I am long-winded. Even more so than usual.
I seem to be making up for my lack of updates by being horrifyingly wordy in what few updates I make. Hmm.
Firstly, I seem to have won a couple of awards at the Alias Festival of Fic, which is particularly flattering considering I didn't even really pimp myself. Love and (probably gay) sex to whoever voted for me, and whoever nominated me, too. corngirl_jo? dinanimo? Are you my benefactress(es)?
Secondly, I am, temporarily at least, the best girlfriend ever. My boy was away from last Thursday through yesterday, and after having a tremendously shitty week last week and a pretty shitty Saturday morning (which culminated in me locking my keys in my car), I was seized with the desire to do something nice for him while he was gone. So I decided to clean up our house a bit, since he's the freakiest neat freak in the history of neat freaks, and having things messy stresses him out. However, being me, and since there were movies to be watched and books to be read, I didn't so much get started on the cleaning until fairly late. As a result, I was up till 3 a.m. yesterday morning, making sure our kitchen, living room, bedroom, and office were organized and clean. Quite a task. But rewarding, because along the way, I found: tickets to a Mariners game that I thought I'd lost, a credit card that had been sent to replace one of mine that had expired, my tax information for 2002, and various other little goodies that were all lost in the moving shuffle. So that was good. Plus, my fiance was very, very grateful and happy when he came home, and a grateful and happy fiance is a good thing.
Incidentally, Jon Stewart is totally. My. Boyfriend. His interview with Gabrielle Union, where they're talking about her dog? I nearly fell off the couch. I cried. He is my boyfriend, now and eternally. And thanks to the magic of TiVo, we rarely miss a Daily Show. Good times.
I finally saw Terminator 3. Twice. And now I must talk about it, at great length, because I can't seem to talk about things any other way. So, complete with cut tags (For Her Pleasure). Spoilers ahead, in all but the first section.
See, Terminator could probably be considered my first fandom. T2 came out when I was about 13, and after borrowing a video of it from a friend, I became instantly obsessed with it. I was going through what could probably be termed my "rebellious period," and here was John Connor, misunderstood by everyone (especially his mother), tooling around on his motorcycle listening to Guns ‘N Roses, with this great destiny looming ahead of him. It clicked with me. I was in love with him and wanted to be him. (Yes, I know he was Eddie Furlong and his voice cracked on every other line. Shut up, I was 13.) After watching T2 a dozen or so times, I rode my bike down to the video store and rented T1, watching it in the middle of the night with the headphones plugged into the TV so my parents wouldn’t catch me (I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies at that point; this was what constituted rebellion for me--no drinking, no drugs, just renting of R-rated movies. Tame, huh?). And I was hooked again. Reese, Sarah, the change in her, their doomed love, his silent strength--I was a goner. I wrote my first fanfic not long after that, long before I even knew there was such a thing as fanfic, a Reese POV of what it would be like for someone from his world to suddenly find himself in ours. (Michael Biehn... sigh. Why couldn’t he have just spent his whole career playing Hicks and Reese over and over again? Would that have been such a bad thing? Why do I have to remember him as cheesy villains when the only role he was ever really good at was the silent, stoic soldier who never quite got the girl? Shoot your agent, Michael Biehn!) The story enthralled me, made me think, made my head hurt trying to figure out how the past might change the future. I carved "NO FATE" into several hapless trees around our neighborhood. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, and to this day those two movies hold a fascination for me that goes pretty deep.
Still, when I heard they were planning a third movie, with no James Cameron and no Linda Hamilton, I was skeptical. Skeptical to the point of not really having any desire to see it, sneering when I saw previews. Yes, the effects looked cool, but the story was what mattered to me, and as far as I could think, the story had been told. And even if it hadn’t, how could they continue without Cameron, who--despite being an egotistical womanizing ass--is one hell of a storyteller and not easily replaced? So I wasn’t going to see it. Until I was in Spokane a few weeks ago and had a few drinks with my best friend from high school, and he told me--go see it. You’ll be glad you did. So, since Matt and I had always had similar taste in high school, and were in the midst of a very gratifying conversation about Buffy and Farscape that indicated to me that we were as much in accord as ever, I went. By myself, since my fiancé didn’t have any interest in the movie, which seemed somehow appropriate, a throwback to those nights crouched in front of the TV in the dark, captivated.
