Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

Q: How do you (almost) ruin a movie franchise whose need of the hour was to break away from the hangover of the Star Actor who has been its face for the past three instalments?

A: You include a bad CGI version of the actor in one of the fight sequences! That’s what McG has resorted to, likely as an homage, probably as an after-thought. In case you’re wondering about which movie I’m talking about, its Terminator Salvation.

The fourth instalment in the Terminator series takes us into the future – 2018 – when Skynet has become all-prevalent and the human resistance forces have had to stay hidden in small pockets across the world as the bots and machines take over the planet.

John Connor (Christian Bale) is waging two battles – one with the machines and one with his fellow commanders, who choose to ignore him as the ‘leader’ of the resistance and pay no heed to aid him in looking out for someone. Into this mileu comes in Marcus (Sam Worthington), a survivor, a man on a mission…one that he himself isn’t much too sure about. Is he a friend? Is he a Foe? Only time will tell.

The resistance have managed to lay their hands on a potential weapon that will destroy skynet and its upto John Connor to stop the attack until he gets out the human prisoners out safe….and take the help of the mystery-man Marcus. Trust and belief have to be placed in the very hands that might bode the doom for humanity…..and that is a difficult choice that John Connor must make. To ensure the survival of the human race. To ensure the struggle against skynet doesn’t end tamely. To ensure that the sacrifices and actions of Sarah Connor aren’t wasted. To attain…Salvation!

Unconnected II

Its wierd how when someone’s building something, that can play a major part in breaking something totally unrelated (Heck! Come to think of it, that’ sounds a lot like Software Engineering…build some, break something else )

Anyways, the building I was referring to was the construction work going on at the head of the street where I reside. In their eagerness to erect pillars, the construction workers had inhumanely slashed away all the non-electricity wires snaking through their airspace and poof! went my Internet and Cable connection…

I was hoping (which later gave way to yelling at the repairmen) that it would be fixed by the weekend, but alas, the repairmen turned out to be more moronic than the workers. They simply “patched up” the wires and left them dangling just above the airspace of the second pillar! The result, it was gone again the next day! Of course, the fact that the connexions were all-too-similar to this, didn’t help either.

What I’ve been upto…

Google Squared – Searches in Grids

Seems Google is taking the fight to Bing! Or maybe not! Given that this was announced more than a month ago…

Google’s new new search ‘tool’ (or call it toy) – Google Squared went live in the Google Labs yesterday and at first sight, seems a nifty way to categorize information. To quote their own help pages:

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes.
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others.

So what they do is restructure the search results into neat little grids or squares, each with its own category & label. And the user can add/remove the necessary rows and columns and when they do so, Google automatically gets that information (if available) and populates the squares. One can add as many items or columns in one’s search and what’s more, can also save them for future reference. But of course, the information should be available on the web for Google to retrieve in the first place.

To illustrate that, I’ve saved myself a neat square for Hyderabad. Go to Google Squared and type in Hyderabad. The areas by popularity (or search results) will be listed out as items, with few attributes as columns. I chose to add items that included areas/places of my interest and also changed the columns to show the attributes that I needed and voila! Again, information I desired, but was not available on the www (like population or nearest chemist, for example) will not show up in the grids. Check out the image after the jump…