Lately I've been attempting to satisfy my appetite for good sci-fi by watching a fairly new show called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. To be honest, other than starving for sci-fi, there are only two real reasons I started watching this show: morbid curiosity (what are they doing to one of my favorite movies?) and Summer Glau (excellent actress who played River in Firefly). I fully expected this show to suck. To properly review this, though, I need to start at the beginning.
Spoiler Alert!
Major and minor plot spoilers follow, but I wouldn't worry about it; it doesn't really matter. Read on!
Terminator was a low-budget surprise hit in 1984, the first film with Arnold Schwarzenegger after he became a popular actor with Conan the Barbarian. For those of you not familiar with Terminator, the idea is that the human race has become so automated that in 1997 the computer defense systems of the world decide that all humans are threats, and initiate a nuclear annihilation that nearly destroys the human race (don't you remember 11 years ago when that happened?). Unfortunately for the machines that now rule the world, the humans form a resistance and are on the verge of taking back the world. At the last minute the machines send a machine that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill Sarah Connor, who is the future mother of John Connor, the leader of the human resistance. The humans send one man back as well, and the movie is a chase between the human and the Terminator robot to find and kill/save Sarah Connor.
The story is good, and so is the action, but this movie really suffers from its low budget. To show damage to the Terminator they give him a prosthetic head that looks awful, and during the final showdown the Terminator's skin has been burned off revealing the metal underneath, and they use distracting stop motion animation to show him walking. It made me think of Jason and the Argonauts, which used the same technique but was more impressive (especially having been made 21 years earlier in 1963). Still, it succeeded at the box office, so seven years later they made a sequel.
Terminator 2 (1991) is completely brilliant, one of my favorite movies. I'm very glad I saw this one before I saw the first one. One thing I appreciate about this movie is that beyond a quick bit of monologue at the beginning is that other than a very brief introductory monologue in the beginning, all of the background material you need from the first Terminator to not be lost in this movie is provided seamlessly in context. Many writers could take a cue from this; even good ones like Rowling and Jordan. You can start with this movie, as I did, and not miss anything.
Speaking of the beginning, the opening shots of this movie are practically a remake of the first movie, but this time with a good budget (most expensive film shot at the time at $100,000,000). James Cameron even plays some fun mind games with those who are familiar with the first. This time Schwarzenegger is the good guy (but still a robot), and the bad guy is an even better, cooler robot who can change form to look like anyone. There's a bit in the first movie where Arnold punches a guy in the chest and literally rips his heart out; in T2 he reaches at a biker the same way but this time just takes his sunglasses from his pocket.
John Connor is 10 years old now, and we learn that Sarah got busted trying to destroy a computer factory in an attempt to prevent technology from taking over and is now in a maximum security psycho ward while John is with loser foster parents, believing his mother is insane. James Cameron plays a bigger game now, with both Terminators chasing John, and only when there's no escape revealing that Arnold is the good guy. Then there's one of the coolest car chases ever: bad Terminator in a semi, John on a motorbike, and Arnold saving the day with his cool sunglasses and awesome shotgun on a motorcycle.
John Connor and Arnold Terminator then go to rescue Sarah from the psycho ward in what is one of the most beautifully crafted scenes in movie history, and I mean that. (More spoilers!) Sarah knows her son is missing and Arnold is on the loose again, but she doesn't know arnold is the good guy. She makes a brilliant, desperate escape attempt (and a plausible one; Cameron payed close attention to detail), and just as she is successful and about to make a clean break, Arnold comes around the corner and she is convinced she's too late. This is one of my top ten movie moments of all time, because it is so thoroughly effective.
After a showdown between Arnold and Bad Terminator (T-1000), they escape and decide to prevent the evil computer network, SkyNet, from being created. Here another switch is pulled. John has been trying to teach Arnold Terminator to be more human (Arnold is the first father figure John has ever really had), while Sarah, plagued by nightmares of nuclear annihilation, becomes herself a Terminator, and moves to kill the man who develops the SkyNet technology. We are presented here with a serious moral dilemma: Is it acceptable to kill a good, innocent man if it means saving 3 billion lives? The movie's answer is no; my answer is yes, only if there is no other way.
The movie's message is that there is that "the future's not set, there's no fate but what we make for ourselves," and that there's still time to figure things out before the situation can't be recovered. There is quite a lot of violence in this movie, but none of it is gratuitous; in fact through the whole thing, John works to convince Arnold Terminator that killing is a last resort. While it is one of the best sci-fi and action movies ever made, it is the character interactions that drive the movie and give it lasting value.
Then Terminator 3 came along and said, "no, just kidding; there's no escaping fate because we want to show lots of nuclear explosions." Don't ever watch Terminator 3. Watching Terminator 1 is optional. Terminator 2 is on my imaginary list of essential movies that everyone should watch. If you're wary of R-rated movies, find a Cleanflicks or TV version with the language removed, you won't lose anything from these movies. The message still survives, and Arnold is still just as muscular and cool with his sunglasses. They don't edit out the sunglasses.
They're going to make another Terminator trilogy, with Christian Bale, about the future war against the machines. I really wish they wouldn't, but I will watch anyway, and hope they're good. I doubt this is how they'll play out, but they can still do these and keep with the T2 "No Fate" philosophy, but they have to make them prequels, in the future. Yep. They can play out the war, and at the end the final move is to send Arnold back in time. Unfortunately, then they'd have to show the landscape transform from post-apocalyptic to pristine and peaceful, and there's no way to make that not suck. Oh, well.
On the bright side, back to the beginning of this post, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has turned out not too bad. I had Reservations about Lina Heady playing Sarah, because she's not rugged-looking enough, but she's not bad. Thomas Dekker is really good as John, and naturally Summer Glau is brilliant as the new "good" Terminator, Cameron:
Sarah Connor, John Connor, and Cameron the Good Terminator
The show had a rough start: since the nuclear apocalypse happened in 1997, and this show aired first in 2007, they had to make a convenient little time jump to the present, in which Sarah's and John's actions had delayed but not prevented SkyNet. The show improved from there, though, following suit with T2 in exploring moral dilemmas, and does a decent but not awesome job with the character development, enough to be worth watching. Oh, and Summer Glau is in it.
While it is turning out to be a good, adequate fix for my sci-fi urges, there are some possibly troublesome developments. First, it's produced by Fox. The same Fox that cancelled the awesome Futurama for the train wreck called Family Guy. The same Fox that unforgivably cancelled Firefly before its first and only season was even finished (Summer Glau is in that one, too, plus it's the best show ever, so you should watch it). They're really trying to make Prison Break stay successful, and Terminator barely got renewed for season 2, and may not make it to season 3. The other possibly troublesome development is that they have a stereotype new villain (a T-1001) who is played by Shirley Manson from Garbage. She may turn out cool, but who knows.
Speaking of singers, the show ended its first season with a really cool scene shot with no sound, but set to When the Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash, as a dozen FBI agents storm a Terminator's hideout not realizing what they're up against:
And they began their second season with something even better, an original song "Sampson & Delilah" by Shirley Manson of Garbage (they introduce Manson's new character at the end of this episode). Major Spoilers! Good Terminator Cameron (Summer Glau) just got car bombed by some thugs looking for some technology Sarah and John had stolen, and now she's malfunctioning. This is cool, but only watch it if you're ready for a spoiler! By the way, this clip has a lot of Summer Glau in it:
That's enough for now; in the near future I will probably post more about the topic of time travel and robots in various movies, since I've thought a lot about these (especially the time travel) and the interesting paradoxes they pose.
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