I nearly walked out of the theater when they gunned down de-aged Edward Furlong in the first five minutes of Dark Fate. It felt like watching your childhood best friend get murdered.
That reveal at the end was so horrific and condescending. “Oh you thought she was the MOTHER? Women can be military leaders and saviors of humanity too, chud.”
Eh. I sort of liked the discorse on being 'Mother Mary' though. As I comment elsewhere I am the last guy to like Wokeist tropes in films, but 'Dark Fate' overall felt like a real successor to T1 and T2. A little derivative in that the plotting was very nearly the same as T1 and T2 but you can hardly complain about that in a sequel to a movie.
Dark fate though was about the only woke movie I ended up on balance liking. It was well executed and satisfying despite all of the girl boss and wokist tropes it included. And as the author points out T2 also had pre-wokist elements in it so it wasn't a total betrayal of the concept.
The OG Terminator was the superior movie, but the soundtrack for T2 was better solely because they had the money to give Guns N' Roses for the rights to the absolutely slammin' "You could be Mine" (which literally has nothing to do with the film at all) for the T2 soundtrack. The truck chase is iconic though. Even back in the day though the Negro Science Nerd was more than a bit ridiculous, and Cameron's Diversity Casting only got worse.
The premise is correct: computers will destroy human civilisation. The modality, however, is what the films get wrong. Computer models of the climate have convinced us we must destroy our entire way of life but it is an army of eco loons, not robots, that are doing it and it is of our own volition we are ending our civilisation.
I saw T2 on opening night. It was obv sensational at the time however i rewatched it recently, and it doesnt quite hold up as well as i thought it would. Maybe a little too much comic relief. (But for me, neither does Silence of the Lambs). Not as well as the first one which I still get chills watching. Michael Biehn totally carried that movie. I found the scenes where they confronted the scientist about his research on the T chip causing Judgement Day and tried to murder him in front of his family while his kids try to protect him to be actually quite profound and moving. Odd as it may seem, and while it has some hokiness about it and the casting, acting, action have lots of flaws, I found T3 to have a very powerful and haunting ending.
T3 is my favorite of the Terminator movies. (I haven't seen any of the Terminator sequels since T3.) Everyone I have told that opinion too has told me I'm nuts. T1 is the best overall movie. T2 I find to be uninteresting dreck.
I thought Claire Daines was terrific in it, and the ending hit so hard that it makes up for the many other flaws. They do a pretty good job making you think they might actually save the world! And the action is fast-paced and holds attention. I give it a B- overall. Maybe Librarian should review it next! I also liked the one with Christian Bale. After those, I have nothing to add except they were horrendously awful.
What a brave admission! I never thought I would read those words! I’m of the opinion you are correct in your assessment…literally no one likes Exorcist II! LOL! But I would say it’s a distinct possibility there are maybe a baker’s dozen around the world who didn’t hate it, not that they would admit it!
If nothing else, Cameron’s Skynet is now parlance for the dangers of AI. We don’t even need a battle between evil machines and man. The near future will probably feature thousands of autonomous drones and Boston Dynamic battle hounds with auto aim controlled by predictive AI, funded by our tax dollars. Paging Tony Stark!
I generally am against sequels because I find it a lazy way to print money. The original Terminator was fantastic and a fascinating idea. I love your essays!!
The first three Terminator movies fit together in a subtle way, as each one ends with a timeline change.
At the end of the first, Sarah Connor survives but so do the remnants of the Terminator. The timeline shifts.
In the second, the timeline has ALREADY shifted, which is why we have the T1000 scenario. This time supposedly all remnants of both Terminators are destroyed, and the timeline shifts again.
In the third, where the timeline has again already shifted, we see the rise of Skynet, even as Skynet sends a different Terminator back to take out John Connor directly.
Taken together, there is an interesting rebuttal to John Connor's message to Sarah from the future in the first Terminator, about there being no fate but what we make for ourselves. By the end of the third movie, that argument has been completely shredded. In the Terminator universe there are significant limitations to how far we can alter our destiny.
To be fair, you could plug in many of the plot holes in T2 via time travel, a destabilizing element already present in the narrative. Perhaps the Hail Mary play of sending the Terminator back altered the original timeline so that events unfolded differently, which is quite plausible. There's still the catch-22 of how the resistance leader was born in the original timeline before it started branching off, but you're still in better narrative shape nonetheless.