And I was blown away.
Yes, I had a few quibbles. The writing was, in general, not up to the quality of the first two. Many of the jokes were too cheesy, there was a little too much action before the exposition (the car chase was fun, but the whole time I was thinking--tell me what’s happening, tell me why), and there could have been more time spent on character development (T3 was more like T1 in that way; pretty much non-stop action throughout--I think in T2 Cameron had a little more leeway, a little more freedom to have those quiet moments at the truck stop and in the desert, and that was a positive thing). The line, "My father’s plane! I trained on it!" may be one of the lamest, most clunkily expository lines ever penned. (Two more seconds if she’d said, pointing, "My father’s plane!" and John says, "Can you fly this thing?"and she goes, "Since I was ten." See? Would that have been so hard? Still lame, but not nearly as lame as their incarnation.) Not having Brad Fiedel’s score was a huge loss; I don’t know if he refused out of solidarity with Cameron, or if they just didn’t go after him, or if he was busy or what, but he got the heart of these movies, and it just wasn’t the same without him. You didn’t even get the Terminator theme till the end credits, which was very strange. But the thing that bugged me most was that they messed with the timeline, for no apparent reason. According to the novelization for T2 (yes, I am a big geek--I told you I was obsessed), Sarah was 19 in T1. And at the beginning of T2, when Silberman is talking about Sarah in the mental ward, he says she’s 29. Hence, John would’ve been about 10 in that movie. Yet in T3, they say he was 13, and that Sarah was born in 1959, which would’ve made her 24 in 1984 (the year in which T1 takes place). Which she clearly wasn’t. And I just don’t get that. It’s a small detail--why couldn’t they have bothered to get that right? If they wanted to make John a little older, they could have just set T3 a few years in the future--if you think about it, that’s pretty much what they did with T2, since 10 years were supposed to have elapsed between T1 and T2. So the only conclusion I can come to is that they were just lazy with that detail, and it bugs me. Because they got so many other things right.
Firstly, I think casting Nick Stahl as John was the perfect choice. For one thing, he has a very Michael Biehn thing going on, with the stubble and all (mmm, stubble), which is very appropriate considering that in many ways this movie parallels T1, with John in the "Reese" role (and appropriate, of course, because Reese is his father). He doesn’t get a ton of dialogue--no one does--yet he manages to convey a lot without words, the blend of experience, weariness, fear, confidence, and heart that will make him a leader. He’s beaten down and lonely and confused and conflicted, but he hasn’t lost his sense of humor--I love his smirk in the back of the truck when he asks the Terminator to tell Kate who he is. Also, despite everything he’s been through, he hasn’t lost his humanity, his capacity to feel, and I think this is important given that the heroes of the first two films, Reese and Sarah (especially Sarah), were represented as machine-like, unapproachable. But in order to be a leader, John has to make people like him; Reese says, describing him, "He’s got a strength. You trust him." He has to counteract the machines, represent the opposite, represent humanity. And Nick Stahl’s got all that going on behind those very fine eyes of his. (It did not hurt at all that as the movie went on, I began, almost against my will, to totally dig his chili. I couldn’t help it. He’s John fucking Connor, and if I loved him when he was little Eddie Furlong, how could I not love him when he’s stubbly Nick Stahl, with the eyes and the slow smile and the weird little things he does with his tongue? I wasn’t asking for it, it just happened. Chili was dug. I was helpless to resist it.)
