Risking The Terminator on my kids

If you can believe it, I only just watch the original Terminator for the second time.

How is this possible, you ask? Especially when I've seen T2 at least eight times, and wouldn't be surprised if it were double digits?

Well I never saw The Terminator in the years between when it was released in 1984 and when Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. My first exposure to the Terminator universe was in T2, at which point my mind was blown and I was on board for however many decades of later releases were yet to come. (Most of which have been disappointing, but with intermittent pleasures along the way.) I might have caught five minutes of the original on cable at a friend's house, but that was it. 

The actual date of my single previous Terminator viewing is lost to time. I didn't start keeping track of the dates I watched movies until 2002, so it was sometime between 1991 and 2002. I know I didn't rush out right away after T2 to watch it. It might have taken at least a few more years and happened somewhat organically.

The fact that I haven't seen the original The Terminator more than once until now seems even more absurd when you consider that I rewatched two demonstrably lesser Terminator movies, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Dark Fate, before I got to a rewatch of the original. That's very strange on the face of it, though at least those two are my next two favorites in the series. (Leaving Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys on the outside looking in. Like, way on the outside, barely able to see the inside from their vantage point.)

There's a reason I haven't watched The Terminator again since the 1990s. It's not that I think it's bad. In fact, I think it's quite good. It's just that it pales in comparison to T2, feeling like a fossil by comparison, certainly technology wise, and possibly even narratively. 

We may generally prize practical effects over digital effects, but the liquid metal Terminator in T2 came along at a time when we weren't already ruined for digital, and it still looks good today. It's kind of like the digital effects in Starship Troopers. (In fact I've probably made that comparison before.) 

That's in stark contrast to the practical effects of The Terminator, which probably already looked quaint even by 1991. We may feel warm fuzzies about the Schwarzenegger mask and the Ray Harryhausen-style movements of the skinless terminator endoskeleton, but that's only because it reminds us of a lost, simpler time -- not because it actually looks good. 

The liquid metal, combined with some dynamite storytelling and action set pieces, levelled up the whole series, leaving that film's predecessor feeling antiquated and small by comparison. So when I'm looking to scratch a Terminator itch, I never think of being able to do that in the original Terminator. (You could also make the argument that I prefer my Arnie as a protagonist, which he is every other time he appears throughout the saga.)

And this was my thinking behind being uncertain about whether to show The Terminator to my kids, now ages 12 and 16.

Why is this even coming up, you ask? Well I'll tell you.

Sunday (today) is Father's Day in Australia. I'm not huge on days in my honor, and I treat it a bit like my birthday -- I'll take a few token gestures on my behalf, and I don't want to do anything I don't want to do, but other than that, I don't want a big fuss made over it. Especially this year, when my wife is overwhelmed with work-related things. 

She asked if there were any good movies to see, but this is a bad time of year for that. Although the theatrical release schedule is not as black and white as it once was, late August/early September is still not a great time for new movie releases. Especially new movie releases that might feel "special" in some way.

But I can tell you what does feel special: Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

Which I've already seen once in the theater this year, back when I saw the altered musical score (plus added laser effects) for the Hear My Eyes series, as discussed here. But that wasn't going to stop me from making this our Father's Day activity.

It's playing today at 3:45 at my favorite theater, The Sun in Yarraville, for its 35th anniversary. And I guess I need to stop pooh-poohing random anniversary years (see this post), because this will now be the second time I'm celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of T2. 

My last viewing brought home with me a resolve that we needed to show this to our kids, which I shared with my wife at the time, back in February. What a golden opportunity to do so, on the big screen no less.

The thing is, doesn't T2 have more impact if you've already seen The Terminator? My own personal experience notwithstanding?

I stand as living proof that you can love Terminator 2: Judgment Day on its own merits, not having consumed anything about this world previously, and not having your mind blown that there was a reversal from the first movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger went from villain to good guy. I already knew that anyway, because of course it was in the culture back in the '80s.

But The Terminator isn't in the culture to the same extent, in that my kids don't appear to have grown up with its mythology. They've heard of the movie, but didn't even know the central tenets of the series, which is built on the need to kill John Connor before he ascends to command the rebellion against the machines, potentially even before he's born. In fact, they didn't even know who John Connor or Sarah Connor were.

