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‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor

Chronicles’ off to an exciting start

Summer Glau is incredible.

Yes, that is a terrible way to begin a review of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” After all, she’s not even playing the title character.

The title character of Sarah Connor is played magnificently by Lena Headey, who I’ve never heard of specifically but who has apparently been in “The Brothers Grimm” and won some sort of Teen Choice award for her work in “300.”

But then, naming the show after her may already overstate her importance. After all, the “Terminator” aspects of the show are focused not so much on her, but on her son, John Connor, played reasonably well by Thomas Dekker, 20, who is also coming out of nowhere for me but who has apparently been working for the past 14 years in shows like “7th Heaven” and “Heroes” and “Honey I Shrunk the Kids.”

In the story of the show, John Connor grows up to lead a resistance effort against an uprising of apocalyptic androids called SkyNet. These androids are apparently so upset by this resistance movement that they send assassins back in time to terminate Connor before he becomes the big powerful leader he is in their time.

This clearly never works because otherwise there’d be no John Connor involved in any resistance movement and they wouldn’t be sending anyone back in time to kill him. But since that aspect of temporal mechanics makes everyone go cross-eyed, let’s focus on the pretty robots.

Terminatrix

Summer Glau has been involved in the WB’s “Angel” and in FOX’s short-lived space western “Firefly” and in USA’s “The 4400.” If you want to get a glimpse of her abilities, go rent “Serenity,” a movie that came out a couple years ago that was based on “Firefly.” Glau plays a human weapon deployed by the government against a tribe of violent berzerker cannibals called Reavers.

The fight scenes are astonishing and her scenes specifically are incredible. Glau’s training in dance shines through the balletic gore she always seems to find herself in the middle of, and it serves her well in this series as well.

While her “Terminator” fight scenes have been more one-on-one and hand-to-hand, watching this slight young slip of a thing hold her own and prevail against larger androids – since she is playing an android herself, sent back in time to protect the Connors – has just been exciting.

Watching her inhabit her character of Cameron Phillips – discovering how to relate to John and Sarah and how to act more human – is enriched by the Connors themselves being out of their element as well. In the pilot episode this week, Cameron jumped all three of them ahead in time from 1999 to 2007. The Connors have ties to their old lives that they don’t quite know how to relate to, and Sarah learns some things about her son and their relationship that she would never have known without Cameron’s insight.

Of course there are forces marshaled against them. No one believes Sarah, for example, about robots from the future targeting her family, and among other things, she’s an escaped mental patient. She’s quite naturally a fugitive and lives in hiding lest the investigators from the present – or the future – track down her and her son.

Engaging

The result is a reasonably engaging story that I imagine will improve as exposition makes way for narrative. The show has had to establish a complicated world in a short period of time. As Monday’s installment of the two-part premiere came to a close, John was heading to his new school and Cameron and Sarah were forming an uneasy alliance. So as the show continues, the effects and spectacle may subside a bit to allow the human aspects of the storyline to ascend somewhat.

Overall, the story seems to be off to a good start, reasonably well-written and certainly worth the attention of even casual science fiction fans, and fans of strong, complex heroines kicking butt and taking names.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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