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Saturday, October 06, 2007

The Sarah Connor Chronicles Pilot! Me luv Terminators!

Terminator 2 is one of my favourite action films of all-time, until this day, I don't think it had aged. The film IS. A. TIMELESS. CLASSIC!

The first Terminator, due to its low-budget, understandably didn't age very well, but it still has some good parts. But man, Terminator 2! So many awesome action set pieces balanced with great character moments that blockbusters these days are incapable of doing. Hell, I have to say that for me, Terminator 2 is THE ultimate James Cameron movie! (... you weren't expecting me to pick TITANIC, were you?)

I enjoyed Terminator 3 too, it knows that it'll never top Terminator 2, so it became a bit more self-referential and comedic, and seeing Arnold getting his butt whupped by a skinny chick in a toilet was just too funny. However, one thing that made Terminator 3 good was its nice 'twist' ending, where wimpy John Connor will finally assume his destined role as the leader of humanity after failing to stop the nuclear war. Without the redemptive ending, the movie would've sucked a lot!!!

One thing that bothered me was Sarah Connor's death in Terminator 3 (it happened before the events of the film). The idea of having the heroic Sarah Connor lose the fight against leukemia despite being able to survive and invincible cyborg like T-1000 is kinda sad. WHY????? (true story is that Linda Hamilton doesn't want to do T3 cos' she thought the script sucked)

When a Terminator series called The Sarah Connor Chronicles was announced last year, I felt a mixture of excitement and worry. Excitement because I'm a Terminator fan, worry because I fear the TV series would belong to the land of suckness, and it's just another stupid attempt to cash in on a venerable franchise.


C'mon, a Terminator series without... Arnold?
What are we going to get? Cheap Arnold imitators strolling around?
Who can replace Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor?

And since the series is supposed to happen after the events of Terminator 2, will it be a sad weepie where we see Sarah Connor gradually succumbing to leukemia? Man, is it going to be like the Japanese dorama 1-Liter Of Tears, but with Terminators in it? (Actually, that would be rather fresh in US, to be both an action thriller and a melodramatic tearjerker...)

I later found out that this TV series follows a different continuity, instead of happening after the events of T2 and before the events of T3, this whole thing happens IN PLACE of T3, a completely different continuity as if T3 does not exist, which means that Sarah Connor will NOT die of leukemia.

And the one to replace Linda Hamilton as the title character was Lena Headey, who played the Spartan queen in 300. Good choice, no one else can really fill in those shoes.

("MY QUEEN!!!!!! MY WIFE!!!!!!! ... MY LOVE...")

There's Summer Glau too, pretty much doing what she did as River Tam in FIREFLY and SERENITY: kicking ass.

She's supposed to replace Arnold as John Connor's Terminator protector, she's a Terminator infiltration unit who went undercover as John's high school classmate and goes by the name Cameron (homage to James Cameron, obviously). I'm all right with that.

Anyway, I have managed to... ahem, obtain myself the pilot episode of the TV series.

It's pretty good.

(If I have written this a week ago right after I just watched the series, I would have said FREAKING AMAZING!!! But I just started watching the first few episodes of HEROES, so I have to say that my initial enthusiasm for Sarah Connor Chronicles had been dampened slightly.)

The episode begins with a long and stupid nightmare sequence (of a cheap Arnold imitating Terminator succeeding in finishing off John Connor), which is kinda cliched. And I wasn't really that impressed. But things picked up when Summer Glau's character appeared, and the episode ended with a bang!

I was definitely not expecting the ending...

[spoiler warning]

The three main characters time-traveled from 1999 to 2007.

[end spoiler warning]

A big enough bang for me to look forward to the series... when it comes out next January. (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!)

So far, the Terminators (both the lame baddies and Cameron herself) that appeared in the pilot are seemingly old-fashioned T-800/ T-805s, would be cool to see some T-1000-like villains in the future. (I want to include T-X due to hotness, but she seriously ain't as cool as the T-1000).