Arnold was strong again (though not as good as in T2), and Krystanna Loken was surprisingly not annoying, and actually pretty menacing for a skinny blond chick. (Though I did keep wondering how the hell she was running in those heels, figuring that they wouldn’t break because they weren’t really heels but poly-alloy, but did she have special Terminator balance stuff going on to keep her from falling on her ass? Inquiring minds want to know.) Claire Danes was fine. The blowing-up of shit was fun, the car chase was so over-the-top I couldn’t help but enjoy it, the gore was gratuitous, and things generally moved pretty well. The special effects were, of course, stunning--I especially liked the Terminatrix’ "true" face that we saw in the final battle, one of the only truly scary images in the whole film, and I couldn’t help thinking how far they’ve come (and how ironic it is that a movie about the dangers of technology is so dependent on technology). I really enjoyed all the echoes of the other movies--like I said, I thought that in many ways this paralleled T1, with John as Reese and Kate as Sarah (a little different in that Sarah becomes the focus of T1, while Kate remains secondary, but still). The return of Silberman (that weaselly bastard), the subtle almost-repetition of lines (not the obligatory "I'll be back" stuff, but when John asks Kate, "Do you want to live?"), all of it gave a nice sense of history repeating itself, which has more weight than usual in the python-eating-its-tail timeline of these movies. I thought they did an excellent job of conveying John’s dilemma, this man who’s been raised his whole life to think that he’s important, who doesn’t know who to be if he’s not The Great John Connor, yet who’s bound to try to prevent ever becoming what he’s been told he should be, who can never quite feel comfortable or safe. The shift in focus from Sarah to John seems very appropriate; I couldn’t imagine a Terminator movie without Linda Hamilton, but I didn’t miss her at all--she’s played her part, done what she can, and the mantle has to pass to John. (I still got choked up when I found out that she’d died, though of course in retrospect it’s really the only way she’d ever leave her son. For all her hope at the end of T2, it still seems perfectly in character for her to leave a coffin-full of guns for her son... I think she would’ve been looking over her shoulder her whole life, just like John is.)
But the end. Jesus, the end. Depressing as hell? Yes, particularly now that I’ve recently rewatched T1 and T2 and been reminded of just how bleak that future is. And it totally caught me off-guard. I didn’t figure it out till John pointed out that the computers were all old, and the shock literally took my breath away for a second. But I thought that was brilliant. Because you always assume that the good guys are going to win… yet one of the things these moves have excelled at is that sense of tension, of impending doom. And in retrospect, it somehow seems very appropriate to me that that doom should come to pass after all. Yes, they blew up Cyberdyne, but they couldn’t kill human/American fascination with technology. John says they couldn’t kill Skynet because it was software, but it was also an idea, an inclination, a drive to make things better and more efficient. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing; in a scene in T2, Dyson tells his wife to imagine an airplane pilot that never gets tired and never makes mistakes. His motives are, to some extent, positive. Yet we see how his fascination with technology pulls him away from his family. It’s a double-edged sword, and imbalance is the danger.
