(07-06-2015 04:44 AM)Kristoph Wrote: I have to say I have no idea why anyone would even bother watching this. The trailer made the film look like complete trash.
The first two movies are simple sci fi thrillers that are effective because of their simplicity and the competency of the people making them. The time travel plot device makes it particularly memorable, giving the setting a sense of impending, inevitable doom which stays with you long after the end credits have rolled.
That's because they're horror movies. Not science fiction.
I'm borrowing this from a site I saw on the Net - not sure where. But what makes the first two Terminator films work so well is because they're really about the inevitability of death (like all horror films at core).
This theme is beautifully personified in the Terminator itself: unstoppable, unbeatable with the weapons we have to hand. Hit it with bullets, it keeps coming. Hit it with a truck, it keeps coming. Burn all its skin off, and all you do is reveal it in its true form: the Grim Reaper, in steel. As Kyle Reese screams at Sarah Connor: "
It can't be reasoned with! It can't be argued with! And it absolutely will not stop -- until you are dead!"
The very model of time travel itself presented in the first film resonates with this theme (indeed isn't it a wonderful wink to this concept when Kyle Reese describes the main restriction around time travel as "Nothing dead will go!"). In T1 there is no alternate timeline possible. The paradox of the Terminator creating Skynet by his insertion into the past (and also creating John Connor at the same time) is bulldozed over; all you do, trying to change the future, is bring it to be. It's the inevitability of death writ large: it doesn't matter what you do, sooner or later death catches up and all you have done, all your life, is write a path of your journey towards it. (Even Skynet itself bows to this concept. In trying to prevent its own demise, it merely sows the seeds of its own destruction - creating John Connor
by trying to destroy him.)
All you can do - as Sarah and Kyle do - is flee it, fight it as best you can, and in the shadow of death, create offspring -- living hope that one day, someone will figure out how to stop it.
T2 is a wonderful counterpoint to the concept as well. It also draws on the horror from the inevitability of death (mainly by Sarah's nuclear nightmares) but it argues that implacable, stoic opposition to death is the only way to defeat it. The Terminator is pretty much the personification of a stoic lifestyle (okay, when not otherwise using miniguns to blow up vehicles). And writ large in the film is fatherhood, that single mothers basically suck as parents. But T2 has its most potent horrors wrapped up in the death of fathers: fathers die all over the place here, from John's foster father to Miles Dyson to ... ultimately ... the Terminator.
Ingrained here is the real horror for boys, and why we like it so much: eventually, your father will leave. Whether it's a divorce -- consider the symbolism of Sarah, the single mother, lowering John's father figure into molten lava -- or old age or early death, eventually your father will be out of your life no matter how much you scream at your bitch mother to not divorce him or scream at the doctors that they can find the cancer he's got. We get catharsis because Arnie on the film goes out like an avenging angel, in about as honourable a way as modern screen can imagine. He goes out the way we'd like to secretly imagine our fathers do -- fighting right to the end, and then sacrificing himself for a noble cause, for us, to show us he loves us.
T2 could have been a complete disaster -- had it left the "alternate" ending included on most modern DVDs which shows the future
is changed as a result of Cyberdyne's destruction. Had that been left in, all of the series' power would have been sucked cleanly out of it. As it is, it leaves the issue open, and thus leaves the fear of death's inevitability alive in us. That's the only way it survives as a cinematic masterpiece.
The rest of the series -- less so with T3, I'll come to that -- is not in the horror genre. They're either war films or science fiction films. And making it worse is that the people making them do not understand any of those three genres. Perhaps worst of all is the endless obsession Terminator filmmakers have with showing us the human/machine war. It's
stupid. Badly stupid. There's a reason you only watch a scene or two of the war out of the entire T1 and T2 cycle. It's because they're there to establish Kyle Reese's character and the crapsack the world has become since Skynet went online. There's no actual story up there in the future. We know how it's going to turn out. The real drama and action is all back down here in the present day.
Quote:This modern clusterfuck is an embarrassment. Everyone involved in writing, directing, producing this film is a hack. They're parodying themselves now; spelling Genesis with a y to make it look cooler? Sarah Connor is a big tittied hottie*? Oh and she's waiting for Kyle now, and she's liek, so super hardcore not just a scared little girl or a disturbed middle aged mother any more GIRL POWER AM I RITE LADIES. Helicopter chase with them swerving around buildings like it's fucking Tokyo Drift in the sky? John Connor is a robot because plot twist?
They could at least pretend they didn't just make it for the money and copy the plot straight from 'Hollywood Tropes For Dummies'.
*At least, that is, they try and make her look like she has big tits and she's kind of a hottie, 7/10 would not die in the fighting pits for.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but the series does not completely fall over until T4:
Christian Bale And You Are Seriously Done Professionally Salvation. (I dismiss the Sarah Connor Chronicles, I should add, because they're TV. Although Harlan Ellison's glass teat has been getting better with long form storytelling recently, it's still a shit medium compared with the emotional punch two hours of film can give you.)
T3 is no masterpiece. For a start, Nick Stahl should've been Edward Furlong. And if not that, they could've at least got a young actor with some serious fucking
presence. Michael Edwards gave John Connor more gravitas in one shot, glaring across our screens in T2, than Nick Stahl did screaming in victory with a faked-up bunch of scars and gun in his hand. Additionally, the women cast in this film are appalling; Claire Danes is simply waiting around for her paycheck and we did not see sufficient ass from Kristanna Loken to pardon her appearance in this film. The plot also is eye-rollingly bad where it tries to introduce a new reason for Skynet coming online, not to mention the leaps of coincidence bringing some parties together.
But: it also contains some gold. Arnie being the Terminator that kills John Connor is a visceral thrill. The massacre at the air force base by the T-1s is a brutal foreshadowing of the war to come - it would've worked better with some Verhoeven-level gore as a nice contrast between sleek, gunmetal technology and bloody slaughter, but that's to one side. The coincidences in the film, handled better, actually do support the final scene. That final scene is the best scene of the film - where John Connor finds himself in the bunker and involuntarily the leader of mankind while the bombs fall around him. This one is the best scene because it dares to turn back to the inevitability of death as its theme, back to the horror that you can't change the future, that the Terminator itself understands this and therefore carries out its mission in a stoic, unwavering manner. Its model of causality -
"You did not stop Judgment Day; you only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable." - suddenly makes more sense. The coincidences make more sense - because the future is set, and coincidences will serve impending doom as well. This is why I can forgive T3: it's a sort of horror film right at the end, saved by its final scene.
T4 and this new film do no such thing because they try to explain shit. That's a really stupid move. Time travel really can only be seriously contemplated one of two ways: either (as is most likely) it simply can't happen, or you might as well say "A Fucking Wizard Did It" as try to explain it by the dance of tachyons. The Terminator bulldozes the plot problems down by suborning them to its theme. T4 and T5 try to work around them, and they fail badly as a result.
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