Terminator Salvation: The perspective from an AI guy

Films with AI in them have always fascinated me, I'm doing an Artificial Intelligence based degree, so it's always fun to go and see whether they get anything right.

Terminator Salvation was thus a natural choice to go and see, because not only does it have an AI, we also get killer robots which, despite the fact that their Asimovian counterparts make for deeper story lines, gain massive bonuses because of the inevitable "who would build something like that?" questions which typically end with me pointing a finger at myself and smiling.

Now I'm a hard man to please when it comes to films, I grew up on a steady diet of sarcasm and Mystery Science Theatre so I tend to be mocking towards most films that I go and watch. In particular I tend to be most mocking towards actors who hype themselves up dramatically, yes I'm looking at you Christian "I'm BATMAN" Bale. This was a real issue for me in going to watch the film, because I like the Terminator franchise (with the exception of Terminator 3), and I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy Salvation because we see Christian Bale getting beaten up repeatedly or be throwing Popcorn at the screen as I had to sit through Batman versus Terminator.

Overall though the film didn't disappoint, yes we had Bale's deeply macho voice grating out at us like a blender filled with gravel. But that was the only real downside to an otherwise pretty good film. Things that really stood out for me where:

• The attempt at making the intro credits look like part of a program, which led to Verena and I simultaneously trying to debug the credits,
• The weird fact that the resistance seems to get all of its computer hardware from the same place I do (the Sony Vaio tablet, the cruzer flash drives) meaning that expansys still exists in the Post Judgement day world, or that John Connor looted my corpse,
• The fact that I can sit there and think "I could build a better kill bot than that" forgetting temporarily the plot-shields surrounding certain cast members,
• The new Mr Chekov being Kyle Reese "Keptin I've spotted Skynet Wessels!"
  
• And finally there was the really commendable work done by the CG department to hide Arnie's balls; a hand, a shadow, some smoke they used it all.

In conclusion, if you're like me (and even if you're not) go and see it, at the very least you'll be amused for a couple of hours.

Plans for the now

So, with summer truly upon us, I've decided that it's going to be good weather to actually go and fly a couple of model rockets. With this in mind, and in order to procrastinate about my exams that start tomorrow I've dug out my copy of The Handbook of Model Rocketry in order to convert the programs contained in there over to perl, so that I can run some simulations on a couple of designs I want to build.