Which is, I guess, why I don’t think that T3 entirely contradicts the “no fate” message of the first two films. I believe in fate, to some extent, in the sense that, being who I am, I am more likely to attract certain people, to end up in certain situations, to have certain experiences. Given a set of variables, there are some outcomes that are more likely than others. And I think this same definition can be applied to “fate” as it’s presented in T3. Judgment Day was inevitable not because It Had Been Decreed, or because it was marked down on some cosmic calendar, but because Americans’ increasing obsession with technology wasn’t something that could be blown up or stopped, particularly by two or three people (give or take a Terminator). That, coupled with some of the darker aspects of humanity (the Terminator tells John in T2, “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”), is what leads to Judgment Day. All John and Kate (and Sarah and Reese) can do is postpone it, because the forces they’d need to affect to prevent it are way beyond their control. They can be the masters of their own destinies, but they can’t be masters of the destinies of everyone in the world, and it’s kind of arrogant to think they could be. (In fact, in a way this idea is alluded to in T3; it’s not just John who needs protection this time, but his lieutenants, too--he may be the leader, but the fate of the world still can’t be entirely up to him and him alone.) Add time travel in there, and it gets really convoluted. John has the capabilities he needs to lead the resistance because he’s been training his whole life to lead the resistance, because he’s been told that’s what he’s going to do--it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s in the right place at the right time, and that could be written in the stars, but he’s in that place at that time as a result of decisions he’s made over the course of his life, the person he is, the potential he possesses, and the path that he’s chosen.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I still don’t think the future is set. If it were, why would the machines bother sending back terminators to try to change it? Yes, the war happened, but it’s already a different war than the one Kyle Reese knew. Happened five years later. It’s a different war than the one that T3’s Terminator knew, too; John will be missing three of his lieutenants. Reese says in T1 that humans were “that close to goin’ out forever” before John Connor rose from the ashes to lead them; in this case, he’s in contact with other people from the beginning of the war. So the future is changeable, even in small ways, and who knows which one of these variables could have a profound ripple effect? Even given the repetition of the ideas of “fate” and “destiny” in T3, at the end John still says he doesn’t know if they’ll win the war. He’s still going to keep fighting. And that’s where there’s still hope. Because along with the arrogance and self-destructive tendencies in human nature, there’s strength and defiance and intelligence, too. You can talk as much as you want about fate and destiny, but John still has to take that responsibility for himself, he still has to flip the switch on that comm and say that he’s in charge. He makes the choice. Even if you assume that some higher power plunked him in the right place at the right time, ultimately, the choice is his.
And I seriously doubt that the idea that he’s fated to win is going to be much help to John when he’s making split-second decisions in combat. Destiny can’t make up a battle plan. Ultimately, the concepts just aren’t of much practical use. And that’s where I think the message of the first two movies is still clear in the third: humanity has a lot to learn, but there’s a lot of good in us, too. Our actions have consequences, positive and negative. The positive can win out, but the everyday, minute decisions are ours, as individuals, but also as a group.
So. Depressing? Yes. Bleak? Yes. But not incompatible with the tone and feel of the first two movies. And I have to say, I’m looking forward to the (inevitable) fourth one. I didn’t think there was any story left to be told... but they found what I think is the only compelling possibility. And it worked for me, it totally worked, and now I want more. MORE I tell you! They finally have the technology to depict this war and make it look really fucking cool, and I'm actually anxious to see it. Bring it on, I’m hooked again.
If anyone made it all the way through that, you should get a fucking medal. Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of the first two movies and you haven't seen this one because you're skeptical, I'd recommend it. Highly.
Also, something random that occurred to me--in T1, Reese explains that you go naked through the time displacement device because "nothing dead will go." And of course the first Terminator gets through because he’s surrounded by living tissue. But what about when they get to the T-1000? The guy’s metal. He looks like he has skin, but he really doesn’t. So how did he get through? Did they find a way to mimic the "field generated by a living organism"? But they couldn’t have, otherwise why wouldn’t he have brought more weapons along with him? I want an explanation for this. Because if there isn’t one, that’s a mighty big hole. (This rumination brought to you by the sniggering of the guys in the theater around me at the T-X’s naked appearance, and the realization that she didn’t really need to be naked, because she can mimic clothes just as easily as she can mimic skin. But then, you know, there wouldn’t have been one naked chick in the whole movie, and we can’t have that, can we?)
Also also, I was watching special features on the new T1 DVD, and discovered that Lance Henriksen was the original choice to play the Terminator. They wanted the Terminator to have anonymity, like he could be anyone in a crowd who could just walk up and kill you before anyone had time to react. How different would that have been? Worked so much better with Arnold, and Reese just this normal-looking human against this hulking impassive machine. But now I wonder if Lance recycled some of the Terminator mannerisms he’d worked up to play Bishop in Aliens.
If any one can make me, or direct me to, T1 icons or screencaps, I will be your eternal sex slave.
