Terminator Salvation Army

The fourth installment, like a never-ending loan payment, deals with John Connor (The Bale) in post-apocalyptic 2018. As we know -it feels firmly implanted like a nail in my skull- Connor is the answer to Jesus in humanities battle against the deadites, aka Skynet. Unfortunately, Connor's tunnel vision of mankind's future comes under shallow questioning with the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Connor must work out whether Wright has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past. As Skynet (US Branch, mind you) begins it's final onslaught, Connor and Wright battle into the brain of Skynet's operations, where all the terror is/isn't revealed.



I want to say John O'Connor and add an irish accent. An Irish take on the series might have been better. It would have featured Liam Neeson as John Connor, Cillian Murphy as the jittery, reawakened, death-row survivor Marcus Wright, and Helen Bonham Carter would remain, as she basically plays herself.

It could have dealt with Ireland's take on persecution from Skynet, and the fight-back, with echoes and parallels with the Irish Famine and Angela's Ashes combined. It could have had Skynet robots with big, pompous British accents, jagged robotic teeth and mercury mustachios. The Skynet robots would have been fuelled by Guinness, much to the pleasure of John Connor, who, at the heart of London Skynet (which looks, suspicously like a massive guinness factory) destroys Gordon Browninator/the architect/Bonham Carter/standard Big-Boss LCD screen and is flooded with the black stuff.

They all get really pissed drinking the Guinness and it creates a drunken mirage of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Neggar tells them "NOW YU KEN KILLT DUR RUBOTS". Suddenly a gang of pommie terminators appear around the corner, "Ay feck, wat we gunna dai," purrs Murphy who is pissed out of his skull. As the Britbots go to fire their Lea and Perrin 47s, they come to a halt. Stopped. Neeson shouts 'Oi cun see thee ansa, dis Guinness lets mui disaiuble theei systems with mui mind.' Neeson then makes a point of destroying and scatting all over the dead british bots. They all get pissed and end the war with the machines. With Guinness.

Ok, seriously, Salvation wasn't THAT bad. It wasn't good either, and there are so many things that let me down in the movie. I was gearing up for this one. The Bale is, make no mistake, one of the best actors of our generation- so what was he doing here, apart from upsetting lighting technicians; and why did he get so upset when the film never actually required him to act?




Perhaps Bale's best acting scene in the movie takes place at the heart of Skynet. Bale is at the peril of, momentarily-fused, CGI T-500 (which looks disgustingly like a real-life 95' Arnold Schwarzenegger) and while he has knocked out Arnie, Bale knows he has moments before the terminator finishes him off:

Bale is crawling on the floor next to Worthington's cyborg corpse. Worthington signed a contract before death row granting Skynet permission to make him into a cyborg following his death- he is basically a human robot, a human that is stronger than a human. Anyway, Arnie really fucked up Worthington, and he looks gone- the red lights have left his eyes, but they haven't left the Terminator series as a clear convention for a 'Robot Comeback Scene'. Bale's Connor seems to know this, after-all, this exact same thing happened in the factory in T2 Judgement Day. Deja Vu. So Bale, desperately, pseudo-straddles Worthingtonborg and begins twatting him on the chest like a spoilt, angry actor. His face seems to sneer, an ugly, delicious, glibby grin on his chops. And he begins screaming while pounding him, 'CUMMARRRON, CUMMAIN, CUMMMON, AH WHATYA, COMMON, COMEEAN YA.' I think he screams it five times. It's classic Bale when he gets to scream, and it always makes me smile. This was the best moment in the film. Worthington's light powers on in the nick of time and all is well.

Apart from that great scene, here are the many errors of what could have been a truly enthralling visit to post-apocalyptica mit robots:

The biggest criticism is that it simply draws, almost completely, off of a film that is now 18 years old. Terminator 2: Judgement day created pretty much all the conventions and content for which Salvation draws any story, character depth, plot development or resolution from. Bale's Connor is modeled on Bale playing his blander-than-film self, as well as a little boy who still listens to everything Mommy told him- he is fearlessly shallow as a character to watch. There are no emotions except for hate of Robots, hate of people who don't love or adore his Prophecy and a general hate and disillusion for the whole time-traveling mess he has got himself into.

