Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Season One Movie Review

The MILF playing the lead role of the new Terminator TV show is enough to revive interest in the sci-fi franchise after its third film tanked.

Despite not being nearly as buff as Linda Hamilton, Lena Headey pulls off a feisty Sarah Connor: She's gorgeous but tough enough to be taken seriously. Her co-stars aren't half bad either; they're worthy spin-off "successors." But as for the show itself, its first season can be summarized as a series of hits and misses, where the strong points occur at the beginning and the end, sandwiching a mess of boring melodrama in the middle. Nonetheless, when the show's good, it's really good, and those few quality episodes should be powerful enough to reel you into watching season two.

The pilot episode is the most exciting. We learn that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks up where Terminator 2 left off (a wise decision, seeing as most Terminator fans would like to erase their memories of Terminator 3). After having a disturbing dream about the Terminator robots returning to assassinate her son, Sarah and John Connor (Thomas Dekker) skeedaddle to a new home. Unfortunately Sarah's dream proves to be an accurate premonition when a new Terminator disguised as a substitute teacher attempts to kill John in a classroom. In steps Cameron (Summer Glau), the curiously attractive fembot sent to protect John.

What's particularly interesting about Cameron is that she's designed to give the appearance of a teenage hottie in the same age range as John. Of course, this creates a minor element of sexual tension between her and John. An attractive robot + a teenage boy going through puberty = quite an effective hook for the show. It gets you wondering about other untold details. Why did the future John Connor send back Cameron, of all Terminators, to protect him? Perhaps in the future they have some sort of robo-human love affair? That'd actually be kind of neat.

But after the pilot does a good job laying down the groundwork, the series takes a temporary dip into stupidity and silliness. The worst episodes are those that focus on John's life in high school. For a guy who's destined to be the leader of a resistance against the Terminators attempting to destroy the world, he can be surprisingly emo. For instance, in one episode a girl commits suicide because her classmates hate her. This thoroughly perturbs John, and Sarah spends a great deal of time sappily consoling him. You would imagine the guy would be more thick-skinned about such matters, since he grew up running from a robot who murdered plenty of people in its efforts to kill him.

Fortunately, just as Terminator is starting to look like a teenage drama that should be on the WB, the show gets interesting again when the Connors and Cameron attempt to find and destroy Skynet, the company responsible for building the Terminators. At some point Cameron destroys another Terminator -- and seeing a hot woman cyborg kick ass is loads of fun.

As much as Terminator fans will likely enjoy the series, I can't vouch for purchasing the first season DVD since there are only about four good episodes out of the nine. You'd be better off purchasing the gem-quality episodes on iTunes, or simply re-watching them at Hulu.

With that said, if you haven't delved into Terminator yet, definitely give season one a try: Season two thus far is tremendously better.







It's Summer in L.A.