With so many things that are happening right now, it is hard to focus on what will happen in the future. Although we are trying to protect the planet for our kids to survive on, there is much more happening that we cannot control. It does not matter who you are or where you live or what you do, there is always something out there that is destined to stop you from achieving your goal. Perseverance is the only way to get things to change, but even now, in this day and age, it may not be enough to keep everything from falling apart. 

John Connor is living off of the grid. After the loss of his mother after Judgment Day was supposed to take place, he is still living in fear. With the dreams of his future haunting him, he still has a feeling that something bad will take place, but cannot tell when or where it will happen. But staying off of the grid has taken its toll on the future leader and when he is not able to go to a hospital or a clinic for medical attention, his life finds a way to drastically change. 

Kate Brewster is almost ready to get married, but she is still having her doubts. With her father always working, she is not able to get his blessing for the marriage, much less find out what he thinks about her future husband. Robert Brewster is in charge of something much greater at the Air Force, being in control of Skynet, the greatest computer program ever created. Knowing that he is not ready to hand over authority to a program, Brewster is trying to head off a virus that is infecting computers all over the world. Thinking that a human still needs to be in charge, he will not push the button to release the program into cyberspace until it is completely necessary. ​

There are very few times in life where you can trust someone you have just met. With so many people out there that are just looking to take advantage of whatever your situation is, it is next to impossible to know who you can even believe in. But there are those few instances where you just have a feeling about someone and know that they are on the level and looking to help you. Even if they may not be able to deliver everything that they have promised you, you still know that they will be a part of your life, no matter what curve balls are thrown your way.

Sarah Connor is a lonely waitress that is just looking for Mister Right. After her date cancels on her, she decides to head out to the movies to fill her time and leave her roommate and boyfriend at home to take care of their own business. But what Sarah does not know will hurt her as there are two people from the future that are looking to hunt her down, one is looking to protect her and the other is looking to kill her. As anyone that is anyone has their name, number and address in the phonebook, it is an easy task to find Sarah Connor, but it may prove a little more difficult to locate the right one.

Kyle Reese has been sent from the future to protect Sarah against a killing machine that has been sent back before him. Not knowing the current year and mugging a homeless man to get something to cover himself, Kyle runs into more problems from the get go than he could have expected. Needing to find the young woman who is the mother of the man that will lead the uprising against the machines that have taken over the world in his time, Kyle turns out to be very resourceful in finding Sarah, but he has to use her as bait to find out what the T-800 looks like. After watching the humanoid try to kill Sarah, Kyle is able to step in and put a wrench in the gears, but he knows that it is not enough and has to prove to Sarah that she is in trouble. Explaining himself and his mission, Kyle falls for the mother of his leader and steps over a line that he, himself did not want to venture. But with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Kyle puts on his solider face and battles the T-800 to the death.

The T-800 is a new design the has infiltrated human strongholds in the future and now has made its way to the past. Looking like a human, only dogs are able to distinguish that it is not, and under that fleshy exterior is a hunter/killer made of metal. Traveling around the city without any issue, the T-800 has located many Sarah Connors from the phone book and is visiting each one in order. Without a reason to listen to any of them, the T-800 performs his duty and kills them on the spot. But when he terminates the wrong person in Sarah’s apartment, he has to venture out of his normal programing and head to a populated area where the kills become more apparent. Being stopped by Kyle on his first attempt to kill the woman, the T-800 has to take his game up a notch and will not retire until this Sarah Connor is dead. Nothing will stop the machine from accomplishing his goal, not even having to take the fight to the police station.

Honestly, who did not love this movie when it first came out? This was something special that will never be duplicated in cinema and never should be. Yes, I know the special effects are a little bit dated, all right, a lot dated, but the story still stands tall and may even tower over the stars. There are several parts of this movie that may leave you wanting more, but hey, it was the eighties and very true to the time and looking back, I am pretty sure it was how most of the people behaved. I will admit that the cops in this movie made me cry with how bad they really were, but they did prove that numbers can be a blessing, along with a curse. Headphones, big hair, bad music, blood, action and a gas truck explosion, there is nothing better to make a blockbuster in the eighties and there is nothing that can replace it. I am a little ashamed to say that this is the first time I have watched this DVD since buying it countless years ago, but you know what, it ends up feeling like a new movie to the collection once again. Well, we've come to the end so I need a Sci-Fi sendoff, don’t have a set one yet, so I will try…the Future is only minutes away.  ​

It’s always hard to come up with clever things to say about films based on pre-modern literature. It’s a great well of inspiration for many authors/directors to draw from, sure, but the stories themselves lend towards a narrative that is simple as can possibly be. My mind often goes to the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf, based on an ancient narrative that goes 'man slays monster,' followed by 'man slays MOTHER of monster,' and ends with 'man is slain by dragon.' In order to modernize this, Director Robert Zemeckis effectively needed to take a third of the narrative and suggest that Beowulf made that part up, just so he could sew in a few veins of character motivation, depth, and transition into the piece.