Bale's Connor has a girlfriend apparently (the medic), and she also greets Worthington's Robot-Man incarnation with unintelligible hate and persecution. The characters don't stop for a second, and question the significance of a human heart perpetuating a living cyborg with super strength: something which could easily end Skynet. No, no cast him out, and whip him if you get a chance too.



The settings are also ridiculously unoriginal. The fighting scenes at the beginning of the movie take place in a conventional apocalyptic war-ground, which points to a complete lack of imagination; this is every apocalyptic, sand storm desert, old shack-gang hangout, every-man-for-himself, future you have ever seen. It just could have been so much more interesting if the Robots weren't dotted about in abandoned areas, like ready-made-action-scenes-in-a-box, for our Mad Max rip offs to dance and dodge bullets from. The robots also appear to groan when attacked, almost as if there are little midget men inside, who could not mute the impact of a gun immobilizing their metal chassis. *Guffaw*.

The fights with the Terminators feel really unthreatening. I think this is because the story has given no real 'meat' for truly understanding the Terminator's motives, or, for making you want anyone to survive their cold, destructive wrath. Basically we're following Kyle Reese, another nostalgic embrace and rehash of old, this time T1, material. It just feels like a big fan film, with nothing extending beyond the realms of imagination in the previous Terminators.

Reese's naive heroic nature is portrayed in the prodigal manner of Luke Skywalker on the Moisture Farm, and Worthington flits, with the spasticity of a retarded Han Solo: from completely untrusting and of fatal risk to Kyle Reese, on first meeting, to loyal, devoted comrade within ten minutes.

Reese gets dragged away in a flying, human-meat-box collector, and you feel like you're watching AI and The Matrix at the same time. It's that element of human persecution which post-apocalyptic films find really difficult to make look original and interesting anymore. It's always a great homage to Nazism- I thought we might be able to give the Robots a more interesting spin. No, it turns out they're hunting humans, to make more sophisticated robot-humans.

I'm inclined to believe they might have the answer here: If Worthingborg, the robot with a human heart, is ultimately the saviour of the film, then who gives a fuck about Bale's cry for preserving humanity. Worthington has humanity and the tin box to protect all of our fatal flaws. Perhaps the Robots have a good hunch here, and therefore the movie-makers have detracted completely from what should make this film gripping- to humans, atleast.

T3 made the mistake of blurring the fight between Humans and Robots with the creation of Worthington's character- an obvious middle ground in which the basis of the film revolves. It takes alot of fight out of the film, because there is no enemy to get all riled up at- and this is what you need in an action movie- something to just want to die and explode. I didn't feel like that. Perhaps they should have just aimed for the older style Terminator movies in general and leave the good-bad philosophical intellect out of this action film; it feels like they've generally derived everything else from the older films, so why not?



Salvation opted for a 'Saving Private Ryan' style war-scene, action movie approach to the film, whereas older Terminators have taken a more thriller, suspenseful approach to the creation of action. I think the latter approach captures the essence of Terminator movies because it gives time for the humans to recoup, get all heart-rendered (like Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong in T2), remind us of human nature and then *METAL CRUNCH, RED LIGHTS, COLD NIGHT* the Terminator appears with all of his antithetical, valueless existence to sever the mother-son bond. That is the nature of what made me grit my teeth for Arnie to do what he is programmed to do, and protect our humanity- it's the stark contrast.

I didnt get any of those vibes when Worthingborg's programming to kill 'John Connor' was piss-easily overridden via a quick, LCD-screen montage of human memories. And who was he saving, an angry prophet trying to save a world with barely a tear of humanity portrayed for the last hour and a half. A mute, black girl is thrown in like a spanner for cliched emotional kicks during the movie and that's about the extent of the movie to touch this cinema full of emotionless, action-centric idiots, apparently.

