The Nerdy News Blog - November 20th, 2010

Forgive me, folks, for failing to write up last week's Nerdy News, so here we go for what happened this week.

FOX Announces That Fringe Will Be Moved to Fridays

 Normally, I wouldn't find a change of day and time for a show to be anything remotely newsworthy. But let's take a look at the facts here. Fact: Fringe is a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that's currently on Thursday nights. Fact: Starting on January 28th, it will be on Fridays. Fact: Firefly was a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that aired on Fridays and was quickly canceled. Fact: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a science fiction show that aired on FOX that was moved to Fridays in its second season and was quickly canceled.
Opinion: Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcapOHCRAP!
FOX might as well have put out a press release that said we're thinking about canceling another awesome show because we're a bunch of morons.

Cryptic Studios and CBS Will Let The Fans Design The Next Enterprise

I realize I'm probably the only person you know who plays Star Trek Online, and hell, I don't even play it as much anymore. But I think this next bit is pretty cool. The game's developer, Cryptic Studios, along with Star Trek license holder CBS Studios and Intel have announced a contest that asks for fans to design the next starship Enterprise. I'm assuming it will be the Enterprise-F, since, according to the game's timeline, the Enterprise-E had a significantly longer life span than some of the other ships in its line. The grand prize is kind of lame, though - an Alienware laptop, the collector's edition of Star Trek Online along with a lifetime membership, the new Enterprise will appear in STO and you'll get a replica of your design. Personally, I'd rather have the replica and royalties for the use of my design. Oh well. The contest starts on December 9th. Check here for details.

 Darren Aronofsky To Direct The Wolverine

 That's right. The guy who directed head trips and arftsy flicks like Requiem for a Dream, Pi, The Fountain, and The Wrestler, is directing the sequel to the abysmal X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Aronofsky has worked with big screen Wolvie Hugh Jackman on The Fountain and it would seem that it was Jackman himself that got him the job. One of the things Aronofsky has done already is to change the title from something that probably would have been awful, like X-Men Kinda Origins: Wolverine Goes To Hollywood, to the simple title, The Wolverine. Supposedly, Aronofsky is looking to really separate his film from the Gavin Hood-directed nightmare that gave us magic adamantium memory-erasing bullets and the horribly realized Wade Wilson/Deadpool. He's called it a "stand alone" film, that "isn't connected" to its predecessor. Frankly, I don't see how that's possible since you still have Hugh Jackman playing Logan (though I actually still think he's great in the role). But combine this with the fact that they're rebooting Wade Wilson's origins for Deadpool, which should film soon if Ryan Reynolds' schedule ever frees up, and the craziness that seems to be involved with X-Men: First Class, and it's pretty obvious that FOX doesn't give a rat's ass about maintaining continuity in its X-Men film universe.


Oh, and for your amusement here's an image from a mid-90's Star Trek/X-Men crossover comic. I actually own a copy of it.

Yeah, that's Spock owning Wolverine with a Vulcan Nerve Pinch.

Win.

Four TV Shows That I'm (Still) Royally Pissed Got Canceled

1. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Dear Thomas Dekker, thanks for being less of a whiny bastard than Edward Furlong.

To this day, when I see someone who was on this wonderfully well done continuation of the Terminator franchise (set in an alternate universe where the events of the third and fourth movies didn't happen). Often, I end up pleading at the television set, "You're supposed to be on Sarah Connor Chronicles!" And then I get depressed. And then I get angry at Fox for pulling the rug out for what was a truly wonderful example of science-fiction on TV.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles wasn't just good for the Terminator franchise, it was just plain good. The show had solid writing, great acting (especially from Summer Glau as Cameron, the terminator sent to protect John) and surprisingly good special effects for a television show. It didn't pull punches and make sure your favorite characters survived every episode. A couple of my favorites got taken out with little ceremony. There was one particular "Bang, you're dead" moment toward the end of the second season that was particularly shocking. If you enjoyed the Terminator movies but didn't watch the show, you ought to check it out.
Be warned, though, a huge part of my ire is that the show's producers decided to take a risk by ending the second season with a huge cliffhanger. I repeat: a huge cliffhanger. And how did Fox respond? Oh, yes, they canceled it. Bastards.
On the bright side, the show's stars and producers have apparently been trying for the last year to get Warner Brothers to let them make a direct-to-DVD movie that would wrap-up the loose ends of the series. Though there hasn't been much in the way of developments in that regard. Sad face.