The mythical life and adventures of King Arthur actually has tons of interesting themes that are capable of sustaining it: Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, his tutelage under the wizard Merlin, his marriage to Lady Guinevere and her subsequent affair with Sir Lancelot, the quest for the Holy Grail, his rivalry with his sorceress half-sister Morgan Le Fay, and his inevitable death during a war against the armies of Mordred. Like the telling of legends themselves, though, it is up to the maker of a film based on these legends to take a few of the most juicy bits, concoct a decent-length film out of them, and see how their results play out before a screen-going audience. It is funny that for all of the sheer Arthurian legend that exists on paper, we’ve really only seen about three successful film contributions, the first is a 1967 film based on a musical, the second is a late-era Walt Disney film, and the third is a lengthy surrealistic skit by a little known comedy group called Monty Python.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword makes it pretty well known from the start that it isn’t going to be tackling its subject matter with any attention towards its lofty lore. At the very start of the film, the Warner Bros. logo glows with red runes as though it is pleading with its audience to pretend this is actually Lord of the Rings, followed by a preamble text suggesting an endless and possibly sequel-bound war between man and mage. We then get our first glimpse at a scene that we’ll soon see replayed multiple times in intervals throughout the film: in the middle of a battle where the evil mage Mordred is using King Kong-sized CG elephants to flatten Camelot, Uther (Eric Bana) sends his son Arthur away on a raft, in a manner not-unlike Superman, while his totally-a-traitor brother Vortigern (Jude Law) undergoes a mysterious ritual to seize the last bit of the Camelot throne. In the madness Arthur’s mother (Katie McGrath) is killed, Uther is turned to stone with the magic sword Excalibur imbedded in his back, and Arthur sails downstream.

This begins the first of many head-scratching montages that the film seems to love to toss at the audience out of nowhere. It’s somewhat hard to describe in text but it’s just 3 solid minutes of a second-by-second smash-cut of Arthur living the hard-knock life as the orphan ward of prostitutes, doing odd jobs, taking punches, and stealing purses until he becomes an adult, played by Charlie Hunnam, and the sole master of the economy in the unnamed suburb of Camelot he lives in. The movie shifts from King Arthur to Robin Hood, at this point, as Arthur and his captains Tristan (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and Backlack (Neil Maskell) outwit the evil Sherriff Kjartan (Mikael Petersbrant), leading Arthur to be arrested and led to a labor camp. There, he successfully pulls Excalibur from the stone, and immediately gets set up by his evil uncle to be decapitated. He is then saved by a combination of his two friends, who happen to be spectacular archers, and a society of rebels led by Sir Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) and a perpetually unnamed female substitute for Merlin (Astred Berges-Frisbey).
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So, the main narrative is now concerned with Arthur being the chosen one, the true-blood king, destined to destroy Vortigern’s evil reign. It’s strange, then, that the rest of the film tends to play out like a medieval Ocean’s Eleven, as this rag-tag band of rebels use the power of rapid smash-cuts to outsmart Kjartan’s men, and pull various jobs in order to erode the public’s belief in Vortigern. The editing at this point in the film becomes so erratic that it’s difficult to tell whether it was director Guy Ritchie’s choice to play out multiple scenes, 3 seconds at a time, to paint the whole movie, or if this film was originally longer, and the smash-cuts are a way of preserving as many scenes as possible while maintaining a short runtime. Whatever the reason was, it largely distracts from a film that admittedly looks very good for the periods when the plot isn’t swarming around your head like a cluster of angry hornets. There’s an especially well-shot sequence when, after the villains succeed in taking a minor victory form Arthur, he throws Excalibur into the river and runs into The Lady of The Lake for the first time, and that final climactic battle Arthur has with Vortigern that is supplied nicely with both CG and a decent closure to the overall plot. Other than that, though, there isn’t a point in this film when two scenes are not happening all at once, and the rapid-fire progression of the themes in this film are more dizzying than the potential 3-D viewing experience.

It’s a real shame. Warner Bros. really could have had a franchise with this film. The cast is likeable enough, the storyline is daring and roguish, and the effects are wonderful. If it weren’t for the slap-dash editing, a lot of people could have walked away with a greater appreciation for the filmed Arthurian legend. As it is, there’s no point in expecting that both King Arthur and Guy Ritchie are going to be free agent commodities in Hollywood for the foreseeable future.