A couple weekends ago me and K headed to Baltimore to check out a double feature at Bengie’s Drive-In. The line-up was ‘Up’ and ‘Terminator Salvation’. The day before ’17 Again’ was thrown in for good measure and I think that’s a pretty genius triple feature. You have one movie that’s good in just about every way, one that’s at least got some passing interest because of the movies that came before, and one that you can pretty much tune out and instead make time with your date. Well, being Sunday night, it was only a double feature, so K totally lost out.

Interesting, though, to watch ‘Up’ and ‘T4′ back to back. If you could chart the range of both on an emotional spectrum, you’d find that ‘Up’ covers pretty much the whole gamut, while ‘T4′ barely leaves a dot. It is, essentially, ‘action’. But is action an emotion? I guess not. But let’s pretend for a second that it is so that I can get through this post.

The original ‘Terminator’ isn’t genius, but you do at least care for the characters and there is an emotional aspect to it, if not a wallop. The two main characters, while fleeing a time-traveling assassin-bot, fall in love and instead of giving us a gratuitous love interest b-story / sex scene, what happens actually HAS to happen if the war against the machines is ever going to turn in the humans’ favor. It’s grand stuff for something that was relatively low budget. Some humor is squeezed out of Arnold’s death-machine-out-of-water status, some tears are shed, and a whole lot of stuff blows up in between. Not a bad little ride.

But with ‘T4′, none of that exists anymore. There’s no happy and there’s no sad. At least, there’s no new sad. Everything here, the plight of humans, the rise of machines, it’s all been documented. It’s all been said. There’s a pretty interesting set-up between Connor and a guy named Marcus Wright who may or may not be blah blah blah. You’ve seen it in the trailer. There’s some good action, but man it’s so solemn. At least ‘The Matrix’ had the advantage of being new. That series also slowly slid down the solemnity chute into the self-seriousness trash-bin, but at least there were things to find out. With ‘T4′, not so. Wait no – there is one thing. I’d spoil it to tell you here, but believe me, it’s nothing at all Earth-shattering. More of a ‘Huh. Interesting.’ moment than anything else.

Whereas ‘Up’ seems to effortlessly slap you silly within the first ten minutes. The first ten minutes! That’s where I got my money’s worth. Everything after that was icing on the cake. ‘Up’ packs into it’s first ten minutes what ‘T4′ couldn’t achieve in two hours. How? Why? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the screenwriter’s fault. Maybe it’s McG. Maybe it’s the studio. Maybe it’s the fact that $200m movies can’t maneuver once they’re on a path. That last excuse seems exceptionally weak considering ‘Up’ has probably been in production for the last two to three years. How do you suddenly decide to move in a new direction with an animated movie? Maybe it’s easy, I don’t know. But regardless – ‘Up’ has the goods and should be seen in the theater. ‘Terminator Salvation’ is like a really expensive TV offshoot of the Terminator series and will be a solid action rental.

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Also, it looks like ‘Grindhouse’ is going to finally get released in full on Blu-ray come August 11th. It’s really the only way to watch both movies, I think. Good as ‘Death Proof’ is, it didn’t need to be longer. And ‘Planet Terror’ is just right in this iteration, too. When it comes out, at least rent it and watch it all the way through in one sitting.