Had enough? Yeah, me too.
Firstly, I seem to have won a couple of awards at the Alias Festival of Fic, which is particularly flattering considering I didn't even really pimp myself. Love and (probably gay) sex to whoever voted for me, and whoever nominated me, too. corngirl_jo? dinanimo? Are you my benefactress(es)?
Secondly, I am, temporarily at least, the best girlfriend ever. My boy was away from last Thursday through yesterday, and after having a tremendously shitty week last week and a pretty shitty Saturday morning (which culminated in me locking my keys in my car), I was seized with the desire to do something nice for him while he was gone. So I decided to clean up our house a bit, since he's the freakiest neat freak in the history of neat freaks, and having things messy stresses him out. However, being me, and since there were movies to be watched and books to be read, I didn't so much get started on the cleaning until fairly late. As a result, I was up till 3 a.m. yesterday morning, making sure our kitchen, living room, bedroom, and office were organized and clean. Quite a task. But rewarding, because along the way, I found: tickets to a Mariners game that I thought I'd lost, a credit card that had been sent to replace one of mine that had expired, my tax information for 2002, and various other little goodies that were all lost in the moving shuffle. So that was good. Plus, my fiance was very, very grateful and happy when he came home, and a grateful and happy fiance is a good thing.
Incidentally, Jon Stewart is totally. My. Boyfriend. His interview with Gabrielle Union, where they're talking about her dog? I nearly fell off the couch. I cried. He is my boyfriend, now and eternally. And thanks to the magic of TiVo, we rarely miss a Daily Show. Good times.
I finally saw Terminator 3. Twice. And now I must talk about it, at great length, because I can't seem to talk about things any other way. So, complete with cut tags (For Her Pleasure). Spoilers ahead, in all but the first section.
See, Terminator could probably be considered my first fandom. T2 came out when I was about 13, and after borrowing a video of it from a friend, I became instantly obsessed with it. I was going through what could probably be termed my "rebellious period," and here was John Connor, misunderstood by everyone (especially his mother), tooling around on his motorcycle listening to Guns ‘N Roses, with this great destiny looming ahead of him. It clicked with me. I was in love with him and wanted to be him. (Yes, I know he was Eddie Furlong and his voice cracked on every other line. Shut up, I was 13.) After watching T2 a dozen or so times, I rode my bike down to the video store and rented T1, watching it in the middle of the night with the headphones plugged into the TV so my parents wouldn’t catch me (I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies at that point; this was what constituted rebellion for me--no drinking, no drugs, just renting of R-rated movies. Tame, huh?). And I was hooked again. Reese, Sarah, the change in her, their doomed love, his silent strength--I was a goner. I wrote my first fanfic not long after that, long before I even knew there was such a thing as fanfic, a Reese POV of what it would be like for someone from his world to suddenly find himself in ours. (Michael Biehn... sigh. Why couldn’t he have just spent his whole career playing Hicks and Reese over and over again? Would that have been such a bad thing? Why do I have to remember him as cheesy villains when the only role he was ever really good at was the silent, stoic soldier who never quite got the girl? Shoot your agent, Michael Biehn!) The story enthralled me, made me think, made my head hurt trying to figure out how the past might change the future. I carved "NO FATE" into several hapless trees around our neighborhood. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, and to this day those two movies hold a fascination for me that goes pretty deep.
Still, when I heard they were planning a third movie, with no James Cameron and no Linda Hamilton, I was skeptical. Skeptical to the point of not really having any desire to see it, sneering when I saw previews. Yes, the effects looked cool, but the story was what mattered to me, and as far as I could think, the story had been told. And even if it hadn’t, how could they continue without Cameron, who--despite being an egotistical womanizing ass--is one hell of a storyteller and not easily replaced? So I wasn’t going to see it. Until I was in Spokane a few weeks ago and had a few drinks with my best friend from high school, and he told me--go see it. You’ll be glad you did. So, since Matt and I had always had similar taste in high school, and were in the midst of a very gratifying conversation about Buffy and Farscape that indicated to me that we were as much in accord as ever, I went. By myself, since my fiancé didn’t have any interest in the movie, which seemed somehow appropriate, a throwback to those nights crouched in front of the TV in the dark, captivated.