So they were in a position indeed to be faked out by the start of T2, when you just think Arnie is back to try again to kill the young John Connor ... but only if they saw the original movie.

My wife could go either way on it. She left it up to me. I think she was excited to see the original again -- she's seen T2 few enough times that she actually thinks the original might be superior -- but she was willing to yield to my concerns, it being Father's Day and all. 

And I definitely had reason for worry. The things that blew our minds when we were young are, in some cases, just too old-fashioned for today's young people. I knew this wasn't possible with T2, given how modern it still feels, but its predecessor lacks those bells and whistles. And if you think I'm overreacting and that I should give my kids more credit, I still remember well the time my older son started to watch Jaws on the plane, but then abandoned the viewing after less than 15 minutes because it was just "too old."

The danger was, we'd already bought the tickets to T2. If they both hated The Terminator, it would put quite the damper on our Father's Day activity.

Well I decided we should do it. I set up the projector in the garage -- my first projector movie in ages -- and popped up some popcorn. We'd order dinner during the movie, to arrive for its second half.

And I think it was pretty much a success.

Neither kid was effusive in their praise. My older son said it was "cool," but that could have been diplomacy, knowing that there was a lot riding on this viewing and not wanting to poison the well in advance of T2. My wife and I quickly took over with our own effusive praise, so I can't recall my younger son's reaction. But later he showed his engagement with the viewing when he talked about being faked out by Kyle Reese, thinking he was another terminator -- at which point my decision to watch the movie, in order to support a similar sort of fake-out in T2, was totally vindicated. 

"Exactly!" I enthused. "You're supposed to not know and that's supposed to increase the tension!"

(That's not exactly what I said, but it was what I wished I'd said.)

I'm not going to include a lot of Terminator takeaways in this post, but one of them was just how little exposition there is in the first 25 minutes or so of this movie. In fact there's very little dialogue, and what's there is largely limited to Sarah Connor, her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend. Eventually the detectives played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen get a fair amount of chatter too.

But exposition actually related to the time travellers? There's almost none. And indeed, that's designed to fake us out, but we're also just trying to get oriented in this world. There's some on-screen text at the start about the war with the robots being waged in present day, but after that, we don't really know who these guys are who materialized in a Tesla coil's worth of lightning. I noted specifically that we don't even see Schwarzenegger's POV computer readouts until it's firmly established that he's the villain, and definitely an android.

Once Reese gets talking it becomes a veritable exposition dump, making up for all the previous paucity of details. But we need it to fully acquaint ourselves with the stakes of Sarah Connor escaping her own assassination. 

The action scenes are pretty good. The visual effects are, I try to tell myself, quite sophisticated for 1984. And the relationship between Reese and Sarah is touching enough. 

But I know this is never going to stand a chance for me against T2, and a second viewing didn't change that. I need to remind myself that the concepts themselves -- among them the paradox of a person sent back in time to become the father of the very person who sent him back -- were part of what made the original Terminator so great. It's easy to take that for granted when you've lived with these ideas for 42 years. 

But even if this movie hadn't worked for my kids, I knew I had the ace up my sleeve that the sequel was the best in the series, which I had told them. In fact, I had told them that the first one was a little old-fashioned but the second one was not. And whether she actually believed it or not, my wife now co-signed, at least verbally to the kids, that the second one was the best in the series. I didn't know if she was able to decide that based on this viewing and a retroactive memory of T2, but she enthused to me privately that this had been really fun, so I suspect The Terminator didn't suffer for her on her most recent viewing. 

And so it's all down hill from here, in other words, now we can coast to Terminator 2, in about five hours. I'll let you know tomorrow how it goes. 

Terminator tries again ... again

The cinematic landscape is littered with failed Terminator reboots.

Okay, there are only two. But if Terminator: Dark Fate does not do well, three could constitute a proper littering.

I can’t think of another series that reboots itself so frequently, that needs to reboot itself so frequently as a result of repeated failures. Spider-Man is an obvious answer, but in each case of Spider-Man rebooting, at least the initial reboot was a success. No Spider-Man series to date has had fewer than two films, and you don’t make a second film using the same actors unless the first one is a success, by whatever standards you measure that success.

I’m sure that each time Terminator has rebooted, they expected to make anywhere from two to five more movies in that timeline, but never have they been able to make a single one more.

