Cons and Terminators
Spent last weekend at Genghiscon, which stands out as the one con we go to each year which has no cosplay competition, no vendors room, no special guests and not more than maybe a couple of hundred attendees, and the major attraction is hanging out with other fans for a weekend, eating pizza, doing weird crafts and maybe chasing each other around with laser guns or hitting each other with foam-padded sticks. And waving shiny things. Can’t forget waving the shiny things.
It is consequently the only con we ever get to go to where we actually get to relax for a weekend rather than going through nearly as much stress as fun, and damn but that is nice and this year was no exception. Especially when we’ve now got two and a half weeks until Waicon, which is at exactly the other end of the con scale, and before then I’ve still got to finish painting and decorating a giant key, paint a sword, style two wigs, make an eye patch, finish organising temporary tattoos, iron a costume and probably a few things I’ve forgotten, not to mention all that fic I’ve still got on my to-do list or a bunch of other posts I’ve been meaning to make for way too long… but eh, the fic WIP list never ends, but at least after January I’ll be able to take a nice long cosplay-break. This is the one upside of deadlines - at least they make you get stuff done.
In completely unrelated fannish news, we of the local household swallowed our pride and gave Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles a try last week.
The thing you have to understand about my investment in this particular franchise is that Terminator 2 has been up there with my favourite movies EVER since I was 14 years old - and when you fall in love with something at that age you fall pretty damn hard. It didn’t just have some of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen on film, it had three fantastic lead characters (not to mention the interaction between them), and a great plot as well. It had a kickarse lead female who never made you worry for a moment had been included purely for sex appeal, it had a young kid who was allowed to act smart and actually got to contribute to events rather than just being relegated to the role of being rescued a lot or acting as comic relief, and it had a cyborg learning human emotions and bonding with the kid without ever descending too far into the warm-and-fuzzy robots-are-people-too! clichés. More to the point, they were all there because the world set up by the first movie made it logical for them to be the leads in sequel, not because they were convenient gimmicks. And then there was the awesomely-freaky villain, the best motorbike-chase scene ever written, the sad but hopeful ending… basically, it was one of few movies out there that didn’t make me chose between action and sci-fi versus characters and plot, which made it pretty much everything I could ask for in a movie in one package.
So understand where I’m coming from when I say that any sequels are going to have a hell of a lot to live up to. This is why we do not talk about the travesty known as Terminator 3, which ripped the happy ending to shreds, ruined the characters and very nearly put me to sleep during its sad attempts at action sequences. The only thing you need to know about the third movie is there is no third movie. But perhaps more to the point, the other problem that’s going to crop up with any Terminator sequels is that part of what made the T2 ending memorable was that it effectively wiped out the possibility of any Terminators ever coming back again, so if you’re going to continue the story in any way that does not go “and they lived happily ever after”, you’re already retconning one of the things I loved most about T2 and that means you're on about negative a hundred points before you've even started.
From the first two episodes of The Sarah Conner Chronicles, it did at least do a much better job at convincing me they had a decent justification for continuing the story, but I came away with a lot of mixed feelings about the result.
Things I didn’t like
The new Sarah Conner. I can’t hold it against them that they didn’t get Linda Hamilton back - that’s just how the business works. It’s not a big deal that her hair looks completely different now (it changed completely between the first two movies after all, though I do wish they’d bothered to stick her in a wig for the old police report photos just in the name of pretending they’re making an effort here). But the Sarah Conner in T2 had spent the last ten years working day and night to make herself into a soldier, to the stage she’s almost unrecognisable as the woman from the first movie. She’s tough, intense and more than a little crazy. The first scene she appears in in T2 she’s doing chin-ups in her cell, and to look at her running around for most of the rest of the movie, by god you can tell she’s been doing that sort of thing a lot.
The new Sarah Conner, by contrast, is built like a stick. Yeah sure, the old one was pretty skinny too, but there’s a difference between wiry and artistically thin, and they haven’t landed on the right one.