And I was blown away.
Yes, I had a few quibbles. The writing was, in general, not up to the quality of the first two. Many of the jokes were too cheesy, there was a little too much action before the exposition (the car chase was fun, but the whole time I was thinking--tell me what’s happening, tell me why), and there could have been more time spent on character development (T3 was more like T1 in that way; pretty much non-stop action throughout--I think in T2 Cameron had a little more leeway, a little more freedom to have those quiet moments at the truck stop and in the desert, and that was a positive thing). The line, "My father’s plane! I trained on it!" may be one of the lamest, most clunkily expository lines ever penned. (Two more seconds if she’d said, pointing, "My father’s plane!" and John says, "Can you fly this thing?"and she goes, "Since I was ten." See? Would that have been so hard? Still lame, but not nearly as lame as their incarnation.) Not having Brad Fiedel’s score was a huge loss; I don’t know if he refused out of solidarity with Cameron, or if they just didn’t go after him, or if he was busy or what, but he got the heart of these movies, and it just wasn’t the same without him. You didn’t even get the Terminator theme till the end credits, which was very strange. But the thing that bugged me most was that they messed with the timeline, for no apparent reason. According to the novelization for T2 (yes, I am a big geek--I told you I was obsessed), Sarah was 19 in T1. And at the beginning of T2, when Silberman is talking about Sarah in the mental ward, he says she’s 29. Hence, John would’ve been about 10 in that movie. Yet in T3, they say he was 13, and that Sarah was born in 1959, which would’ve made her 24 in 1984 (the year in which T1 takes place). Which she clearly wasn’t. And I just don’t get that. It’s a small detail--why couldn’t they have bothered to get that right? If they wanted to make John a little older, they could have just set T3 a few years in the future--if you think about it, that’s pretty much what they did with T2, since 10 years were supposed to have elapsed between T1 and T2. So the only conclusion I can come to is that they were just lazy with that detail, and it bugs me. Because they got so many other things right.
Firstly, I think casting Nick Stahl as John was the perfect choice. For one thing, he has a very Michael Biehn thing going on, with the stubble and all (mmm, stubble), which is very appropriate considering that in many ways this movie parallels T1, with John in the "Reese" role (and appropriate, of course, because Reese is his father). He doesn’t get a ton of dialogue--no one does--yet he manages to convey a lot without words, the blend of experience, weariness, fear, confidence, and heart that will make him a leader. He’s beaten down and lonely and confused and conflicted, but he hasn’t lost his sense of humor--I love his smirk in the back of the truck when he asks the Terminator to tell Kate who he is. Also, despite everything he’s been through, he hasn’t lost his humanity, his capacity to feel, and I think this is important given that the heroes of the first two films, Reese and Sarah (especially Sarah), were represented as machine-like, unapproachable. But in order to be a leader, John has to make people like him; Reese says, describing him, "He’s got a strength. You trust him." He has to counteract the machines, represent the opposite, represent humanity. And Nick Stahl’s got all that going on behind those very fine eyes of his. (It did not hurt at all that as the movie went on, I began, almost against my will, to totally dig his chili. I couldn’t help it. He’s John fucking Connor, and if I loved him when he was little Eddie Furlong, how could I not love him when he’s stubbly Nick Stahl, with the eyes and the slow smile and the weird little things he does with his tongue? I wasn’t asking for it, it just happened. Chili was dug. I was helpless to resist it.)
