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It’s been ten years since Sarah Connor was first introduced to the future of her son and mankind. Sarah has been preparing her son John since his birth to be the warrior he would need to be to survive in this future and lead us to victory, however, Sarah is now separated from her son and confined to a criminal mental instution because she tried to blow up Cyberdine Systems – the company that will one day manufacture SkyNet.

Without the influence of Sarah, John has begun to doubt all of the training and warnings his mother has given him through the years and begun to believe she is just as crazy as the doctors and law enforcement believe her to be. He is set on being a rebellious teen until SkyNet changes its direction and sends back a terminator to target John instead of Sarah.

I adore Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I saw this film in the theatre when I was a kid and I still remember that experience to this day, the same way I remember Jurassic Park wowing me. Because of T2 I later discovered Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and happily chose the red pill and went down the rabbit hole with James Cameron.

The version of T2 I have on DVD is the director’s cut and like any of his films, once you see a James Cameron director’s cut you don’t go back. I understand that Cameron makes long movies, but everything he is forced to cut out for time constraints or other reasons, seems to be just as good as the material he keeps in his theatrical releases and Terminator 2 is no exception to this rule. The most notable scenes eliminated here and re-added to the director’s cut are the dream sequence where Sarah imagines Reese visiting her and when John & Sarah repair the T-800 model. Of all the sequences cut out of the movie this is the one I would have fought to keep.

If you remember from the theatrical cut of the film as John, Sarah & the T-800 escape from the T-1000 old Arnold gets pretty banged up, and he has a conversation with John about how he can be made to learn things due to his processor. When they are alone the T-800 gets repaired by Sarah. Anyone who paid attention to the first Terminator should realize that Sarah should be the last person to trust this model of terminator, it killed Reese and came dang close to killing her; so when it powers down for repairs Sarah removes it’s processor chip and prepares to smash it – but John stops her. He convinces her to instead switch the chip to learning mode so that the T-800 can begin to adapt and be more useful. It’s John’s first real moment as a leader and he demands that Sarah respect that. It’s a great scene and the only reasons I can see for it being cut would be pacing or because the studio wanted a shorter movie. Either way I think it’s a scene that proves Cameron is superior to other “action” filmmakers as he manages to concentrate on character and story as well as the action set pieces that get audiences into chairs.

If you haven’t seen the original Terminator films I really encourage you to if you are a fan of science fiction, the franchise, or James Cameron. I greatly disliked Terminator 3: the Rise of the Machines and enjoyed Terminator Salvation, but neither of these two films holds a candle to the original two. It’s still my secret hope that when the rights to the franchise go on the auction block soon Cameron will secretly buy them up so that he can either stop the inferior sequels or oversee them so his vision can be seen on screen again.

Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron & William Wisher Jr.
The Terminator: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sarah Connor: Linda Hamilton
John Connor: Edward Furlong
T-1000: Robert Patrick
Dr. Silberman: Earl Boen
Miles Dyson: Joe Morton

Sarah Connor: 3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

Bob Wilton is a small time journalist whose wife has just left him. Distraught he goes to Iraq at the start of the Gulf War hoping to get permission to cover the war; however, what he finds is much better – Lyn Cassady, who claims to be a former member of the Army’s psychic spy unit and on a mission to find his former commanding officer Bill Django. Together Lyn & Bob journey across the Iraq desert and encounter civilians, terrorists and independent contractors as Bob slowly draws from Lyn what the unit he belonged to was like.

What drew me to The Men Who Stare at Goats was the quirky concept and the cast. The cast delivers, the concept stops just short of doing so.

This film is helmed by remarkable actors: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges & Kevin Spacey. These are leading men that will be looked back at one day as the standout, true movie stars of our generation. They are as talented as they are charismatic and having them all on screen together is an amazing thing. None of these actors can do any wrong on their own, so put them all together and you have acting gold.

The downside to The Men Who Stare at Goats was that it’s a genuinely quirky film, which I am normally fine with but I couldn’t help but feel that director Grant Heslov was trying to emulate the style of something like Burn After Reading and he missed. This genuinely felt like a Coen brother’s film that was lacking the spirit and presence of the Coen brothers. As I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats and I wondered what the film would have been like if they were helming it, something I am sure was aided not just by the quirky concept but the fact that the film is starring one of their leading men – George Clooney.

What genuinely kept me laughing the entire film was all of the references to the psychic spies as Jedi warriors. This is funny on a geek level alone, but it’s made absolutely hysterical by the fact that Ewan McGregor played Obi Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels – I am 100% sure this was brought up many times on set.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an entertaining movie. It’s only issue is that for those of us out there that have a bit of a broader understanding of the genre we know what the film could be instead of what it is. It’s definitely worth watching, it’s just not necessarily a movie you will want to watch over and over again. If you’re really looking for a quirky spy film I would recommend Burn After Reading, you’ll even get George Clooney in that one and Brad Pitt in perhaps his most memorable role ever.

Director: Grant Heslov
Writer: Peter Straughan
Lyn Cassady: George Clooney
Bob Wilton: Ewan McGregor
Bill Django: Jeff Bridges
Larry Hooper: Kevin Spacey
Brigader General Hopgood: Stephen Lang
Todd Nixon: Robert Patrick
Gus Lacey: Stephen Root

Bob Wilton: So what do you use to remote view?
Lyn Cassady: I drink. And I find classic rock helps.
Bob Wilton: Any music in particular?
Lyn Cassady: Boston. Boston usually works.