I’m letting my own biases sneak in at least a little here, because the idea that the action hero man can be up to his ears in muscle whereas the action hero woman still has to be thin and pretty and feminine is something that always bugs me, whereas one of the great things about Sarah Conner is how thoroughly she broke that mould (and is still damn hot, IMHO). I hate that the series has lost that, even when it does make a lot of sense that she would have bulked down a bit - she’s living incognito and has every reason to believe they’ve seen the last of the Terminators, but even so, that much? Sarah’s one justifiably paranoid lady - five years of relative peace are hardly going to make her slack off completely. Looking the part isn’t all there is to a role, but surely they could at least have sent their new actor lady to the gym for a couple of weeks before they started shooting and found somewhere on that skinny frame to grow a convincing muscle or two.
What the series gives us instead is a Sarah who’s hiding out in the suburbs with her fashionable modern clothes, nicely styled hair and eye shadow and expects us to blindly accept she’s the same person. With a really good script (say, throw us a scene of her getting dressed in the morning and treating it like someone putting on a disguise, just as one top-of-my-head idea) and a really good performance, it might be possible to pull that off, and she looks to be doing the best she can, but the result falls flat. I cannot look at this version of Sarah Conner and even for a moment buy the idea this is a woman who spent ten years making herself into a soldier. A few scenes of her running around with a gun only go so far. There’s nothing to connect her to the Sarah we knew that sticks.
In the second episode, the show also revives a character from the movie, transplants him across the country into a completely different setting, turns him traitor and kills him all before the final credit roll. That’s pretty much up there in my top ten Tropes That Make Me Want To Throw Things At The Screen. Hell, there’s probably a TVTropes page for it somewhere if I could figure out how to find it.
Things I did like
John. More in the first episode than the second, where the writers pass him the Idiot Ball and force him to do some phenomenally stupid things in the name of getting the plot rolling. He’s hardly exactly like the movie John, but a kid changes a lot in five years and I can buy that this is the sort of boy he’d grow into - very much a teenager, a little resentful about his lot in life but no more than makes sense for him to be, and with just enough about his character that you can believe he’s going to grow up to be someone awesome. Mostly I just wish he got a bit more screentime rather than letting Sarah hog it all.
Cameron. My first thought on hearing Summer Glau was to be playing a Terminator was that this might be a case of someone being a little too well cast after her similarly crazy-but-kickarse role in Serenity. Having seen her in action though, I was quickly sold. You can see she’s flexing a lot of the same acting muscles she used as River, but there are plenty of nuances to Cameron that prevent me from being overwhelmed by the feeling we’ve seen it all before. Look, it’s Summer Glau being kickarse and weird, it does not take that much to get me in on this idea.
On this subject, if the plot does not eventually go spiralling into John/Cameron territory in a serious way I am going to be very disappointed in them, because as much as I love Sarah, John bonding with Terminators is what the second move was all about.
Things I am undecided about
The idea of throwing them forward in time to 2007 originally sounded to me like a fairly lame excuse to avoid having to set the series in the nineties. Having seen it how it was executed it bothers me a lot less now, but I can’t help but wonder a little about their motivations.
I loved how Cameron shows up to defend John against the other Terminator and he and Sarah hardly bat an eyelid. None of those silly questions about whether she’s trustworthy, she just saved his life and they’ve been through all this before, hi Cameron, welcome to the team!
On the other hand, there were a few fairly important questions I was disappointed John didn’t ask, along with several points my writer-brain is a little disappointed they didn’t even mention in passing - even just in the name of making things more accessible for anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, or simply refreshing the audience’s memories about how this all works. Even just something to the effect of “So you’d be another Terminator the resistance reprogrammed? They do a lot of that these days?” Hardly crucial, but I’m curious. Are the T2 Terminator and Cameron the only examples of their kind, or does the resistance have its whole own army of Terminators on their side these days? In T2 John takes the first chance he gets to ask his new protector a lot of intelligent and important questions, and lays down his no-killing ground rule shortly thereafter. Five years on, John has less reason to have to ask those questions, but it’s a little disappointing to see him being so much less proactive than his ten-year-old self, especially when Cameron dodges the one important question he does ask her. I do realise that they’re probably saving a lot of those answers for future plot points, but that doesn’t mean I’m not missing seeing them raised now.
Maybe the biggest disappointment out of those scenes is that the good old Schwarzenator who was such an important figure to John back in T2 - who had to have been one of the first things to spring to his mind when a new friendly Terminator shows up - did not get so much as an oblique side-reference, and that makes my inner T2 fangirl awfully sad.