Interestingly, this film would have gone down well in a post-apocalpytic, post-humanity, cinema of Skynet's Terminators, sipping fizzy oil/Guinness and eating poptin.

(Real Robots were pain-stakingly made for the film...and this amounted to nothing)

There were no cogs in this machine.

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Knowing Cage Likes To Do A Spot Of Disaster-Dogging. At Home He Predicts The Dead From A Mighty Tower.

In Knowing, Nicolas Cage plays a teacher who stumbles upon terrifying predictions of the future...via an elementary school time capsule. Not being the type of guy to dismiss the ridiculousness of a schoolgirl's maths homework predicting natural, worldwide disasters, Cage sets out to prevent them with baseball bat, his deaf son and ofcourse, his mighty stride!



At first I thought this film was a massive piss-take. It's called 'Knowing', and the plot is about as banal as every disaster movie ever created since 'Bean- The Ultimate Disaster Movie' which is now well over a decade old. I thought Cage was making a satirical statement about the action film genre: the idea that all action films leave the audience with a sense of 'Knowing' and he is merely playing into the predictability of the movie-world in which he inhabits: the world of the talentless, pantomime Jabbermong. Like Cage, I thought the signs were all hilariously pointing to sarcastic disaster-movie derivatives:

1) Cage *chortle, minor fart escapes* plays a College Professor. Asked how he played the role, Cage said 'It was easy, my Dad was a professor'. Great Nic, nice to know you can earn millions of pounds by simply living life and not having to hone or practice a trade.

That's right, I think i'll play a film about a man who wants to paralyze Nicolas Cage. My basis will be that it's a role I have much experience with, having accidentally broken my friend's leg at a New Year's Party. My film will involve Nic and Me as friends. We get drunk, he falls asleep, and I jump on his back wearing Ice skates. The plot thickens when the police leave, seeing it as an obvious-drunken-New Years-iceskating mishap, and my friend (played by Joaquin Phoenix with prosthetic, sunken eyes) stumbles across the blood-written inscription in my notebook, reading 'Cripple Cage'. The film falls into further calamity and suspense, when crippled Nicolas Cage (who can no longer speak properly due to the severity of his crippling), plots to cripple me back. A sub-plot of comedy runs across the film as Nic trys to convey a simple order of a cheeseburger with his new voice machine (the machine sounds like Cage blended with a lawnmower and Mos Def), and desperately slurs to a hitman (a great cameo by Danny Glover) about plotting my imminent demise. The film reaches its powerful climax when Cage dies a cripple, having anally implanted stem cells which ruptured his insides in a desperate attempt to walk, and I laugh in a five minute scene. However, as contracted by Cage, he does have the last laugh via the sperm bank. Cage donates a sperm to a raunchy, Cathy Bates who has a Cageman kid. This kid, also played by Cage who is, via the genius of CGI, shrunk into the proportions of a Child, sneaks into my house and beats me to death with a golf club shouting in the famous Cage drawl ,'HAR, YA LIKE THAR!'

Got ahead of myself...more hilarious disaster-movie deja vu:

2) Cage's Wife is dead. Oh no, she died in a disaster which is predicted by the timecapsule parchment too! Jeez! It echoes M Night Synahaanaya's Signs almost as if one is sitting in the Bat Cave and Michael Caine's cockney Alfred is serving you a laxative riddled tea. It's also utterly serious with this treatment: The kid can't sleep until seeing 'Mommy and Cage home videos' which he still says goodnight to-*Cage at this point looks silent with his glum, pudding face.



