I can't help but think that both Batman: Battle For the Cowl and Terminator: Salvation, aside from sharing annoying colons, are similarly misconceived. Both projects are meant as opening acts to something bigger, which is frustrating. Neither one was designed to tell its own story. With a comic series that was intended as a place-holder until the new creative team could get a few issues under their belt, I can understand Battle for the Cowl to a certain, crass degree. I can even understand how the new Terminator movie wants to cover the potentially rich ground of a character who struggles with his faith and the seeming impossibility of that faith being rewarded. Both were hampered by execution that didn't seem to aspire to much beyond scenes we'd seen before in either franchise and one-note emotional intensity that lacked grounding in the themes the stories teased. Both projects simply restated the conclusion that everybody already knew was coming. Both protagonists are trying to understand their legacies and their roles in narratives that have been written for them. And that's where they both let me down the most.
(I won't even complain that the teaser [right] promised to deliver a Two-Face Batman, Hush dressed up as Bruce Wayne, and Batwoman.)
There is a lot of fun to be had with playing with audience expectation, thematic exploration of free will vs destiny, and the legacies that parents leave for their children - the various ways they screw them up and empower them. I don't expect Terminator movies, or most Batman comics, to be deep philosophical explorations of complex themes, but I expect that both stories will not justify their existence by simply restating a foregone conclusion. When your entire project would be better treated as a line of expository dialogue in the follow-up that tells the real story, you should probably reconsider the story you're telling.
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