In conclusion: Undecided. Will probably give it another episode or two and see how it goes.
It is consequently the only con we ever get to go to where we actually get to relax for a weekend rather than going through nearly as much stress as fun, and damn but that is nice and this year was no exception. Especially when we’ve now got two and a half weeks until Waicon, which is at exactly the other end of the con scale, and before then I’ve still got to finish painting and decorating a giant key, paint a sword, style two wigs, make an eye patch, finish organising temporary tattoos, iron a costume and probably a few things I’ve forgotten, not to mention all that fic I’ve still got on my to-do list or a bunch of other posts I’ve been meaning to make for way too long… but eh, the fic WIP list never ends, but at least after January I’ll be able to take a nice long cosplay-break. This is the one upside of deadlines - at least they make you get stuff done.
In completely unrelated fannish news, we of the local household swallowed our pride and gave Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles a try last week.
The thing you have to understand about my investment in this particular franchise is that Terminator 2 has been up there with my favourite movies EVER since I was 14 years old - and when you fall in love with something at that age you fall pretty damn hard. It didn’t just have some of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen on film, it had three fantastic lead characters (not to mention the interaction between them), and a great plot as well. It had a kickarse lead female who never made you worry for a moment had been included purely for sex appeal, it had a young kid who was allowed to act smart and actually got to contribute to events rather than just being relegated to the role of being rescued a lot or acting as comic relief, and it had a cyborg learning human emotions and bonding with the kid without ever descending too far into the warm-and-fuzzy robots-are-people-too! clichés. More to the point, they were all there because the world set up by the first movie made it logical for them to be the leads in sequel, not because they were convenient gimmicks. And then there was the awesomely-freaky villain, the best motorbike-chase scene ever written, the sad but hopeful ending… basically, it was one of few movies out there that didn’t make me chose between action and sci-fi versus characters and plot, which made it pretty much everything I could ask for in a movie in one package.
So understand where I’m coming from when I say that any sequels are going to have a hell of a lot to live up to. This is why we do not talk about the travesty known as Terminator 3, which ripped the happy ending to shreds, ruined the characters and very nearly put me to sleep during its sad attempts at action sequences. The only thing you need to know about the third movie is there is no third movie. But perhaps more to the point, the other problem that’s going to crop up with any Terminator sequels is that part of what made the T2 ending memorable was that it effectively wiped out the possibility of any Terminators ever coming back again, so if you’re going to continue the story in any way that does not go “and they lived happily ever after”, you’re already retconning one of the things I loved most about T2 and that means you're on about negative a hundred points before you've even started.
From the first two episodes of The Sarah Conner Chronicles, it did at least do a much better job at convincing me they had a decent justification for continuing the story, but I came away with a lot of mixed feelings about the result.
Things I didn’t like
The new Sarah Conner. I can’t hold it against them that they didn’t get Linda Hamilton back - that’s just how the business works. It’s not a big deal that her hair looks completely different now (it changed completely between the first two movies after all, though I do wish they’d bothered to stick her in a wig for the old police report photos just in the name of pretending they’re making an effort here). But the Sarah Conner in T2 had spent the last ten years working day and night to make herself into a soldier, to the stage she’s almost unrecognisable as the woman from the first movie. She’s tough, intense and more than a little crazy. The first scene she appears in in T2 she’s doing chin-ups in her cell, and to look at her running around for most of the rest of the movie, by god you can tell she’s been doing that sort of thing a lot.
The new Sarah Conner, by contrast, is built like a stick. Yeah sure, the old one was pretty skinny too, but there’s a difference between wiry and artistically thin, and they haven’t landed on the right one.
I’m letting my own biases sneak in at least a little here, because the idea that the action hero man can be up to his ears in muscle whereas the action hero woman still has to be thin and pretty and feminine is something that always bugs me, whereas one of the great things about Sarah Conner is how thoroughly she broke that mould (and is still damn hot, IMHO). I hate that the series has lost that, even when it does make a lot of sense that she would have bulked down a bit - she’s living incognito and has every reason to believe they’ve seen the last of the Terminators, but even so, that much? Sarah’s one justifiably paranoid lady - five years of relative peace are hardly going to make her slack off completely. Looking the part isn’t all there is to a role, but surely they could at least have sent their new actor lady to the gym for a couple of weeks before they started shooting and found somewhere on that skinny frame to grow a convincing muscle or two.
