Last week I watched Terminator Salvation, sat mostly submerged in a frothy bath of water with 4 lit candles and a glass of Banrock Station Cabernet Sauvignon (£7.99). Immediately a number of questions should be entering your mind.

Firstly: “What on earth is Simon – a man of no small stature with a testosterone count roughly equal to the cast of Predator – doing immersed in the sort of scenario you‘d encounter in an episode of Sex & The City?

Secondly: “£7.99 for Banrock Station? You’ve been ripped off mate”

Thirdly: “I wonder what Simon looks like naked?”

Fourthly: “How can he watch Terminator Salvation?? We all know the series as taken a serious nosedive since the nigh on perfect sequel Judgement Day blew our unprepared minds in 1991.”

Allow me to answer these in respective steps:

1. I’m a man comfortable in my sexuality. And I like bubbles.
2. It was a gift.
3. Amazing, obviously.
4. I was curious. I’m curious about sci-fi. In fact… I’m SCI-CURIOUS (hahaha)

Let me just set the record straight: Terminator 2 is one of my favourite films ever, for a whole list of reasons. The first Terminator film is also great, but in my eyes not quite as good, reasons for which I shall come to shortly.

I first saw Terminator 2 while on family holiday in Turkey at the ripe old age of 9. I holed myself up in my hotel room, shunning the sunny outdoors – children within eyeshot out the window splashing about in the pool – engaged the satellite TV, and watched this monumental piece of action cinema with dodgy Turkish subtitles. I laughed, I cried, my heart raced, and then I did it all again. Thrice.

You see, Terminator 2 isn’t just an action film. Don’t sneer ladies and movie snobs – if you shrug off Terminator 2 on the grounds of it being just some loud, explosive, manly wank fest with little else to offer, you’d be missing the bigger picture. While Terminator 1 was very much a sinister piece of near-future sci-fi exploring the menacing intentions of a mindless robot in pursuit of a hapless, innocent woman, the sequel offered up a whole platter of different moods and themes. Largest of these in my eyes – behind the action façade – was the films strong family theme. For the films 2-hour length, Arnie’s rewired T-800 had developed into the closest thing John Connor has ever had to a father figure, spending the vast majority of the movie sharing uniquely intimate moments and protecting him like a father should. With John’s mother incarcerated for a large part of his childhood and otherwise preoccupied with the upcoming apocalypse, the decision to make the Terminator John’s paternal figure was an utter stroke of genius on the part of director James Cameron, injecting some much needed humanity into a film that could so easily have been a carbon copy of its predecessor. That said, what made both the first two movies as exciting as they were was the basic “chase” motif: an unstoppable killing machine hunting down his target, doing anything to achieve his goals.

Terminator 3 fucked this up. As a continuation of the Terminator legacy, and proposing itself to be a true sequel to two near perfect films, it had a LOT to live up to. Losing Cameron as director was the first mistake, and a sure sign that the film was never going to work. This guy invented the Terminator, devised the initial story, and had a clear picture of how things should have worked out. Shoehorning further storylines into a series that never really needed it is a regular crime committed by Hollywood to make a quick buck, and nothing unsurprising – but doing it to the Terminator franchise?

Ultimately, the dynamic of having a good guy Terminator sent back in time to protect someone from a better, evil model was one that had been used up in the second film – so all Terminator 3 did was copy the underlying premise of the second film, and do it badly. It was a needless clone, a retarded twin, a straight-to-video sham that tried to pull the wool over its audience’s eyes. John’s “future wife” Kate Brewster simply replaced the role of John from the second film in the same way that John replaced Sarah from the first, but with the Terminator’s allegiance already switched there was nowhere left to go.

Arguably we should never have to see the future apocalyptic world that was created in the flashbacks, dream sequences and suggestions of the first two films. The fear of what might happen come was a large driving force behind the fraught anxiety created by the first tow films, and made the mission of the characters on screen all the more important. Terminator 3 suggested that these actions were ultimately futile. Now, the concept of time-travel in the Terminator films has never been water tight, but this never detracted from the enjoyment of the films. But the new suggestion was that regardless of what you do in the present, the future cannot be changed, contradicting the suggestion made in the second film that there is “no fate but what we make”, as Sarah etches these exact words onto a table in the desert sequence before setting off solo to stop Skynet at the source, determined to change the fate of the world.

However, with T3 now twisting the intentions of Cameron’s series and ensuring that there is no doubt over the impending apocalypse by ending on it no less, a 4th movie was going to have to be radically different from the first three.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, back to me and my bath, sipping on red wine and in no way thinking about penises. My expectations were low for Terminator Salvation. VERY low. But it seems as though the director (McG? Seriously? This guy did Charlie’s Angels. Ugh, nevermind) has taken the correct route of delving into the prospects of the apocalyptic world we now know has come to be. This film isn’t great – don’t get me wrong – but at least it doesn’t insult our intelligence by doing nothing new, worse. Bale’s acting-by-numbers Connor impression and the superficial plot is largely incidental, and frankly this is no bad thing. The decision to focus on Marcus Wright’s realisation that he is a cyborg is interesting ground within the Terminator universe, and while it’s not quite pulled off with the panache that someone of Cameron’s calibre might have, it’s at least aiming for something new and original.

Wow, that was like a proper essay or something. Enough of that. This article has been “terminated”. HAHA. No wait: “I’ll be back”. HAHA.

Next week: Simon laments the debacle that is Alien vs. Predator 1 & 2 while moving silently in a 5 metre spread.