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Terminator Salvation may prove to be as 'cool' a movie as The Dark Knight. May not sell as many tickets, but check out its third trailer. So exhilarating! I listened to that repeatedly, even when not inclined or able to watch.

One speculation, by the way. The Halycon (or Halicyon? or Halcyon?) Company holds copyrights over the movie, partly. The fictitious robot-creating Skynot was a company, too. So why not imagine The Halycyon Company's logo to be Skynet's. The two are one and the same, I say. Hee hee hee hee hee! Fantastic!

The third trailer has something the preceding two don't. A bit of singing, layered over soundwise silent images. Very gentle, therefore exhilarating. Why the cause-effect linkage? Because the vocals and accompanying instrumentals provide part of the trailer's promise. And cycling this promise through my mind contributes to the exhilaration.

Not every part of the promise impressed me, though. Some shots, utterances, sounds and music merely prevent incompleteness. I accept them for that purpose. The succession of ultra-brief shots at the end of the trailer, for instance: a sixty foot robot punching downwards, a citywide explosion spreading outwards, etc. I'm not saying that these won't impress in their full-length contexts. More than exhilaration may be impressed on viewers. Fear and worry, for instance. As of now/During the trailer, however, these experiences are not impressed.

The visual effects supervisor of Terminator Salvation said that 'the camera is always moving'. I guess he was counting some shots in every sequence, because I counted many shots devoid of camera movement in the trailer. He also said, at the outset of the film's post-production, that the challenge of his job would be to 'bury' the effects in the photography. Reminds me of a motorcycle robot by-passing burial under a falling wreck, at one point in the third trailer. The succession of shots in the trailer featuring these happenings evidently constitutes a single sequence in the film: a truck ridden by humans smashes through a smaller, empty truck barricading the road; the smaller truck's wrecked body is consequently thrown out of the speeding truck's path, spinning over and falling behind it; the robocycle skids easily beneath and past the arc of the wreck's bounce over the road, utilizes momentum to straighten up, then speeds past and ahead of us; a second robocycle enters our freshly panned and forward-tracking view, shouldering aside a debri separated from the main wreck. This last happening, particularly, is determinism in its usual form -action sequence. "Tiny-and-medium-sized debris descending in the wake of the wrecked truck.....one medium-sized broken metal sheet hitting and bouncing off one robocycle's armour! Fantastic!"

Terminator Salvation has three cast-members as its primary stars. Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Bryce Dallas Howard. The first has portrayed John Connor. He's the one whose commentary we hear in concert with parts of the third trailer. Among these parts, by the way, are two successive shots -soundwise silent, over which is layered that gentle music I mentioned- of human crowds evidently imprisoned by the robot population.

Bryce Dallas Howard's eyes are literally gleaming in two shots, impressing on me the stunned reaction that the amateur doctor portrayed by her is experiencing. This impression is allowed, perhaps by my belief that the chemistries and deliveries of these actors are...serious achievements...not comic acting.