Best Use of an Alice in Chains Song

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." (Charles Darwin, as quoted by my coworker on his office door)

"Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can count on, then it can be a comfort. There's not many things you can really count on." (Clint Eastwood's character on The Bridges of Madison County)

What do these quotes have to do with Terminator: Salvation? They basically sum up the moral I took from the movie: Be flexible at a moment's notice. Don't do anything motivated by fear, glory, greed or hate. John Connor isn't afraid of anything, he doesn't punish his well-meaning soldiers when they go AWOL, he'll even go AWOL himself for the big picture. Being responsive to change and having long-term perspective is the most important quality to have in a time travel story.

Terminator: Salvation (three stars total) On my way home after watching the movie, I stopped at the grocery store. The exit I had to take goes right by all these strip clubs (I live near a naval base, hence, the clientele). This time I noticed a lot of minivans in their parking lots, and a minivan means only thing - family man, or in this case, purported family men. I guess these guys do something besides blogging after their kids go to bed. This brings me to my favorite tidbit in the new Terminator - John Connor's wife Kate (the same Kate from T3: Rise of the Machines, I checked) is pregnant. We always knew John's character was a mama's boy, but now we know he's a family man too. There are some aesthetic changes I would make to the movie, including Kate's makeup (I've never seen Bryce Dallas Howard this dolled up before), because it doesn't seem realistic for a post-apocalyptic military base, especially on a pregnant woman, but oh well. Most people probably won't ask themselves why Skynet maintains clean, carpeted office space with glass partitions for its headquarters, or why machines with infrared need floodlights on their building's exteriors, but I understand why cameramen need them. I don't understand how a giant robot could sneak up on an isolated building in the middle of nowhere, but the movie's very realistic in other places. Sometimes you can almost smell the campfires and hear the wind blowing through the California desert setting. If you've ever been in a room with a bunch of computers during a power outage, then you learned how loud those seemingly quiet machines actually are. That's what I was reminded of during the human cattle corral scene when the machines make this horrible metallic squelching noise. I'm pretty sure the aerial canyon pursuit is a reference to the end of Star Wars and how could the motorcycle jump over the mines not be a reference to The Great Escape? My own obscure movie reference comes from Johnny Mnemonic. Just how efficient a CPU is the human mind, because I don't believe we'll ever mentally hack computer files with the ease that we channel surf on TV, but isn't that always how movies make that look like? Don't get me wrong, I loved nearly everything about this movie, except for the walking wax museum statue of Arnold Schwarzenegger and what Roger Ebert calls the "Fallacy of the Talking Killer" on his glossary of movie terms ("The villain wants to kill the hero. He has him cornered at gunpoint. All he has to do is pull the trigger. But he always talks first. He explains the hero's mistakes to him. Jeers. Laughs. And gives the hero time to think his way out of the situation, or be rescued by his buddy . . . most James Bond movies."), only this time it's done by a computer. I hated that part in Eagle Eye and I hate it even more here. The downfall of the Terminator TV show is the the machines display personality overload. Other than that, it's a great movie. It has the most explosive big rig chase since Live Free Or Die Hard and the moto-terminators are thankfully recycled from The Dark Knight's Bat-pod. It's beyond thrilling and inspirational also, in that it made me want to learn human anatomy, how to set booby traps and fix ham radios and burned-out cars.