In Defense of Terminator 4: Salvation

In light of the other movies that came out in the spring/summer of 2009 (Transformers 2, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra), I'm not sure why everyone made so much noise about Terminator 4 being so awful. For starters, it was demonstrably better than Terminator 3, and those of us who had been following the Sarah Connor Chronicles and mourning its cancellation were primed and ready for more Terminator at that point. Below, I set the record straight on where the movie falls on the scale (where 10 = District 9, 1 = Transformers 2, G.I.Joe).

5 Reasons Why Terminator 4 Actually Kicked Ass:

1. Guy Candy
Take your pick here - Sam Worthington or Christian Bale (or, I suppose, Arnold's head attached to not-Arnold's-body). The number one rule of apocalyptic sci-fi is that the sweatier, oilier, and filthier the men are, the hotter they look. Sam Worthington in particular has the boyish face on that dirty, dirty body that makes you forget about John Connor about halfway through the movie.

2. Related: Dudity
The Terminator franchise has long had a history of nudity, necessitated by the nature of time travel itself (you can't take your clothes with you), and Terminator 4 is no exception. The afore-mentioned Sam Worthington stars in a scene where he emerges from a heap of rubble full-frontally,clad only in mud from head to toe. Likewise, not-Arnold's body has a full-frontal scene with the relevant parts obscured by smoke of some sort. It was actually a good year for dudity in sci-fi, when you add Terminator 4 to Watchmen (blue genitalia) and Wolverine (side view of Hugh Jackman running around naked) - although both Watchmen and Wolverine were inferior to Terminator 4.

3. Guy Candy Who Are Also Good Actors
Christian Bale followed a great performance in Dark Knight, and Sam Worthington is now in demand for a number of upcoming movie projects, as well as having appeared recently in Avatar (also not as good as Terminator 4).

4. Not Transformers 2
The plot was coherent and moved along quickly (unlike Transformers 2), with lots of explosions (like Transformers 2) until the last 5 or 10 minutes, which I have decided to rewrite in my head back to one of the earlier rumored endings, where John Connor turns out to be a hot robot, and Marcus lives happily on, and they are both hot robots together.

5. Set in the Post-Apocalyptic Future
The earlier Terminator movies are generally set in the Past, with only tantalizing views of the grim Future. Terminator 4 gives us a new spin by doing the opposite and giving us a new perspective on John Connor.

City of Ember - The Movie (see also: Steampunk Gone Mad)

I know I'm a little behind the times on this one, but I got a Kindle for Christmas and have since been enthusiastically catching up on my reading. City of Ember is a 2003 children's sci-fi/post-apocalyptic novel (the first in a series) by Jeanne DuPrau that was adapted into a movie in 2008. The plot involves an underground city whose inhabitants do not know that their ancestors lived on the Earth's surface over 200 years ago prior to some unnamed apocalyptic event. The city and its supplies were only intended to last until the surface is presumably ready for repopulation, and its inhabitants were left a locked box containing instructions for egress which were to be handed down from mayor to mayor, each unaware of the box's contents.

Of course, the box gets lost, the lock pops open, an annoying toddler (Poppy) half chews up the instructions, the city starts running out of supplies, and the generator which keeps the lights on starts breaking down, leading to blackouts and panic and situations generally more dire than those experienced by the inhabitants of California who are also, I understand, short on electricity. As is usually the case with YA fantasty/sci-fi, the children (in this case, Lina and Doon) save the day from the villainous/incompetent/weak adults, which is how we know it is fantasy and that they all resent us in their heart of hearts until they get their first desk job and BECOME us.

The book is no Tuck Everlasting (what is, though?), but it is a perfectly serviceable read, and there's the mystery of the apocalypse which is left open for subsequent books in the series to explore. The plot is somewhat predictable, and the toddler seems to do nothing but wander off and put things in her mouth, but still...the series was popular enough to get a movie adaptation, which is where things go horribly wrong.

The movie is well-cast enough, with big names such as Bill Murray (the greedy, corrupt mayor of Ember) and Tim Robbins (Doon's father), but the screenplay writers otherwise failed in a number of areas. It is unclear exactly why they decided to jettison the children's straightforward and believable exit from Umber (they decipher the soggy remains of the instructions, find a key to a hidden door in the rock face of a river bank, where they discover boats and candles which they are to ride out of Ember) in favor of a jazzed-up one full of giant mutant attack moles and as many gears and clockwork mechanisms as they thought they could cram into the last 15 minutes or so, but I imagine they wanted to get in on the recently growing popularity of steampunk (the mole I can't really explain, except to surmise that they wanted to add an unnecessary element of risk and some CGI).

Also: Ember is populated by the ugliest, most decrepit group of white people I've seen in a long time outside of British sitcoms (due to inbreeding, perhaps?), and it was a good 20 minutes into the movie, after I had wondered aloud if all the people of other races had been destroyed previously in the apocalypse, before the first and only non-white character showed.