2. Firefly

Oh, come on, like you didn't see this coming. I'm sure this is on everybody's lists of "Got Canceled too soon." I actually never watched Firefly while it was on the air. Before last summer, I'd seen a couple episodes in reruns on The Channel Formerly Known as Sci-Fi and I saw Serenity when it hit theaters and enjoyed it. I probably would have liked it better had I been more familiar with the show.
How did it get canceled? Seriously, it was essentially a western set in space with extremely memorable and likable characters. The cast was top notch, with awesome actors like Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk and the aforementioned Summer Glau (who sadly is pulling double-duty on this list).

I'm actually going as Jayne for Halloween. True story. I just wish I had the hat. You know the one I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, Firefly suffered from a bad case of the common Fox-Is-A-Bunch-Of-Idiots. The network said the original pilot wasn't action packed enough and was essentially "too smart" and it showed the crew as being a little morally dubious for dealing with a villain like Niska (played with a large amount of creepyness by Michael Fiarman) to hook people in. So Joss Whedon wrote and filmed "The Train Job." While it was the third episode in the series chronologically, it was aired first. It's a great episode, but it left people somewhat confused because they weren't introduced to the characters properly. Then, to add insult to injury, Fox aired the whole series out of order. And they showed it on Fridays - a night that nobody wants. Small wonder it didn't make it past 14 episodes.
On the bright side, we did get a very fun movie, Serenity, that served as a sequel to the series and allowed us to get some closure to some of the story arcs of the series. However, hardly anybody went to see it and Universal lost a bunch of money on it, so we've probably seen the last of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and the rest of the crew (that survived the movie).

3. Star Trek: Enterprise

Ah, the often-maligned Enterprise. I grew up on Star Trek, and Paramount was eager to keep producing more when Voyager came to a close. What came next was Enterprise, a prequel that precedes the original Star Trek by a little over 100 years. Starring Dr. Sam Beckett himself, Scott Bakula, as Captain Jonathan Archer, the series got off to a rocky start. But anybody who's familiar with the various spin-offs of the Star Trek franchise knows that all of the spin-offs generally didn't hit their strides until the third season (though I still contend that Deep Space 9 was very good even in its first season). Combine that with the fact that thousands of infantile Trekkies who thought that Enterprise violated their sacred canon who boycotted the show out of principal, and that led to less than stellar ratings. But then, Enterprise was on UPN, which was never a ratings powerhouse (and shortly after the cancellation of Enterprise, it merged with the WB Network to become The CW - a terrible name for a TV channel, if you ask me).

There's a whole lot of swagger on that bridge. But we all know we're looking at the Vulcan. The sexy, sexy Vulcan.

Enterprise is the longest running of all the shows on this list, with a whole 98 episodes under its belt. It definitely did not start strong like Sarah Connor or Firefly. But as the show progressed, the writing and characterization got stronger and stronger. The second season saw some really strong episodes, and then the producers took a risk with the third season. Instead of an episodic story structure, the show launched a season-long arc in which the crew had to go into an explored sector of space to pursue an group of aliens responsible for a Sept. 11th-like attack on Earth. This got into some dark, Deep Space 9 like story-telling involving torture and other morally dubious actions taken by Captain Archer. The fourth season was one of the best seasons of Star Trek ever, but most people stopped watching the show in the first or second season. Even with a new producer and new two to three episode arcs that bridged gaps and explained many mysteries of the Star Trek canon (like why Klingons in the original series didn't have ridges on their head), the show just didn't have the ratings to survive. So, for the first time since the original series, a Star Trek show got canceled. This cancellation, combined with the poor performance of Star Trek: Nemesis, the last outing for the Next Generation crew, did lead to the JJ Abrams reboot that came out in 2009.
But, with Enterprise canceled in 2005, I found myself without new Star Trek to look forward to every season for first time in my life. Le sigh.

4. Dollhouse

I didn't even watch Dollhouse, save for the pilot episode which left me feeling it was a little lackluster. So why should I be pissed that it got canceled? Well, take a look back at the first entry, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Dollhouse premiered while Sarah Connor was in it's second (and final) season. Dollhouse consistently got lower ratings than Sarah Connor and less critical praise. However, when it came time to renew for the next season, Fox decided to go with Dollhouse, because Fox's own studios produced Dollhouse, whereas Sarah Connor was produced by Warner Brothers and sold to Fox to air on their network. Apparently, it was more cost effective to keep making Dollhouse than to keep paying Warner Bros. for the rights to air the episodes. Plus, Fox would make money off DVD sales of Dollhouse while Warner Bros. got the DVD sales for Sarah Connor.
So, Sarah Connor didn't get a third season, while Dollhouse got a second season. And what happened at the end of its second season? Oh. Yeah. It got canceled. Way to go Fox. Morons. Notice a trend in who canceled these shows?