At least with Terminator: Salvation – which, for the record, is the worst Terminator movie we’ve gotten – they tried to jump ahead into the future, Star Wars style. It was a clear continuation of the story that had been hinted at in the first three Terminator movies. I kind of think that’s the way to go. But it didn’t work. Boy, did it not work. A friend of mine and I still joke about the clumsiness of the “What are you???” scene. I won’t get into it now.

Then when Terminator Genisys came along in 2015, it was billed as a “true sequel” to Terminator 2, forgetting the fact that Terminator 3 had occurred at all. Okay fine, but some of us thought Rise of the Machines was actually good. Not many of us thought Terminator Genisys was very good, even with the return of Arnie and the potentially promising series debut of Emilia Clarke.

Now, if I’m not mistaken, Terminator: Dark Fate is also being billed as a true sequel to T2, and as proof has both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton returning in front of the camera, and James Cameron behind it (as writer and producer, anyway). Even though any “true” sequel to T2 would know that Arnold Schwarzenegger was melted down and should not still be around, nor should he have whiskers on his face. (They’ll explain it in a satisfactory enough way I’m sure.)

As various Terminator re-interpreters blame the wrong victim, Terminator 3, we should probably also acknowledge that Terminator 3 itself was a reboot of sorts, as it came a full 12 years after the last movie and featured a different actor as John Connor. I’m sure Edward Furlong would have done it, but it wasn’t meant to take place 12 years after the last movie, so he would have been too old.  

Will this finally be the movie that gets it right? And if so, will it be just in time for the key performers to be way too old to keep making movies?

I’ve long since stopped trying to establish a reliable “use by” date for Schwarzenegger, and I kind of thought Hamilton’s had already passed, since I haven’t seen her in anything in ages. I guess I’ve just been looking in the wrong places, as she has approaching 20 credits in the past ten years. Point is, even at ages 63 and 72 they could probably be in three more Terminator movies each if that’s the way they want to go. And if not, they can try to make Mackenzie Davis the Rey of this series and launch off of her growing star power.

As cynical as I'm being about the history of these movies, though, I'm still as hopeful about the prospects for a new Terminator movie as I have ever been. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is still among my top 25 films of all time, and if a new movie can be even a third that good, it's worth showing up for. 

Killers who don't kill you

I saw my first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate last night, and I was reminded what makes a terminator such a scary killing machine.

When it gets in range of its target, it absolutely, positively kills that target.

Or whiffs while trying its damnedest, anyway.

It'd be quite a different story if the terminator had its target pinned in a corner, transformed the end of one of its arms into a very long knife, and then, inches from the face of its target, withdrew, saying "Not today, John Connor."

That's the biggest problem with Pennywise in the It movies. It's almost never "today."

I'd have to go back and count, but between the two movies, there can be no fewer than two dozen moments when Pennywise is within inches of one of the members of the Losers Club, but that loser escapes with his (or her) life. And it's not because the ceiling collapsed, or because one of them closed a door just before one of his appendages could slither through it.

No, it's because at the last minute, Pennywise said "Not today, Bill Denbrough."

Yes, Pennywise does kill Georgie Denbrough, or that poor girl under the bleachers, at his first opportunity to do so -- after toying with their fragile psychologies for a few minutes first, of course. He's certainly capable of converting a kill. But I don't buy the argument that his interactions with our main characters are just sadistic amuse bouches for himself before he plans to go in for the kill. Really, he just doesn't plan to go in for the kill -- not today, not tomorrow, and not next Thursday either.

It's really difficult to fear something that fritters away all its best opportunities, because you don't know when you should actually be scared. It's easy to draw the contrasts, as my colleague John Roebuck of ReelGood did in his It Chapter 2 review. The terminator is one, but so is this:

"Pennywise is successful in his murderous enthusiasm in some instances, when in others he is not, with few discernible differences between each scenario. When the capacity of a primary antagonist is uncertain, there's isn't a substantial foundation for fear of it. Think about the alien in Ridley Scott's Alien. The only reason a crew member aboard the Nostromo survived an encounter with it was through luck or ingenuity, not because the alien simply didn't kill them or because they ran to the next room."

That's actually John quoting his own review of the original It in his It 2 review, if we're trying to be as accurate as possible.