Arnold was strong again (though not as good as in T2), and Krystanna Loken was surprisingly not annoying, and actually pretty menacing for a skinny blond chick. (Though I did keep wondering how the hell she was running in those heels, figuring that they wouldn’t break because they weren’t really heels but poly-alloy, but did she have special Terminator balance stuff going on to keep her from falling on her ass? Inquiring minds want to know.) Claire Danes was fine. The blowing-up of shit was fun, the car chase was so over-the-top I couldn’t help but enjoy it, the gore was gratuitous, and things generally moved pretty well. The special effects were, of course, stunning--I especially liked the Terminatrix’ "true" face that we saw in the final battle, one of the only truly scary images in the whole film, and I couldn’t help thinking how far they’ve come (and how ironic it is that a movie about the dangers of technology is so dependent on technology). I really enjoyed all the echoes of the other movies--like I said, I thought that in many ways this paralleled T1, with John as Reese and Kate as Sarah (a little different in that Sarah becomes the focus of T1, while Kate remains secondary, but still). The return of Silberman (that weaselly bastard), the subtle almost-repetition of lines (not the obligatory "I'll be back" stuff, but when John asks Kate, "Do you want to live?"), all of it gave a nice sense of history repeating itself, which has more weight than usual in the python-eating-its-tail timeline of these movies. I thought they did an excellent job of conveying John’s dilemma, this man who’s been raised his whole life to think that he’s important, who doesn’t know who to be if he’s not The Great John Connor, yet who’s bound to try to prevent ever becoming what he’s been told he should be, who can never quite feel comfortable or safe. The shift in focus from Sarah to John seems very appropriate; I couldn’t imagine a Terminator movie without Linda Hamilton, but I didn’t miss her at all--she’s played her part, done what she can, and the mantle has to pass to John. (I still got choked up when I found out that she’d died, though of course in retrospect it’s really the only way she’d ever leave her son. For all her hope at the end of T2, it still seems perfectly in character for her to leave a coffin-full of guns for her son... I think she would’ve been looking over her shoulder her whole life, just like John is.)
But the end. Jesus, the end. Depressing as hell? Yes, particularly now that I’ve recently rewatched T1 and T2 and been reminded of just how bleak that future is. And it totally caught me off-guard. I didn’t figure it out till John pointed out that the computers were all old, and the shock literally took my breath away for a second. But I thought that was brilliant. Because you always assume that the good guys are going to win… yet one of the things these moves have excelled at is that sense of tension, of impending doom. And in retrospect, it somehow seems very appropriate to me that that doom should come to pass after all. Yes, they blew up Cyberdyne, but they couldn’t kill human/American fascination with technology. John says they couldn’t kill Skynet because it was software, but it was also an idea, an inclination, a drive to make things better and more efficient. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing; in a scene in T2, Dyson tells his wife to imagine an airplane pilot that never gets tired and never makes mistakes. His motives are, to some extent, positive. Yet we see how his fascination with technology pulls him away from his family. It’s a double-edged sword, and imbalance is the danger.
