Ah, what could have been. I love the premise (superhero who couldn’t care less and is universally hated), and the way it’s presented in the first ten, maybe twenty minutes. What comes afterwards, not so much.

So, fine, PR guy Ray feels sorry for the man (perhaps, too, because he arguably just saved Ray’s life), is unsuccessful himself, and comes up with the pitch of actually making John Hancock well-liked. And his wife isn’t fond of the idea, what with all the collateral damage that is John’s trademark with anything he does. Still amusing.

And amusing, too, to see the alcoholic superhero actually join an anonymous group. For countless meetings, he passes, never speaking up. But this subplot is never resolved: even when finally urged to by the others, he only mutters a few words, not actually introducing himself.

It goes downhill from there. Ray urges Hancock to turn himself in. When, as predicted by Ray, the police actually ask for his help, and he does his job politely and fabulously (and is applauded for it and suddenly a beloved community member), the movie is pretty much over. Well, it should be. Sorry, another 40 minutes to go! Gee, how do we fill them…

Oh yeah! Let’s go all Dogma style, reveal that Jay’s wife is also Hancock’s wife, and that the two are in fact angels. Then, have the two senselessly fight each other and finally explain that, sorry, they can’t be close, lest they lose their powers in favor of mutual affection.

Yeah, that would make sense. Cut!

For a script stuck in development hell for a decade, pathetically little time was apparently put into improving it. The film doesn’t suffer from bad acting or from unoriginality, as is often the case with superhero flicks. It suffers from what’s-going-on incoherency, and from leaving you to wonder just what point it was trying to make.

Self-loathing people just need to disappear for a while as to become recognized as necessary and good? Alcoholism is something you just shed like a piece of skin? Women can be superheroes, too, but they’re too afraid to admit it, and become cranky liars when found out? Who knows.

If there’s one word that describes my feelings about WALL•E with unsurpassable accuracy, it must be “woah”. Just the way WALL•E says it. It’s been getting rave reviews all over the place — with 96% at Rotten Tomatoes, and 93 at metacritic.com. And boy, does it ever deserve those.

This one rivals Monsters, Inc. as my favorite Pixar feature film.

When you have a fictional universe, preserving fans’ fond memories of its intricate, specific qualities is far easier when you stop publishing new titles, be it sequels, spin-offs or other works. Should you decide to continue the ‘franchise’, the end result, more often than not, is that the peak had already been reached, and try as you may, you won’t succeed in getting back there. That’s why sequels have a bad reputation: habitually, they build upon their predecessors, yet never quite reach them, and end up pulling the entire series down.

It was perhaps such with Myst: while Exile, Revelation and End of Ages weren’t bad games at all, they lacked the pure excellence of Riven. And it was certainly so with Terminator: the third movie failed to add any memorable elements of its own, and as such now serves to give a worse impression of the trilogy as a whole.

Thus my worry with The Sarah Connor Chronicles. An entire TV series based on a movie trilogy whose canon is already on the verge of irreparably damaged timeline nonsense? A father who knows his own son before he was conceived, a company reverse-engineering chips before they were built. And who wants to see “miraculously, humans keep surviving the fight against virtually indestructible, highly aggressive and optimized machines” over and over again anyway?

It turns out I do — for now, at least. I think there’s something endearing about — of all things — the character of Cameron, the “good” Terminator who happens to look and act a bit like a teenage girl. Summer Glau is a terrific choice of actress, making Cameron wooden, programmed and predictable as you’d expect a machine to be, yet curious, inquisitive and knowledge-thirsty.

The show goes jumps between disturbing (a mad scientist using human tissue for an android) through amusing (Cameron’s attempts at “not acting like a freak” at high school) to controversial (should a bright-minded person be killed if their clever invention will one day be indirectly responsible for mankind’s destruction), while maintaining a goal that appears near-impossible to attain — preventing Skynet’s creation once and for all.

And so, I’ll continue to watch, hoping for more episode in the style of this week’s, which have it all: a flashback to young John, a connection to the first Terminator motion picture, a return of a character from the pilot, Cameron puzzled by human behavior and a Terminator’s remains found.