Flaws aside, Terminator 2 really is a masterpiece in the action genre.
Also, an interesting parallel between Skynet meddling with the past, and ideologies in totalitarian form (including Liberalism) retconning history into increasingly unreal, stale derivatives.
Pure enjoyment. The first is one of my favorite movies of all time, but the second was a cultural event. America would be better off if we still had Arnold/guns n rose’s crossover’s. I agree with your analysis not only of the films, but the fate of original material in the digital age of spin offs. Reading this reminded me that “apocalyptic” was a trend in film for a while, now I feel like it was about the death of the post modern age and the birth of the digital age.
One thing I noticed about your writing that puts it above others, and is something I need to learn from, is your not fitting the movies into your own personal ideological mode to prove a point, you take the films as they are. Good mix of both film and cultural analysis. I think you should actually find a publisher to anthologize these at some point
I honestly had no idea that T2 had suffused so much of literature but it makes sense now that I think about it. Tbh, I've seen it a few times, love the movie (my Dad adored it) but I don't think much about it. I tend to think about Star Wars and Merlin 1998 more.
Yet most think about T2, now that I think about it and it does indeed suffuse their writing, in a way I never noticed until now. I'm I must sorta've horrified now by this as the movie was great but I don't know if it works in say Fantasy.
Good deep dive. I gave up on Terminator after the third one.
One note: my understanding is that shutting down (and restarting) a steel mill is a massive undertaking, and takes hours if not days. Now, they also don’t run without a shift onsite, and I don’t recall any steelworkers in T2 (but it’s been awhile).
You’re not wrong, but T2 is an absolute classic. One must suspend disbelief in order to enjoy it.
If, on the other hand, you want realism and coherence, I suggest Commando.
Or "The Villain."
I nearly walked out of the theater when they gunned down de-aged Edward Furlong in the first five minutes of Dark Fate. It felt like watching your childhood best friend get murdered.
They had to kill him so a diverse immigrant girl could do the resistancing that white male Americans just won’t resist, obviously.
That reveal at the end was so horrific and condescending. “Oh you thought she was the MOTHER? Women can be military leaders and saviors of humanity too, chud.”
Eh. I sort of liked the discorse on being 'Mother Mary' though. As I comment elsewhere I am the last guy to like Wokeist tropes in films, but 'Dark Fate' overall felt like a real successor to T1 and T2. A little derivative in that the plotting was very nearly the same as T1 and T2 but you can hardly complain about that in a sequel to a movie.
There are no white males in the future. They were all taken out in The Fat Black Lesbian Takis War of 2060.
Not unlike killing Newt and Hicks in their sleeping pods in Alien 3.
Those two earned their lives and deserved better.
I refused to watch it for that reason.
Dark fate though was about the only woke movie I ended up on balance liking. It was well executed and satisfying despite all of the girl boss and wokist tropes it included. And as the author points out T2 also had pre-wokist elements in it so it wasn't a total betrayal of the concept.
The OG Terminator was the superior movie, but the soundtrack for T2 was better solely because they had the money to give Guns N' Roses for the rights to the absolutely slammin' "You could be Mine" (which literally has nothing to do with the film at all) for the T2 soundtrack. The truck chase is iconic though. Even back in the day though the Negro Science Nerd was more than a bit ridiculous, and Cameron's Diversity Casting only got worse.
The premise is correct: computers will destroy human civilisation. The modality, however, is what the films get wrong. Computer models of the climate have convinced us we must destroy our entire way of life but it is an army of eco loons, not robots, that are doing it and it is of our own volition we are ending our civilisation.
I saw T2 on opening night. It was obv sensational at the time however i rewatched it recently, and it doesnt quite hold up as well as i thought it would. Maybe a little too much comic relief. (But for me, neither does Silence of the Lambs). Not as well as the first one which I still get chills watching. Michael Biehn totally carried that movie. I found the scenes where they confronted the scientist about his research on the T chip causing Judgement Day and tried to murder him in front of his family while his kids try to protect him to be actually quite profound and moving. Odd as it may seem, and while it has some hokiness about it and the casting, acting, action have lots of flaws, I found T3 to have a very powerful and haunting ending.
T3 is my favorite of the Terminator movies. (I haven't seen any of the Terminator sequels since T3.) Everyone I have told that opinion too has told me I'm nuts. T1 is the best overall movie. T2 I find to be uninteresting dreck.