Which is, I guess, why I don’t think that T3 entirely contradicts the “no fate” message of the first two films. I believe in fate, to some extent, in the sense that, being who I am, I am more likely to attract certain people, to end up in certain situations, to have certain experiences. Given a set of variables, there are some outcomes that are more likely than others. And I think this same definition can be applied to “fate” as it’s presented in T3. Judgment Day was inevitable not because It Had Been Decreed, or because it was marked down on some cosmic calendar, but because Americans’ increasing obsession with technology wasn’t something that could be blown up or stopped, particularly by two or three people (give or take a Terminator). That, coupled with some of the darker aspects of humanity (the Terminator tells John in T2, “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”), is what leads to Judgment Day. All John and Kate (and Sarah and Reese) can do is postpone it, because the forces they’d need to affect to prevent it are way beyond their control. They can be the masters of their own destinies, but they can’t be masters of the destinies of everyone in the world, and it’s kind of arrogant to think they could be. (In fact, in a way this idea is alluded to in T3; it’s not just John who needs protection this time, but his lieutenants, too--he may be the leader, but the fate of the world still can’t be entirely up to him and him alone.) Add time travel in there, and it gets really convoluted. John has the capabilities he needs to lead the resistance because he’s been training his whole life to lead the resistance, because he’s been told that’s what he’s going to do--it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s in the right place at the right time, and that could be written in the stars, but he’s in that place at that time as a result of decisions he’s made over the course of his life, the person he is, the potential he possesses, and the path that he’s chosen.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I still don’t think the future is set. If it were, why would the machines bother sending back terminators to try to change it? Yes, the war happened, but it’s already a different war than the one Kyle Reese knew. Happened five years later. It’s a different war than the one that T3’s Terminator knew, too; John will be missing three of his lieutenants. Reese says in T1 that humans were “that close to goin’ out forever” before John Connor rose from the ashes to lead them; in this case, he’s in contact with other people from the beginning of the war. So the future is changeable, even in small ways, and who knows which one of these variables could have a profound ripple effect? Even given the repetition of the ideas of “fate” and “destiny” in T3, at the end John still says he doesn’t know if they’ll win the war. He’s still going to keep fighting. And that’s where there’s still hope. Because along with the arrogance and self-destructive tendencies in human nature, there’s strength and defiance and intelligence, too. You can talk as much as you want about fate and destiny, but John still has to take that responsibility for himself, he still has to flip the switch on that comm and say that he’s in charge. He makes the choice. Even if you assume that some higher power plunked him in the right place at the right time, ultimately, the choice is his.
And I seriously doubt that the idea that he’s fated to win is going to be much help to John when he’s making split-second decisions in combat. Destiny can’t make up a battle plan. Ultimately, the concepts just aren’t of much practical use. And that’s where I think the message of the first two movies is still clear in the third: humanity has a lot to learn, but there’s a lot of good in us, too. Our actions have consequences, positive and negative. The positive can win out, but the everyday, minute decisions are ours, as individuals, but also as a group.
So. Depressing? Yes. Bleak? Yes. But not incompatible with the tone and feel of the first two movies. And I have to say, I’m looking forward to the (inevitable) fourth one. I didn’t think there was any story left to be told... but they found what I think is the only compelling possibility. And it worked for me, it totally worked, and now I want more. MORE I tell you! They finally have the technology to depict this war and make it look really fucking cool, and I'm actually anxious to see it. Bring it on, I’m hooked again.
If anyone made it all the way through that, you should get a fucking medal. Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of the first two movies and you haven't seen this one because you're skeptical, I'd recommend it. Highly.
Also, something random that occurred to me--in T1, Reese explains that you go naked through the time displacement device because "nothing dead will go." And of course the first Terminator gets through because he’s surrounded by living tissue. But what about when they get to the T-1000? The guy’s metal. He looks like he has skin, but he really doesn’t. So how did he get through? Did they find a way to mimic the "field generated by a living organism"? But they couldn’t have, otherwise why wouldn’t he have brought more weapons along with him? I want an explanation for this. Because if there isn’t one, that’s a mighty big hole. (This rumination brought to you by the sniggering of the guys in the theater around me at the T-X’s naked appearance, and the realization that she didn’t really need to be naked, because she can mimic clothes just as easily as she can mimic skin. But then, you know, there wouldn’t have been one naked chick in the whole movie, and we can’t have that, can we?)
Also also, I was watching special features on the new T1 DVD, and discovered that Lance Henriksen was the original choice to play the Terminator. They wanted the Terminator to have anonymity, like he could be anyone in a crowd who could just walk up and kill you before anyone had time to react. How different would that have been? Worked so much better with Arnold, and Reese just this normal-looking human against this hulking impassive machine. But now I wonder if Lance recycled some of the Terminator mannerisms he’d worked up to play Bishop in Aliens.
If any one can make me, or direct me to, T1 icons or screencaps, I will be your eternal sex slave.
Had enough? Yeah, me too.