John Connor character severely hurts the film, and the film would have been much more enjoyable, if it had a character with at least some of the same mannerism and speech patterns as the earlier renditions of John Connor. (When Spock came back from the dead, he may have acted strangely for one or two movies, but we still knew that he was Spock!)

The rest of the film is not very well cast also, and although I think that Korinna Moon Bloodgood is a complete knockout of a gorgeous woman, she simply isn't believable in the role of post apocalyptic jet fighter pilot. Her flight suit has obviously been tailored to hug her curves (think Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager) and there is one scene that is so cliché, in which Bloodgood removes her flight helmet and whips her beautiful long hair for the camera, that it is completely laughable! These people are supposed to be living during the aftermath of a nuclear war, how does this woman manage to keep her hair so long and luxurious, when supposedly there is barely enough food for everyone to eat? (Supposedly they crew was made to read Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, but apparently the book had little affect.)

The film reaches a low point in believability, when Bloodgood's character, Blair Williams, finds herself alone at an abandoned speedway near Los Angeles. The Williams character is confronted by a group of hostile male characters, who behave and sound like a bunch of stereotype Ozark hillbillies. Seriously, shouldn't these villains have been a little more ethnically diverse, given the fact that the scene was set in Souther California?

Unfortunately, however, the film's ultimate low-point occurs when it is revealed that John Connor needs an immediate heart transplant, and the half-human and half-machine Marcus Wright character volunteers his own heart so that John Connor may live. Oh come on now, talk about tacky shallow ploys used to prop up an extremely bad movie, well this is absolutely the cheapest emotional manipulation ever attempted by Hollywood, bar none!!!

However, the highlight of the film occurs when three of the main characters stop at an abandoned gas station in search of suppliers, only to find that the station is already occupied by unfriendly human survivors. Skynet detects a human presence at the gas station and sends in some previously unseen hunter killer robots to wipe them out. For better or worse, the new hunter killer robots look suspiciously like Transformers, but the action scene beginning at the gas station is absolutely the only time the film comes even remotely close to recapturing the magic of the earlier Terminator films.

If this film has any saving graces whatsoever, it is the respectable acting job put forth by Sam Worthington in portraying the half-human and half-machine Marcus Wright character, and also the passable acting job put forth by Anton Yelchin in portraying Kyle Reese. Other than that, the rest of the cast seemed to be phoning in their laughably flat performances.