3) Cage runs around with burning people and flying carcasses. It's just so utterly ridiculous it has to be a joke. Cage, attempting to stop natural disasters predicted in the list of random numbers, finds their destination and attempts to 'somehow' stop them. Firstly, his timing is recklessly, suspiciously voyeuristic. Like he's purposely foregoing the 'prevent disaster phase' and is actually going for a spot of Disaster Dogging. He always turns up just as the disaster is about to occur, and he is, in no way prepared to prevent something from happening. He has his feet, and on occasion a baseball bat, which he whacks against trees to deter enemies. If you played him in a computer game, you would simply be committing suicide- and it kinda feels similar to that: how many different ways can Cage encounter death.

The scene when Cage tries to stop a plane from crashing is hilarious. The plane crashes down (Cage, luckily doesn't begin to fly) and, although surrounded by police cars and medics (people far more qualified), Cage bug-runs into the blazing foray. He has nothing in his hands, he has no way of stopping anything- he's not an extinguisher! People are burning and flying out of seats and melting and popping. It's a bit like a microwave is on with people inside, and Cage's big, blue button eyes are staring into it. The camera work is supposed to gross us out with the burning and Cage's 'oh my god, the parchment DOES predict death' realization. When Cage pushes a burning person on the floor to put them out, I was convinced of the Saturday Night Live style comedy.


4) There is a great reference to Dark City's/Crystal Maze's Richard O'Brien. It turns out, the film must be a Scary-Movie style adaptation of Signs: Yes, Aliens are involved and they are somehow implanting 'Dooms Day' predictions, apparently in order to create some entertainment by watching the Professor run about with his son and attempt to survive. There is no need for any of Cage's headless chicken motions, as Aliens are already pseudo-perverting the chosen 'next generation Ipod' children by appearing by their bedsides and story-telling in 80's synth whisper. The Aliens look great, wearing black suits with pale, Richard O'Brien masks. I thought the Alien's were supposed to represent our tired, weary, fucked-off expressions when confronted with the Disaster movie genre- thus they kill and slaughter the whole world with a final, unescapable sun-collision that burns everyone. I thought it was a great laugh building up Cage in an intellectual Jeff Goldblum style- a role which he clearly can't play, and therefore fails in the film at every scene, only creating more panic, and annoyance for people by telling them he predicted it.


I stifled my first laugh into my bowl of popped corn, clearly enjoying this new comic-disaster genre Cage was single-handedly inventing; then I saw their faces. The dads with kids, the senile people, the sleepy dogs sitting on their owners laps. Yes, these weary patrons of the cinema were utterly convinced by the suspension of disbelief: they really thought the world could end like this; with Cage, a prophet of disaster encountering Aliens, and Cage's son becoming a neo-Biblical Adam designed to repopulate some distant 'earth-like' planet.

I then realized Cage wasn't just having a big laugh at disaster movies, and wasn't trying to come across as a pedantic, farcical Action-Professor. He truly, believes he was acting, and creating a passionate, serious dialogue about human survival.

Even more scary, was the realization that Cage wants to become omniscient. He is probably, right now, investing millions of pounds into earth-shattering, quantum-voodoo science he will never understand. This is minced down into babyfood portions by quacks, and fed into him like Christmas Cracker Jokes, via his USB-shaped hair plugs.

Cage would love this power, to know the future, and understand when others around him will die and writhe on the ground. I can see him watching Signs, Heroes, having an empowering asphyxy-wank on a step ladder overlooking the 90th floor New York skyline, and then getting drunk in the bar with the director:

Cage: 'Arr, yerr, I wannar know everything- I wannur play a guy who know evurything about people, plants, Aliens, deaf people'.

The Director (humbling Nic slightly): 'Look Nic, you can't just play a guy who knows everything, there would be no film, and remember, you like to adlib, so the film would have to have plenty of err, direction, for your tremendous acting talent'.

Cage (inspired drunk): 'Why cun I play Garrd, I mean, Garrd, I played arn Angel before, why not now, Garrd. He carrn predict the futarr, and know wharr peeple dooo like real smarrt, intelligul and-'.

