Inside Out

In my notes on Terminator:Genisys, I wrote that I’ve lost interest in big budget, yet empty, animation festivals.

Inside Out is a big budget, yet rich, animation festival.  I loved it.

This is an amazingly ambitious picture, bringing together contemporary psychology theory, brilliant storytelling, and cutting edge animation to take us inside the mind, perhaps even the soul, of an 11-year-old girl struggling with a cross-country move and all the uncertainty that can bring.

Of course, this sounds like the type of thing you may recall from elementary school films, but we’re talking about a Pixar movie here.  This is the studio that sold us on the concept of paying rats to prepare our meals.  Inside Out makes us care about his girl and – I don’t quite know how to write this – the component parts of her psyche in a way that not only captures our imagination, but improves our understanding of ourselves and of those around us.

I love Inside Out.  I love everything about it.  It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

Terminator: Genisys

Oh, my goodness.  What a big, goofy, internally inconsistent, dumb, fun movie.  That left me flat anyway. 

Terminator: Genisys is a great movie for the casual fan of the Terminator franchise.  If you have a vague memory of the first two films and general feeling of goodwill toward the concept of time-travelling killer androids, this is just the picture to fire up when you’re sitting in Coach on Hour 6 of a 10-hour plane ride.

Here’s the premise: we start some minutes before the beginning of The Terminator. John Connor is about to send some meatball (who is supposed to be what Michael Biehn might have looked like if he’d gotten into steroids instead of whiskey) back in time to rescue his mom from young Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So far, so good, but …

SPOILERS AHOY.  NOT THE BIGGEST SPOILERS, BECAUSE THEY TAKE PLACE IN THE FIRST 5 MINUTES OF THE FILM.  STILL, IT’S A TWIST.  YOU CAN ALWAYS STOP HERE.  YOU ALREADY KNOW WHETHER YOU’RE GOING TO CATCH THIS ON VIDEO.

… oh, no!  The Terminators have infiltrated the Resistance!  One of them’s attacking John just as Not-Biehn is transporting!

And away we go.  And this is all fine.  We have a reasonably clever script, we have a woefully underused television star in a supporting role when he’d have brought so much more than a killer recipe for protein shakes to the not-Biehn role, and we have Arnold shooting guns and pulling faces.  It’s fun, but it’s missing something.  It took me a long time to put my finger on it, but it finally came together during a stunt sequence set on the Golden Gate Bridge.

See, there’s a bit where a school bus flips end over end, then rolls for a while, then flies through a fireball, etc.  Sarah Connor’s wearing a seatbelt, at least, but not Meatball.  There were two things wrong with this bit.  First, the crash was not survivable – seat belt or not.  If you’re making a movie about killer androids from the future, you need to get the little lies right in order to help your audience swallow the big lie.  Second, while the sequence used some practical effects, its climax –with the bus coming at the viewer while a fireball explodes- just doesn’t look real.  This would have been fine a year ago, when all the big action movies looked like this.  But this was the summer of the superlative Mad Max: FuryRoad, where a shot of a truck smashing into some obstacles, wiping out, and generating chaos was a shot of a real truck actually smashing into real obstacles, wiping out, and generating (real, though carefully planned) chaos.

For that matter, This movie never felt real.  I never feared for any of the leads’ lives.  I was disappointed that the brilliant Matt Smith was given so little to do.  I just- well, Terminator: Genisys offered a couple of hours of nostalgia and ‘splosions, and that ain’t bad.  But that doesn’t really cut it any more.  Give me a $5M movie about Thai or Malaysian stuntmen fighting each other over a MacGuffin.  I’ll take that – a little movie with actual people executing difficult stunt sequences – over a big budget, yet empty, animation festival.