Captain Black
Posts: 6365
Joined: 30/9/2005
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As mentioned it's up on torrents and newsgroups. My copy was in 4:3, which is a bit odd, but it looks properly framed for that rather than someone monkeying up the rip.
Spoilers mild to fairly revealing, highlight.
Scene setting then. It'll come as a great relief to some that the events of T3 are swept aside. We start in 1999 (with the events of T2 specifically placed 1997 should you have been in any doubt; I was) with a shot identical to T2's closing highway. Then there's an all too familiar dream sequence involving a T-800 (who looks a bit like James Remar I reckon) killing John Connor and a very nice FX shot of a nuclear blast (bit passe these days, really) and the T-800 being shredded to its metallic skeleton. Sarah (Lena Headey, who is perfectly cast and makes a good job of some weak V.O. segments) wakes up at this point; it's revealed that she's with some bloke who has just propsed; she then wakes John and tells them they're going again. Then we get the best line of dialogue in the episode: "Half an hour. One bag, plus the guns. I'll make pancakes."
So they relocate quite quickly and we're introduced to a new character: FBI Agent James Ellison. Sarah's boyfriend from the previous scene has reported her missing, and we get some clunky exposition for the two people in the audience who haven't seen T2.
Then there's the stuff we're fairly familiar with from the trailers. John (Thomas Decker: pretty good actually) meets Cameron (Summer Glau: really good; I'll get to why later) in school. Then we get the T-800 who attempts to shoot him. Cameron acts as a human shield as John does an action movie dive out of a window. Personally, I thought they did this scene better in The OC. T800 pursues him into the car park in an "expensive for TV but a bit poor compared to its big screen outings" sequence. Cameron saves him by driving her pickup into the T800. Which is a total ripoff of that scene in Dawson's Creek, if memory serves.
Sarah's heard about the school shooting on the local news and gets there as quickly as she can, by which time FBI Agent Ellison has arrived and is starting to become suspicious regarding the recurring robitic references in the evidence he's been gathering. The T800 attacks Sarah and does the voice imitation trick from the films, sorry, One Tree Hill. Then there's another shootout at the Connors' house and they do another runner. If this sounds at all like one of those Terminator films then, well, did you really expect anything else?
What is good is that they keep the dialogue fairly clipped; there're a few character points but they do a good job in keeping the material that everyone should be familiar with from the films already out. Something that T3, in particular, could be accused of. I mentioned Glau being really good and here's why: Now, when we first see her she's supposed to fit in with the school, yet she's distinctly Terminator like after that's been reveal. The transition works without you (well, me anyway) wondering: "hang on, how come she's got personality beforehand but not after?" She's also fairly proactive and we don't get scenes (as in T2) of her questioning Sarah's decisions. Which leads to what is, I guess, the biggest twist and you should stop reading now if you don't want to be really spoiled.
Last chance.
Okay. So, after what I think is a completely superfluous sequence where Sarah goes back to the Dyson household to apologise, Team Connor heads to a bank in LA. Cameron informs them that the resitance sent back an engineer who helped build it and in some safe deposit boxes are components for... we don't know yet. SWAT's arrived (as Cameron threatened people with a gun and forced the staff to lock them in the vault with the boxes), as has the T800. They construct some kind of futuristic gun (that the engineer has manufactured) while T800 is about to break down the door. You know that old adage about the least dramatic thing in the world is watching people type? A close second is watching someone build something. Anyway, it's a time displacement device, so they head to 2007 (after Sarah's shot the T800 to bits) and arrive on the motorway close to where Skynet will apparently be completed in 2011.
End.
All in all. I reckon it's a fairly solid pilot. It'll probably please fans of the series and while not outstanding as a single episode (like Reaper) it's got signs that it'll have ingredients worth building upon in forthcoming episodes.
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RE: Sarah Connor Chronicles - Footage - 
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