Director: 'Ah, predict the future you say Nic...I might possibly have an idea...'.

Cage: 'Ok, Directar, but he has to be real smarrrt, and speak Deaf language and, y'know, die like Jesars.'

If the world does end, it will be because of Nicolas Cage. You have been warned.

Ice Age 3- Dawn of The CGI-Equivalent of Barney the Dinosaur Shitting Himself On Stage, Falling out of His Costume and Spilling His Dark Materials

Where do I begin with this movie, my first in a series of, what I hope are, pupil-dilating reviews. I’ll start with a picture, that should set the scene. Here we go:











Ok...*deep sigh*...this picture captures exactly what Ice Age 3 is: a giant, hungry, flesh-eating dinosaur. I think Sid the Sloth (Ice Age 3's only genuine anthropomorphic character: feeble, clingy, loves parenting but is unequivocally shit at it) aptly captures what this big, money-hungry, CGI dinosaur of a film is doing: it is gobbling up children, shrinking adults into children faster than one of Harry Potter's reducio spells, and, quite blatantly, pissing film cliche and story motif into our innocent/world-weary (delete as appropriate) faces.

I know what you're probably thinking this Summer's Day, hand on chin as you crawl through this stinky, prehistoric bowel with me: "it's just a kid's movie, why, err, it's a film made for the Kiddies-ya fuck!" It's for this very reason that a third Ice Age Movie should have health and education ministers all over the country, with shrinks and counsellors and giant, blacked-out-window vans patrolling around cinemas, abducting the children before it's too late: Ice Age 3 is CGI's new Peter Pan, and CGI is our Youth's Pied Piper.

err...right. Just for the record, I'm not insinuating that CGI films make children hop and scotch out of the cinema, following some blind ethereal source into an abandoned forest-cum-CGI film studio. I'm underscoring the value of 'Kid's films' in providing a dose of general knowledge, the impetus for encouraging imagination in a creative way, and a sense of human culture. Today it feels like perhaps 80% of movies are CGI based, and follow the theme of instructing children about basic Binomial Nomenclature: "oaarghh, ANTZ, BEEZ, TOYZ, BUGZ, EXTINCT ANIMALZ" and, ofcourse, "DINOSAURZ!".

So, Ice Age 3 is CGI's latest trip to Neverland, rolling past MJ's decaying nose and stopping time -as well as Neurogenesis- once more. Let me take you through the movie in the guise of a child's spluttering rendition to classmates in a school yard (...for the sake of this article, the child is public schooled and has a basic grasp of the english language).










Errr...the film is about, there's a Wooly Elephant, a Tiger with tusks, a stupid Squirrel, a littler Squirrel, a Hard Vark, an underground squirrel, a squirrel that builds dams and... a Gaysloth.
...Yeah...*giggle*...the start they are playing around like friends. They play in the snow and all get upset at each other because they are bored and do nothing and the girl Elephant is having a baby. Then a Dinosaur egg opens and the stupid squirrel goes under the surface of the ice and finds the Dino land. The friends chase the stupid squirrel, meet an English squirrel who shows them through Dino Land and cross boulders and lava and pearlyious quests. They go back to Ice Age at the end and feel less bored for they should of dyed in Dino land. My dad said Gaysloth was funny to my Mum- they wouldn't tell me what it is.

Just so you know, I didn't make a child write this, it was me pretending to be a modern-day kid who had viddy'd that film high on ritalin, alien waves from his Dad's iPhone and Sunny Delight or any other sugary drink that prevents the human eye from blinking. I personally thought the film was full of squirrels; I'm no Bill Oddy, but there were just so many little scrawny animals, hearts beating at 1000bpms, tails thwacking in 3D, chasing each other around like Darwin on ecstasy. I had the frequently reoccurring fear that my eyes would begin to spasm and I would stumble into epilepsy. Perhaps Children's eyes have evolved to track images at a faster rate and the film appeared to move according to their mind's eye- a mind fueled by a lunchbox-turned-medicine-cabinet of synthetic stimulants. Perhaps their eyes rotate like the ball of a computer mouse.

