At the beginning of the summer, I went to see Terminator: Salvation. I found a desperate world in which machines were in control and people were herded about like cattle. It was a sad world. A hopeless world. But once I got through the ticket line, I found the movie itself to be rather entertaining. Zing!
My relationship with the Terminator movies has always been complicated. I mean, the first movie showed so much promise that they remade it and called it a sequel. The second one was so successful, they remade it and called it a trilogy. The third one was so god awful, they remade the second movie as a television show. Unfortunately the element that I always found compelling was the idea of an actual war between man and machine, and that much anticipated war--like Ethan's sex life, Chinese democracy, and the re-emergence of disco--kept getting postponed. The Terminator movies weren't unlike the Highlander or Crow franchises. Rather than continuing the story, they simply retold the original again and again. And if that comparison doesn't seem to fit, how about the fact that the third retelling of the Crow was subtitled Salvation?
Well, the war in the Terminator world finally got underway, and it seems like everyone and their brother thought that it was a piece of shit--except for me. I ate my popcorn; I drank my cherry coke; and I enjoyed the hell out of that movie. Once again I watched a machine struggle with the concept of humanity and ultimately win. And if a robot can learn to overcome it's own programming and rise up above its basest nature, why the hell can't we?
And so today's strip shows our love for those beloved killing machines by letting them do something they've never done before.
