So, one of my favorite guilty pleasures is going to Matinees. I don’t say guilty because I’m embarrassed, or ashamed; far from it. Rather, it’s more of a sense of that you’re doing something illicit, that you’re sneaking off somewhere when you should be at your desk, at work, being productive. Or at least doing the dishes.

As someone who scratches out a meager living by writing some words whilst sitting around at home, I do sometimes use this as an opportunity to get on my bike and go downtown to catch an early show. It’s better than it used to be – I had a job in an office once and after two weeks, my direct supervisor had a funny turn and was sent home for some mental recuperation. For a month. Accordingly, I took the opportunity to sneak out every Wednesday lunchtime to catch a film in the local theatre. Good times, indeed.

The other day, I met up with a friend to go see the new Terminator film (as I mention in a previous post, there was zero chance of my not going at some stage). The other great thing about matinees is that you pretty much get the cinema to yourself. On this particular Tuesday, there were about twenty other people in the room, all of whom were students, the elderly, or the unemployed. The three phases of my adult life, essentially.

So, Terminator. I saw the second Terminator film when I was twelve and it scared the bejesus out of me. I had nightmares about it for the next few months. At its best, the franchise is about a relentless killing machine, who cannot be slowed, nor reasoned with, nor stopped by anything short of complete destruction. It’s a symbol of death itself – you can’t escape it, just try to outrun it for a while. At its worst, however, there’s a lot of reactionary mumbo jumbo about progress being bad and computers going to kill us, and so forth.

Unfortunately, Terminator Salvation delivers more of the latter, along with a slightly clumsy Jesus / resurrection metaphor. The dénouement, however, is genuinely scary, as our hero John Connor is tracked by his nemesis, Terminator Arnold. Actually, Arnie pretty much steals the film in the twenty seconds he’s on screen (he quickly has his skin burned off), appearing naked but for a strategically placed wisp of steam. Also, it’s a little pointless talking about plot holes in any film involving time travel, but one thing – if the machines are so smart, why did they not do a better job of nuking the humans? It’s like they mostly did it, but then got bored and decided to have some fun. Final point – in Star Trek, San Francisco is the home of the good guys, and in Terminator, it’s the place where the evil computer core resides. Frankly, I’ve never been so conflicted.

Anyway. In conclusion, matinees, awesome, do it; Terminator, silly, but you have to see these things through, right?