The action and character interaction were reminiscent of how I imagine the inside of the Scatman's head looks like, but this could have been excused if the characters had been given an original reason to propel around the screen like calor gas. Unfortunately, there was simply no reason.

The first twenty-five minutes of the film revolve around the two squirrel-things chasing each other to catch an acorn. I have not watched Ice Age 1 or 2, but I assume this is a recurring theme which acts as an official signal for Adults to begin napping as they occur, like interludes, throughout the film. I did look to the aisles occasionally, looking for an instruction manual for how to behave as an adult experiencing this movie. When the squirrels are not chasing each other, the other characters are literally standing around in the snow, apparently recovering from dragging out piss-thin storylines for two movies in-a-row. They take this time to reminisce about each others short-comings and generally pick holes out of their anthropomorphic characteristics.

The only theme running in the movie which anyone could possibly relate to, is surely an antithetical motive for children as it concerns having children. Parenting. The main protagonists, the wooly mammoths are due to have a baby, and this is the factor that propels the movie. I know Barbie Dolls and prams encourage parenting, but a film about the Ice Age should be about the Ice Age: the mammoths should be focusing on hunting and surviving in the icy tundra with the adult humour focused around their inevitable extinction due to some underlying stupidity. Ice Age 3 didn't opt for this. Instead it creates ice sculpted playgrounds and for the adults, the reminder that parenting isolates you from your friends and creates a ridiculous, nagging, anxiety in the male akin to Hugh Grant's 9 months.

The story finally starts though, with a tremendous turn in imaginative writing, when the gay sloth, stupidly feeling abandoned and deserted by his friends, finds a dinosaur egg in the Ice Age. Again, running along the theme of parenting, the dinosaurs hatch and follow Daddy Sloth around. This all spirals out of control and leads to our characters falling under the ice and into a prehistoric land. This is historically ridiculous and may vegetate children further into believing we have a world existing simultaneously beneath us and not, infact, a great fucking-hot mantle and core of molten magma. I know this is a fairy tale movie and you can make stuff up when you write these things so, again, I might be able to overlook how we addle our children's perception of evolution and extinction if there were some conviction in this movie that actually made you think a third film was created with some original ideas- not simply to cash in on a reused, tired and wrinkled condom of a CGI plotline.

Yes, it's the QUEST that ditches the film of its final hope for any integrity as a story, sinking it below the usual critique of 'just another animal CGI film' into the realms of 'just another, another animal CGI film based on a CGI film that was just another animal CGI film'. It sounds like i'm repeating myself because that is exactly what this film is. I think the directors could have taken Ice Age 1, blended the digi film reel like a Mango, drank it and shitted out the contents onto a glass table for the viewers to watch, like Ice Age sycophants under the glass with popcorn and revels. Seriously, I don't know if a child would know the difference if the clips really were all mashed up from the first movie in order to make the third. Are we really assuming our children want to watch a third film about the same thing, with the only precipitating conclusion being 'THIIIS ONE HAAAD DINOOOSAURZ'. We're insulting their intelligence and giving them no challenge whatsoever in Cinema.

The story QUEST in this film makes ET look like Shakespeare's Othello. We had films like the Goonies and Watership Down, and today kids have a story revolving around a quest, which is as old as a Dragon's menopause (check with Harry Potter, but I think it's really old!). Basically, our Ice Age friends meet another squirrel-like creature while searching for the Sloth and Dinopups (who've been kidnapped by -guess who- Mummy Dinosaur. This squirrel-like-creature is voiced by Simon Pegg donning a Captain Jack Sparrow impression which is almost, almost, genuinely funny at times (you imagine they allow Pegg to ad-lib his fanboy lips on occasion). Pegg basically outlines the route to saving their 'Gaysloth' friend via a series of events i'm terming the QUEST.