What the series gives us instead is a Sarah who’s hiding out in the suburbs with her fashionable modern clothes, nicely styled hair and eye shadow and expects us to blindly accept she’s the same person. With a really good script (say, throw us a scene of her getting dressed in the morning and treating it like someone putting on a disguise, just as one top-of-my-head idea) and a really good performance, it might be possible to pull that off, and she looks to be doing the best she can, but the result falls flat. I cannot look at this version of Sarah Conner and even for a moment buy the idea this is a woman who spent ten years making herself into a soldier. A few scenes of her running around with a gun only go so far. There’s nothing to connect her to the Sarah we knew that sticks.
In the second episode, the show also revives a character from the movie, transplants him across the country into a completely different setting, turns him traitor and kills him all before the final credit roll. That’s pretty much up there in my top ten Tropes That Make Me Want To Throw Things At The Screen. Hell, there’s probably a TVTropes page for it somewhere if I could figure out how to find it.
Things I did like
John. More in the first episode than the second, where the writers pass him the Idiot Ball and force him to do some phenomenally stupid things in the name of getting the plot rolling. He’s hardly exactly like the movie John, but a kid changes a lot in five years and I can buy that this is the sort of boy he’d grow into - very much a teenager, a little resentful about his lot in life but no more than makes sense for him to be, and with just enough about his character that you can believe he’s going to grow up to be someone awesome. Mostly I just wish he got a bit more screentime rather than letting Sarah hog it all.
Cameron. My first thought on hearing Summer Glau was to be playing a Terminator was that this might be a case of someone being a little too well cast after her similarly crazy-but-kickarse role in Serenity. Having seen her in action though, I was quickly sold. You can see she’s flexing a lot of the same acting muscles she used as River, but there are plenty of nuances to Cameron that prevent me from being overwhelmed by the feeling we’ve seen it all before. Look, it’s Summer Glau being kickarse and weird, it does not take that much to get me in on this idea.
On this subject, if the plot does not eventually go spiralling into John/Cameron territory in a serious way I am going to be very disappointed in them, because as much as I love Sarah, John bonding with Terminators is what the second move was all about.
Things I am undecided about
The idea of throwing them forward in time to 2007 originally sounded to me like a fairly lame excuse to avoid having to set the series in the nineties. Having seen it how it was executed it bothers me a lot less now, but I can’t help but wonder a little about their motivations.
I loved how Cameron shows up to defend John against the other Terminator and he and Sarah hardly bat an eyelid. None of those silly questions about whether she’s trustworthy, she just saved his life and they’ve been through all this before, hi Cameron, welcome to the team!
On the other hand, there were a few fairly important questions I was disappointed John didn’t ask, along with several points my writer-brain is a little disappointed they didn’t even mention in passing - even just in the name of making things more accessible for anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, or simply refreshing the audience’s memories about how this all works. Even just something to the effect of “So you’d be another Terminator the resistance reprogrammed? They do a lot of that these days?” Hardly crucial, but I’m curious. Are the T2 Terminator and Cameron the only examples of their kind, or does the resistance have its whole own army of Terminators on their side these days? In T2 John takes the first chance he gets to ask his new protector a lot of intelligent and important questions, and lays down his no-killing ground rule shortly thereafter. Five years on, John has less reason to have to ask those questions, but it’s a little disappointing to see him being so much less proactive than his ten-year-old self, especially when Cameron dodges the one important question he does ask her. I do realise that they’re probably saving a lot of those answers for future plot points, but that doesn’t mean I’m not missing seeing them raised now.
Maybe the biggest disappointment out of those scenes is that the good old Schwarzenator who was such an important figure to John back in T2 - who had to have been one of the first things to spring to his mind when a new friendly Terminator shows up - did not get so much as an oblique side-reference, and that makes my inner T2 fangirl awfully sad.
In conclusion: Undecided. Will probably give it another episode or two and see how it goes.