The horror, the horror...

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2003)

NOTE: CONTAINS UNQUESTIONABLE SPOILERS!
Oh, yeah! This movie is a perfect prequel to what can be an even more terrifying, intense, Orwellian and Fritz Langian T4 that can totally eclipse the first three. If I were writing the screenplay, this would be my opening:
The missiles are flying, the nuclear warheads detonating. Every single bit of the horror we baby-boomers tried so hard to prevent in reality and to capture in nightmare fiction and film during the Cold War in "Level Seven," "Fail-Safe," "On the Beach," and "Seven Days in May" finally comes home to roost. But it's not the Soviets or the Red Chinese or even terrorists with black-market nuclear weapons who are responsible: It's our own creation, born from our fear and hubris - SkyNet.
Scenes of people of every nation being vaporized in the middle of their day and night work and play activities around the globe are accompanied by the dark, apocalyptic chords and lyrics of "House at Pooneil Corners" by Jefferson Airplane (remember that one, fellow baby-boomers?)
Gracie Slick sings as a SkyNet craft...
"Circles...like a vulture."
After a few short minutes of mind-bending horror that make us wish we had never invented atomic bombs or computers or even been born - instantly making us all almost Luddites - we find ourselves in a creepily silent post-apocalyptic world as only Industrial Light and Magic can portray them. It is possible to even tie this vision of hell in with technology we "successfully" harvested, retroengineered, and exploited from Roswell in 1947, but which we - the true sorceror's apprentices - never, ever completely understood.
Scene upon scene of devastation assault us as the opening credits roll - we wish we had never started watching T4 but now we can't look away - and Marty Balin's angelic voice rises...
"From here to heaven is a scar, Dead center, deep as death..." ...and Gracie Slick's voice joins his...
"All the idiots have left..." ...followed by the whole band...
"...the idiots have left. Cows are almost cooing, Turtle doves are mooing, Which is why..."
The music starts to fade, and we are there.
"...a Pooh is poohing In the sun..."
Somehow, a stuffed Pooh Bear lies unharmed next to his dead child in a sunny yard (a "clean" neutron bomb might accomplish that trick).
John Connor and Kate Brewster will emerge as our leaders in the counter-revolution, though neither ever wanted or bargained for it. (But neither did Winston Churchill, in the years between WWI and WWII.)

So will Sarah Connor. Nope, she ain't really dead, folks. She faked her death (why do you suppose her coffin was filled with guns and ammo that her son could easily procure anyhere instead of either her body or sandbags except as a message to her son if he's clever enough to figure it out after the dust settles - maybe Arnie knew about the ruse - we now know he can lie - and maybe not). Those two are humanity's only hope, there in the depths of Crystal Mountain (except possibly for Sarah, who I'd have underground in Mexico), with obsolete computers that have never been linked to SkyNet because they were created in the days before the DARPANet and the Internet were even thought of. They're slow, and they are programmed in almost archaic languages such as Fortran. But they work, and they are uninfected.
This is a screenwriter's dream.
Bring it on!