The QUEST includes such film time extenders as 'The Chasm of Doom', 'The Bridge of Bones' and any other dramatic, action cliche you can conjure up in a boardroom with lots of fat people and a board marker in ten minutes. Why do I think this QUEST montage is so bad? It's sloppy, lackluster writing in a film where there is no film to begin with. So ultimately there is absolutely no substance or justification for the movie to be different, interesting or captivating in an original way. You get the feeling the Fox fat cats are clicking their fingers at real-life living 'animalz' who have been crudely, digitally created by a programmer to enact autonomous acting in CGI films. Like they've built Ellie the-Great-Queen-Latifah-Impersonating Mammoth and asked her to just 'fuck around' on the computer studio for a bit while they press record on their big computer. I can see the sly Fox laughing at how easy this is.

There's also a sense in these CGI movies that it's not for Children atall. It's the whole 'Simpson's syndrome' of creating animation with sly, adult undertones throughout to remind adults in the movie that the filmmakers know adults are indeed at the Cinema. I can understand the asides for adults, but CGI movies are too often tight-rope walking the lines on adult and childlike themes; the result, a movie that feels like it's taking the piss out of children's intellect throughout. This is because the childlike elements are really dumbed down and the adult elements tend to be a little bit too dirty for adults to explain to children. For this reason, a film like Ice Age 3 suspends the adult and child in two completely different movies which do not achieve the potential of good CGI cinema.

The answer lies in finding the middle ground- something Ice Age 1 surely didn't do and 2 & 3 gave the big finger- adorning the movie with bright colours and ANIMALZ in a CGI franchising spell that is making burgers out of child-Shaped cash cows. Films like Wall-E and Ratatouille offer the beacon of light for CGI, firmly finding that sacred middle ground. These films do not ask children to be addicted to sugar, bright lights and repetitive slapstick humor, they challenge their knowledge of film and provide interest by being enigmatic for Kids: their not serving up directionless, schoolyard humour every other minute in order to hold a child's attention, they are opening ideas and showing them films can be genuinely captivating by not blowing a bell and whistle with special effects, goofy noises and repetitive cliche, but by being different and original in some way. For adults, CGI films such as Wall-E play out more like something from 2001 Space Odyssey: it's a genuinely worthwhile piece of CGI cinema with a storyline that is told almost entirely in silence. This skill of conveying and telling an original story to a child and an adult, makes an excellent reason for producing eye-catching CGI movies. The rest just makes me Eyerate.

I remember the first time I watched The Witches starring Angelica Houston. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time, the perfect age to watch a film like Ice Age 3. I remember how the plotline of The Witches felt dark, and scary in some ways, and that there were some elements I didn't quite understand. I remember being intrigued and captivated to watch the film several times for the simple reason that I wanted to try and take in more elements of the film as I grew up- it was interesting to see a film that contained elements in it which I now realize are quite adult and present in horror movies. For example, the Witch trying to offer Luke the chocolate bar which turns into a snake is quite a dark theme, ringing with adults and children because of child abduction fears and lessons we give children every day. Films can feed culture to children and should try to expand their horizons. I feel The Witches had elements of this, I fail to see anything of substance in the great diarrhea of CGI ANIMALZ movies.

There's also a poignant sense of nostalgia created in real-life films children watch that may never be captured in CGI. Real films actually belong in a time and a place and have actors you remember and see while growing up. I remember the setting in England for the Witches and feel slightly nostalgic. I think of Ice Age 3 and feel slightly sick. CGI could rob many children of interest in our culture and instead render them primarily interested in the actual effects and graphics which sit in the electronic box. With the heavy wealth of gadgets and gizmos out there, I am instilled with more fear when I realize films may just become a technical process, abandoning the art and story for 3d Special effects, interactive 'choose the ending' movies, augmented reality and highly paid, ugly as sin, 'voice demons'.

Ice Age 3, the beginning of the extinction of CGI? Let's hope snow.