This is a comic book movie in some of my favorite ways.  It’s full of references to Marvel canon that you don’t have to catch, it strikes the right “reluctant hero” notes for me, and it’s funny. The sequence of posters starting here on IMDB works really well for me.

It does not clear the high bar set by The Avengers, however. Also, it invokes comic-book physics, but fails to invoke them consistently. The rules change in ways that seem like they should be pretty important, and which are blindingly obvious, but the inconsistency is NOT a story point, so paying attention is just distracting.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: We are told, and even shown, that shrunken Ant-Man can hit like a hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing. In ant-mode he dents cars and cracks tile. Perfect! He didn’t lose any mass. Just volume. The science behind the “Pym particle” is all kinds of ridiculous, but the initial explanation, which says that atomic distances are decreased, serves the movie just fine.

But for comedy, we need to have Ant-Man riding Thomas the Tank Engine, or getting swatted out of the air with a wave of the hand. Oh, and for about half the action to work, Ant-Man needs to be able to ride on ants.  That’s not something a one-hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing can do.

“Which is it?” I kept asking myself. “Tiny and heavy, or just tiny and cool?”

The fix, obviously, is for the Pym particle to be able to variably effect the expression of mass by affected matter. Sometimes Ant-Man is heavy, sometimes he’s not. But if they’d invoked THAT, then there are a host of other abilities he could have used, and should have used, starting with flying high above his target on the back of a flying ant before dropping fifty feet through the skull of the enemy goon, and then expanding to full size in a shower of gore. And, well, this isn’t that kind of movie.

Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. It doesn’t come anywhere near being my favorite film of the year, entering my list at #8, but it did clear the Threshold of Awesome, and was a much more enjoyable movie than I expected it to be.

Minions crossed my Threshold of Disappointment, which is quite an accomplishment considering the fact that I really didn’t expect much from it.

I think the core problem was that I didn’t care. Nothing seemed to be at stake. Sure, there were some funny moments, and the animation was brilliant, but ultimately the film failed to connect with me anywhere.

Like Penguins of Madagascar, Minions attempts to take hilarious side characters and extend the hilarity to a feature film. Minions was hobbled by one of the key rules of the setting: the Minions themselves must never speak intelligibly.

Remember WALL-E? Imagine the first act of that story with a narrator interpreting it all for us.

That is exactly what happened for the opening scenes of Minions. I don’t mind having a narrator set the tone, and Geoffrey Rush was great at that, but when the narrator must tell me what a character is thinking, feeling, and saying, something has gone terribly wrong.

Minions enters my list at #16. If you’ve got kids who are begging to see this, my advice is to take the money you would have spent on that, and buy something cool for them with it. Then rent this when it comes out on DVD.

I’m listening to the Terminator: Genisys soundtrack, by Lorne Balfe, as I write this. It is quite good.

Per my remarks on Twitter, Terminator: Genisys is NOT the movie in which Starbuck says to Sarah Connor “this is my friend Neo. We’re here to help with your robot problem.” That impossibly wonderful crossing of the streams was my brother Randy’s idea, and we both know that it’s something we’ll never have.  Perhaps our grandchildren will get it on SpacePirateBay, or Googazon’s hTube, but it will never be ours.

Terminator: Genisys does manage to cross some streams, though, and to great effect. If you’re familiar with the first two films, and perhaps a little confused by the third, the fourth, and the TV show, (the confusion results because you’re trying to use the word “continuity” in conjunction with the words”time” and  “travel,”) you will find that  Terminator: Genisys plays with all of the source material, and will reward those familiar with the franchise for paying attention.

(As of this writing the original Terminator film, starring the inimitable Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, is available on Netflix. Should you watch it first? Maybe!)

I would have enjoyed the film much more had I not seen so many cool reveals in the trailers. They telegraph quite a bit of what’s coming, but the studio did manage to hold a few things back, and the surprises were delightful. I want to talk about those things, and how effectively the story turned expectations upside down, but then you’ll have less fun in the theater than I did, and that is almost the exact opposite of what I should be causing to happen with these reviews.

Emilia Clarke, who plays Sarah Connor, initially struck me as looking far too young and tiny for the role. Funny thing: she’s within a year of the same age Linda Hamilton was when she defined Sarah Connor for us in 1984’s Terminator.

Despite being four inches shorter than Hamilton, Clarke had me convinced by the end of the movie. It’s probably because she’s a fine actress, and has that amazing ability to project herself as larger than life. Not having watched enough Game of Thrones to see her as Daenerys, I can’t speak for everything she does, but that particular piece resumé should speak much more loudly to you than anything I say.

Terminator: Genisys did what few* sixth installments in a cinematic franchise do: it crosses my Threshold of Awesome, entering my 2015 list at #8.

Regarding that, it seems that either my standards are slipping, or this is a good year for movies that I enjoy. Or maybe I’ve become a better judge of what I should see in the theater. My Threshold of Disappointment has only been tripped once (Furious 7), and the middle ground between disappointment and awesome is occupied by three titles: Insurgent, Strange Magic, and Seventh Son.

The year is half over. I hope this does NOT mean that I’ve accrued a stack of movie karma that will require balancing in the coming months.

(*Note: sixth installments that cross the Threshold of Awesome: The Avengers in 2012, and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. Sixth installments that don’t?)