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.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Because I’m a good father, I sat down with my 8-year-old and showed him Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

 

Revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that while it’s a great movie, it isn’t a particularly good movie.

It’s great in the sense of, “Having a long-term influence and presence in the public consciousness.”  Nevertheless, it has some serious problems.  There’s a voiceover which distracts us and pulls us out of the movie.  There’s an uneven performance from Edward Furlong, the preadolescent actor playing the young John Connor.  The dialogue seems functional, at best, and everything moves at such a stately pace that my young’n lost focus for much of the second act.

Nevertheless, there are some wonderful things about this film.  Robert Patrick, as the next generation Terminator sent to provide this story with an antagonist, is marvelously deadpan.  The special effects hold up today and keep us in the story.  And Arnold, well, he’s Arnold.  The guy’s a movie star for a reason, and that reason is that his magnetic screen presence raises anything he’s in.

Still, I’m glad I saw it again and I’m glad I shared it with my boy.  I wonder when he’ll be old enough for The French Connection.

Rambo

"Rambo" ain't got time for character development.

Well, I guess it does, if you count an evangelical Western doctor realizing that, sometimes, you've just gotta bash a man's head in with a rock. Or Rambo getting in touch with his inner ... Rambo. But other than that, this movie's all about the viscera, man.

Here's the deal: John Rambo's a snake wrangler in upcountry Thailand (I'm gonna guess somewhere near Chiang Mai, where one of my sisters-in-law lives. She tells me it's quite nice. They have a Dairy Queen, a Home Depot, and a muy thai boxing instructor I think she has a crush on. But that's neither here nor there.). He lives rather a solitary life; just him, his two employees, and his steroid connection. When a group of medical missionaries asks him to take them upriver to savage Burma, he tells them to blow: they can't handle the horror, the horror. But when one of the missionaries, Fay Wr- no, Naomi Ca- no, Julie Benz tries to talk him into it, can beauty get through to the simple beast Rambo has become? Well, when the power of pheremones compels you, there's not much you can do. Soon, Rambo's taking the group upriver, slaying some pirates, and sending the missionaries on their way.

Rambo thinks nothing of it when he never hears from them again, but then The White Shadow himself, Ken Howard, shows up on his makeshift doorstep to tell him that the missionaries have (predictably) disappeared. This leaves Rambo with a tough decision: does he keep to himself and let the world go by, or does he forge himself up a new combat knife and get involved? Well, I'm here to tell you, when The White Shadow tells you to drive to the hoop, you drive to the f*in' hoop. And thus, John Rambo chooses to embrace his destiny as a killing machine and find comradeship with other killing machines.

That's, like, the first twenty minutes. The rest is carnage. So much carnage, such a ridiculously enormously unbelievable amount of carnage, that I laughed out loud at Stallone's wilingness to go so far over the top that I half-expected him to kill the big villain through ultimate arm wrestling. Is it entertaining? If you like to watch things go "Boom!" Is it engaging? If you want to lay odds on the number of barrels of Kensington Gore used in its making. Can it be the centerpiece of an evening with the guys, a couple of pizzas, and a case of Bud? You betcha.

So, yeah, I'd see it again. Under the proper circumstances.

The 6th Day

THE 6TH DAY combines bad filmmaking with bad science fiction to make the worst film I’ve seen in months.

In THE 6TH DAY, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a charter jetcopter pilot who gets in the crosshairs of an evil corporate mastermind with a god complex. Thus begins your basic chase-thriller, but with a twist: the picture is set in the near future, and the evil corporate mastermind likes to clone people for fun and profit. Is Schwarzenegger’s clumsily named Adam a clone or an original edition? Will he live long enough to bring down the evil mastermind’s dastardly scheme? Have you ever been to the movies before?

THE 6TH DAY is bad filmmaking on so many levels that I’m having difficulty deciding where to begin. Do I start with the horrifically glaring product placements that make suspending disbelief impossible? How about the mechanical, by-the-numbers script that telegraphs absolutely everything that will occur in acts two and three in the first fifteen minutes? Of course, there’re always the wooden performances, ghastly set design, and glaring continuity errors, but that seems like piling on. Tell you what – let’s handle this by focusing in one bad judgment that’ll give you a sense of the wrong-headedness of the rest of the production. The evil corporate mastermind (Aside: Ever notice how studio films, which are paid for by corporations, love to use corporations as villains? Do you find the hypocrisy as insulting as I do?) needs a brilliant scientist to actually do his work. THE 6TH DAY employs Robert Duvall in the role, and it’s about the worst choice imaginable. Duvall is making an entirely different movie than everyone else involved in this train wreck, and his character’s pathos, humanity, and fundamental decency so overcome the weakness of his arc and dialogue that he single-handedly shows us what might have been. Like the men in the Plato’s Cave Analogy, we’d have been better off ignorant: Duvall’s brilliance makes everything around him look like nothing more than shadows on a wall, and his casting reflects the same kind of poor judgment that permeates every facet of the production.

THE 6TH DAY is bad science fiction because it steals whole concepts and conceits from other works without bothering to credit them or toss them a nod in any way. Additionally, it weasels out of crafting a compelling vision of the future by telling us that it's taking place in "the near future - sooner than you think." Of course, what vision it does muster looks just like everyone else’s vision of the future - silly wigs, but with more product placement. And its technology – well, it’s simply counterintuitive and unbelievable.

What a disappointment.