So this observation doesn't originate with me, nor does it probably originate with John. But it is a significant detriment to the effectiveness of not only this film, but other modern horror films as well, so I thought it was worth giving it my own particular spin.

The same issue exists in The Curse of La Llorona, which is just one recent case that exemplifies an entire trend in modern ghost story movies. La Llorona presents herself to our main characters a number of times, because you can't have an entire movie about a boogeyman (or boogeywoman) and only show her once or twice. (Not in the post-Jaws era, anyway.) But she of course doesn't kill those characters -- not on the first time, and not on any subsequent times either (spoiler alert). She does kill some other characters earlier on -- you have to establish her capabilities, of course -- but because The Curse of La Llorona opts for a low body count, it necessitates a number of set pieces that peter out inexplicably into non-fatal episodes.

Having said all this, I actually like the two It movies. I gave the first one four stars out of five, and was heading that way on the second after the first hour, ending up at the slightly lower 3.5. That might say more about my own generously skewed star rating system than the actual qualities of these movies, but that's a discussion for another time.

The thing I appreciate about these movies is the way Andy Muschietti stages Pennywise as a concept, not as an actual killer. Although I don't think this is what they were going for, I appreciate It and It Chapter 2 on the level of abstract art, on different ways to visualize an insane clown who might be capable of anything ... setting aside my concern that he's actual capable of nothing.

Some spoilers ahead for the set pieces in It 2.

When I think back to the very long experience of the second It movie, I think of isolated inspired ways to visualize Bill Sarsgaard's expertly conceived embodiment of evil. They're more like snapshots of possible terror than a memory of that terror converted into something tangible. I think of his glowing eyes on the banks of that river as he takes a bite out of the gay bashing victim. I think about the wall-eyed glee of the image above, which presages a further unfocusing of the eyes accompanied by a demented drool. I think of the way his expression goes blank as he starts to bash his head against the wall of glass that separates him from a potential victim. I think of that scene where he's talking to [I don't remember who] and says "Don't you want to play with the clown?" As he turns to look after the fleeing child or adult, his face starts to stretch and skew, as M.C. Escher might have painted him.

These things work for me, though I understand they don't work for everybody. The Filmspotting guys specifically mentioned how they were not taken with two of the more obviously digital scares in It 2, the scene where the fortune cookies turn into creepy crawlies and the scene where the nine-foot-tall naked old woman harasses Bev. I was, in fact, taken with these. I give credit to the vision of a visual stylist who can give me something just a little different from the things I've seen before, and do it with a certain panache, and I consider both of these to be examples of that. Some people don't, and that's fine.

But if you don't, I can see how It Chapter 2 really doesn't leave you much to savor at all.

In a way, watching Pennywise not kill people is a problem lessened if you've read the book. It's been 30 years since I've done that so I'd have to ask a more recent reader to be sure, but I believe Stephen King actually created the template Muschietti followed for the clown's sprees of not killing. King's book is also a book of set pieces, and since it's told largely from the perspective of our main characters, those episodes almost invariably have to be non-fatal in nature.

Knowing who's going to die and who isn't going to die is a contributing factor to a certain lack of fear as well. I remembered that one of the Losers Club was going to die, and approximately when it was going to happen in the story, so any close call before then was going to result in survival, unless Muschietti decided to deviate from the book (which I figured he wouldn't). This is not a problem unique to It, of course. Anyone who's read any book knows which characters are going to die when, and does not fear their deaths prior to that moment while watching the film adaptation. And as anyone who's read the book or seen It 2 knows (and again, spoilers), one of the Losers Club dies by his own hand in a non-Pennywise-related incident, further limiting the number of potential Pennywise-caused deaths.

This character kills himself due to the fear of Pennywise, which is a pretty powerful idea in the book. It just makes it a little harder for us, the viewers, when that fear is based on a number of interactions in which a clown went "Boogedy-boo!" and then left the room without further incident.

Terminator or Matrix?

Catching the middle two Terminator movies in the past month has reminded me of a realization I had maybe a decade ago:

The Terminator and The Matrix are essentially variations on the same story.

I'm not saying I was some kind of genius for thinking this up, but I did think it up on my own.