I'm so bitter at you, Dollhouse, that all you get is a caption without a picture.

I might give Dollhouse another shot, since it was created by Joss Whedon, the man behind Firefly (and who will direct The Avengers due out in 2012). But for now, I'm content with being bitter, thanks very much.

Terminator Salvation - Review

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review, but if you've seen the trailers, then you should already know this stuff.
I'll be straight with you. It was very difficult for me to just take in Terminator Salvation as a movie in its own respect. I constantly found myself comparing it to the previous Terminator films, especially the first and second, as well as the excellent (but unjustly cancelled) TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
The film essentially follows two interwoven plotlines, one involving John Connor (Christian Bale) and the more prominent one involving Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Both characters start at different places, with the opening of the film set in 2003, where Marcus agrees to donate his body to science after his impending execution. Cut to 2018, where John Connor is fighting the machines and we soon see Marcus alive and well. The film proceeds to tell these two characters' stories, focusing more on Marcus than John Connor. This decision is slightly contrary to what a Terminator fan like me might expect, since John Connor is supposed to be so important to the resistance against the machines yet he is only playing a supporting role here to Marcus in their eventually shared quest to protect Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin).
One problem that immediately struck me was how much the trailers gave away about the plot. Several trailers reveal that Marcus is at least partially cybernetic, and since the reveal of this is a good hour into the movie, it fell very flat and didn't have the impact it could have. Any time Marcus got thrown around before they finally revealed him, I found myself wondering if they'd finally show him to be a machine.
Another problem is that much of the performances just feel wooden. In the first couple of scenes, I was concerned Bale would be doing his Batman-growl through the entire film, but that luckily didn't happen. Worthington seemed to just shout a whole lot, but he did seem to manage to give the character some substance. Common's and Bryce Dallas Howard's roles turned out to be largely forgettable. Moon Bloodgood proved to be a strong point, but it was Yelchin that I felt stole the show. He brought a sense of humanity to the character that I felt was missing from the rest.
In the context of the franchise, Salvation lacks the strong characterization that pervades other entries in the franchise, especially the second film. The film simply felt hollow, with none of the other characters aside from Reese and his small mute sidekick, Star, really connecting with me. At the very least, John and Marcus both managed to capture my attention in the last forty-five minutes or so, but the failure of getting both protagonists to connect with the audience shows a strong failing in the film. And perhaps it's because this film is set entirely in the future that this film can't be as humanizing as the first two. It's simply an entirely different type of story. Another problem within the context of the franchise is that John seems to be terribly open about the fact that Kyle Reese is (or will be) his father. We know that in 2027, Reese goes back in time to protect Sarah Connor, but this movie is set in 2019, years before anyone but John know about the existence of a time machine. And yet, there he is exclaiming in front of everyone that Kyle Reese is his father, and no one, not even the people who don't know John, question him on how that's possible. I feel, as a fan, that it was a critical error on the part of the writers to not make John's need to keep his heritage a secret.
There were some nice nods to continuity, such as the recorded diaries from his mother (voiced by Linda Hamilton) that John listens to throughout as well as the initial appearance of the T-800, which sported a decent if sometimes obvious CGI rendering of Arnold Schwarzenegger's face circa the first movie. A few lines are lifted directly from the other movies as sort of in-jokes for the audience and a couple of locales are at least reminiscent of locations in the first two movies.
One strong point in the film was that there were some really great action set pieces. I was especially impressed by a desert highway chase involving Marcus and Kyle aboard an old tow truck with two motorcycle-like Terminators pursuing them and by a chase sequence involving Marcus and John through the resistance base camp. If only for the glitz factor alone, Salvation is fun to watch.
Overall, Terminator Salvation is an enjoyable film to watch and certainly doesn't feel as campy or forced as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It lacks a certain substance found in the first two films (especially the director's cut of the second), but it definitely shows potential for future sequels - which are definitely coming. The film would have benefited from a more singular focus in its plot and strong use of characterization. I almost feel like those missing elements might have been cut on the editing room floor. I'd be very curious to see an extended cut of the film. In all, if you're looking for a fun post-apocalyptic free-for-all, I'd certainly go see it.