Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate's spoiler special podcast on Terminator Salvation.

My guest today is Dan Engber, a senior editor at Slate. Hi, Dan.

Hi, Dana. crazy screening where I will note that all technology was confiscated at the door for pure

piracy, but given the movie, it couldn't help feeling as if, you know, our phones became

our enemies as we walked into that screen.

Right. There was a lot of anxiety at the end when people were trying to make sure they got

their technology back as they were leaving the theater.

And if they got the right one and that it hadn't somehow been infiltrated by some evil force.

So we will get to reconstruct, not just the plot, but I want to try to reconstruct the entire timeline of the Terminator universe to date.

But let me just get a quick evaluation.

Did you like the movie?

I thought the action sequences were a lot of fun and everything else was horrible.

So you didn't care about any of the

characters. You didn't care about the story. No. I mean, it was just, I thought it was laughably bad

except the, it was just one action scenes strung together with another and those scenes were really

good. Yeah, that's what my companion at the screening thought. He thought that it was this kind of

soulless machine, you know, like the T-800 itself,

and that it was just basically unwatchable.

And I guess my standards have just been systematically lowered by summer after summer

of seeing all these blockbusters.

But I thought that as summer blockbusters go, it wasn't that bad.

I kind of enjoyed it.

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