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.

Tulips in Morocco

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

Grandma's been dead for eight months now, and they buried her ashes in Arlington Cemetery last weekend, next to Grandpa's. I wasn't there. Perhaps I thought that one funeral was enough - not that funerals are ever really over. They're just the gatherings at the beginning that do their best to prepare us for the long absences, and those we have to face by ourselves.

I dreamed about her a few weeks ago. The dream didn't start out with her in it; Faith and I were in Morocco (of all places), walking through the streets. We had been doing this for what seemed like a long time, when I saw her, looking very out of place there, sitting on a park bench. She was wearing her bright nylon dress with the deep, almost lurid, purple, pink, and green floral pattern. Big flowers, exhuberant colors - Grandma wasn't into delicate patterns or pastels. It was the dress she wore for company. I asked her what she was doing there, surprised to see her, and she said that she was waiting for the tulips to come out. It would be another week, she said. I just had time to touch her soft, familiar shoulder before the dream broke.

Giant Squid, Catnip, and Orgasms

My issue of New Scientist (highly recommended for any of you who like to read about fun sci-fi-like discoveries - you can subscribe at newscientist.com) came by electronic mail this morning, and there were two articles of particular note.

One dashed a fond, if unrealistic, dream of mine. Ever since seeing the preserved carcass of the giant squid at the Smithsonian and watching the video about scientists' unsuccessful efforts to find a live giant squid, I've often thought it would be really cool to be the one to find the first live giant squid in its natural environment (it would have been a sort of Life Aquatic moment). Unfortunately for me, two Japanese researchers have beat me to it.

The second article was both disturbing and inspiring. In the Last Word, a recurrent New Scientist column which answers a science-type question in every issue (one of those questions you've been dying to know the answer to but didn't really know where to look), this week's question was "Why do cats like catnip?" The answer? "In several carnivores, nepatalectone molecules seem to fit vomeronasal receptors for sex pheromones and induce orgasmic behavior, complete with a period of resolution," John Richfield, from South Africa, notes.

A weed that can do that? There's got to be something like that for humans. Discovering that would be even better than discovering the first live giant squid.