In both cases you're talking about a post-apocalyptic future where machines rule the world. In both cases there is an underground human resistance being tirelessly targeted by the machines, always avoiding extinction by the skin of its teeth. And in both cases there is a single "chosen one" among the humans, a man who seems to hold the key to ultimate victory over the machines.

So my question is: Which version of the story do you like better?

I'm making a distinction here between this question and the question "Which movies do you like better?" Because it would be fairly easy to argue that the Terminator series holds a distinct advantage over the Matrix series. There are two indisputably great Terminator movies, whereas there is only one indisputably great Matrix movie. (Granted, there's also one more movie in the Terminator series than in the Matrix series.) Also, the Terminator movies have spanned three decades, while all three Matrix movies were contained to the period of 1999 to 2003.

So it's actually more of a question of: Which interpretation of machines rising up to enslave humanity better stimulates that sweet spot in your imagination?

As with many things, this is probably a case of which one you encountered first. I actually saw Terminator 2 before I saw The Terminator, so T2 is my favorite Terminator movie. Hard to say whether I'd reverse those two honors if I'd seen them in order, but T2 blew me away. I saw The Matrix next, then it probably would have been The Matrix Reloaded followed by T3 and then The Matrix Revolutions, as all three of those movies hit theaters in 2003. Bringing up the rear -- both chronologically and in terms of quality -- was Terminator: Salvation in 2009.

So yeah, I'm ultimately a Terminator guy, but it's not as easy a decision as you might think. Probably my peak fascination with either of these series came about the time when I saw The Animatrix, a straight-to-video series of short films in different animation styles that was released about a month after The Matrix Reloaded. At the time, I was still on a high following Reloaded, a high that was unpolluted by the third movie in the series, or by the unflattering reconsideration of the second movie that was prompted by the third. When I saw The Matrix Reloaded, I was enthralled by the way it expanded on what we'd seen in The Matrix, even if it did climb up its own arsehole a little bit by the climax. So when a series of shorts that delved further into the logic of the Matrix universe came out a few weeks later, it engaged me right at the height of my philosophical wrestling with what I'd seen.

Conversely, the spin-offs of the Terminator series have held no similar fascination for me. I tried watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox, but it just didn't do it for me. In fact, I can't even remember if I watched more than one episode.

I think it may ultimately come down to the greater immediacy of the Terminator movies, the greater sense of impending tragedy. In three of the four movies, the apocalypse has yet to happen, and all energies are focused on trying to stop it. (Though I still don't know why the machines didn't just send a terminator back to the 19th century to kill John Connor's great great great grandmother. She would never see it coming.) Whereas in The Matrix, what's happened has already happened, and we actually know very little about it (though one of the Animatrix shorts goes into that, which is part of what made the shorts so fascinating to me).

Plus there's the fact that most of the world is not already dead in The Matrix. Practically speaking, they're dead, as they are being used as batteries to power the machines. But in their own consciousness, these people are alive, and in some cases, living a pretty damn good life. Not only that, but their circumstances seem to be reversible. Even if, upon a successful human rebellion, they were to be unleashed into a world that is as decimated as the world in the Terminator movies, at least humanity would have the numbers to rebuild and turn the real world back into a version of their idealized, anesthetized reality more quickly. The world view of The Terminator is more ballsy for its sheer bleakness. Even if the humans do overthrow the machines, there will be only, what, 10,000 of them? 20,000 of them? to repopulate the entire planet.

If I were to rank the seven movies, it holds up the slight advantage held by the Terminator movies. My rankings would go:

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
2. The Matrix
3. The Terminator
4. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
5. The Matrix Reloaded
6. The Matrix Revolutions
7. Terminator: Salvation

The only two I might flip-flop would be T3 and Reloaded. I certainly liked Reloaded more when I saw it than I liked T3. But I've now seen T3 three times, and have yet to revisit Reloaded. That tells me something. (Or wait, did I? I'll have to consult my records.)

I guess this ended up being a discussion of both the movies themselves and the universes they create, as might be expected. On the one hand, there's something more philosophical about The Matrix, even with the time travel aspect introduced into The Terminator. On the other, The Terminator is a lot cleaner, conceptually, and never spirals off into self-defeating existential rabbit holes.

Both have a lot of kick-ass action scenes.

So how do you come down on the topic?