I thought Claire Daines was terrific in it, and the ending hit so hard that it makes up for the many other flaws. They do a pretty good job making you think they might actually save the world! And the action is fast-paced and holds attention. I give it a B- overall. Maybe Librarian should review it next! I also liked the one with Christian Bale. After those, I have nothing to add except they were horrendously awful.
I actually kind of liked it. Not better than the first two, but it wasn’t that bad.
But I’m nuts too: I like Godfather III, and even Sofia Coppola’s performance therein.
Oh no, this is basically blasphemy!! Godfather III was such a wretched stinker compared to I and II. I’m still mad about after all these years!🤬
Well, you ARE nuts. But as maybe the only person on earth who likes Exorcist II better than the original, I can sympathize.
What a brave admission! I never thought I would read those words! I’m of the opinion you are correct in your assessment…literally no one likes Exorcist II! LOL! But I would say it’s a distinct possibility there are maybe a baker’s dozen around the world who didn’t hate it, not that they would admit it!
If nothing else, Cameron’s Skynet is now parlance for the dangers of AI. We don’t even need a battle between evil machines and man. The near future will probably feature thousands of autonomous drones and Boston Dynamic battle hounds with auto aim controlled by predictive AI, funded by our tax dollars. Paging Tony Stark!
As always, Librarian's reviews are stellar. T2 and Alien remain some of my favorite movies to this day. They just hit all the right notes.
The movie about The Abyss made me want to watch it. Hilarious how awful it was.
I generally am against sequels because I find it a lazy way to print money. The original Terminator was fantastic and a fascinating idea. I love your essays!!
Linda Hamilton in T2 initiated the sculpted arms for women trend that persists today. You can trace a direct line from Michelle Obama's arms to T2.
The first three Terminator movies fit together in a subtle way, as each one ends with a timeline change.
At the end of the first, Sarah Connor survives but so do the remnants of the Terminator. The timeline shifts.
In the second, the timeline has ALREADY shifted, which is why we have the T1000 scenario. This time supposedly all remnants of both Terminators are destroyed, and the timeline shifts again.
In the third, where the timeline has again already shifted, we see the rise of Skynet, even as Skynet sends a different Terminator back to take out John Connor directly.
Taken together, there is an interesting rebuttal to John Connor's message to Sarah from the future in the first Terminator, about there being no fate but what we make for ourselves. By the end of the third movie, that argument has been completely shredded. In the Terminator universe there are significant limitations to how far we can alter our destiny.
To be fair, you could plug in many of the plot holes in T2 via time travel, a destabilizing element already present in the narrative. Perhaps the Hail Mary play of sending the Terminator back altered the original timeline so that events unfolded differently, which is quite plausible. There's still the catch-22 of how the resistance leader was born in the original timeline before it started branching off, but you're still in better narrative shape nonetheless.
Flaws aside, Terminator 2 really is a masterpiece in the action genre.
Also, an interesting parallel between Skynet meddling with the past, and ideologies in totalitarian form (including Liberalism) retconning history into increasingly unreal, stale derivatives.
Pure enjoyment. The first is one of my favorite movies of all time, but the second was a cultural event. America would be better off if we still had Arnold/guns n rose’s crossover’s. I agree with your analysis not only of the films, but the fate of original material in the digital age of spin offs. Reading this reminded me that “apocalyptic” was a trend in film for a while, now I feel like it was about the death of the post modern age and the birth of the digital age.
One thing I noticed about your writing that puts it above others, and is something I need to learn from, is your not fitting the movies into your own personal ideological mode to prove a point, you take the films as they are. Good mix of both film and cultural analysis. I think you should actually find a publisher to anthologize these at some point
I honestly had no idea that T2 had suffused so much of literature but it makes sense now that I think about it. Tbh, I've seen it a few times, love the movie (my Dad adored it) but I don't think much about it. I tend to think about Star Wars and Merlin 1998 more.
Yet most think about T2, now that I think about it and it does indeed suffuse their writing, in a way I never noticed until now. I'm I must sorta've horrified now by this as the movie was great but I don't know if it works in say Fantasy.
Don’t try to tell me what I think punk!
Finally a new essay
Good deep dive. I gave up on Terminator after the third one.
One note: my understanding is that shutting down (and restarting) a steel mill is a massive undertaking, and takes hours if not days. Now, they also don’t run without a shift onsite, and I don’t recall any steelworkers in T2 (but it’s been awhile).