The Robots Won

BIG spoilers, as usual...

Having seen the reviews for "Terminator Salvation," and hearing a few of my friends come back disappointed after seeing the film, my hopes were not high. As it turned out, the movie was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting, and I actually enjoyed myself quite a bit, considering that I let all logic out the window when the movie started.
But therein lies the major problem.
The first two Terminator movies were well-thought out stories that, while sometimes contradictory if you thought about them too long, still were smart, logic-driven films.
T1 is the only movie that actually makes complete logical sense, as it goes by "12 Monkeys" rules and states that, in traveling backwards through time, you actually create a past that has already happened (Kyle Reese becomes John's father).
In T2, they went ahead and said, "No, the future is not set." Sarah, John, and good-guy Arnie go to destroy SkyNet and possibly prevent Judgement Day from ever happening. Of course if that's the case, Kyle Reese can't go back in time and father John, but who cares? T2 is without a doubt the best movie in the series, simply because it confronts some pretty scary issues about humanity, destiny, and the nature of determinism, all while delivering spectacularly on ground-breaking special effects that still hold up flawlessly. In T1 Cameron set the stage, but in T2 he expanded the universe to ask some even tougher questions, and ultimately make a movie with far more levels to it. It's the same thing he did with "Aliens," and the same thing Christopher Nolan did with "The Dark Knight." It's something every filmmaker should remember when making a sequel; don't rehash what has already happened--use what is there as the foundation to build a completely new and exciting story.
T3 is my least favorite Terminator movie, even though it really is not as bad a film as everyone says it is. There is nothing wrong with the execution of the story, or where they took the characters--it's just that the entire film is completely unnecessary because nothing new or interesting happens until the last five minutes where they have the balls to blow up the world. Also, T3 sort of undoes everything T2 by saying, "Yes, the future is set. Sorta. It's just very flexible. If you change the future, you're only moving the timeline around." This sounds like more of a convenient rewrite than a statement about the nature of time travel and destiny to me, but I'm willing to go along for the ride.
And now, for T4...
T4 DID deliver exactly what I was hoping for on the broadest scale. Ever since seeing the first two Terminator movies, my favorite part was always the flashbacks (flashforwards?) of the future war. Man vs. robots. Fight for survival. Love that stuff. And on that level, T4 gave me a ton of the robot goodness I needed (although apparently the laser-guns haven't been invented yet...oh well). In fact, for the first ten minutes of the movie, I had no idea why I needed to even be worried about the quality of the film. After a simple expositional scene with Marcus Wright in jail, we cut to a long Vietnamesque shot of John Connor vs. the robots, and the sequence was EVERYTHING I had been hoping to see. I thought I was in good hands, as Connor's entire team is wiped out by the merciless robots of all varying types.
But then things go sour, and I started to get worried. Connor radios to HQ (who apparently spend their entire time in a submarine), and when they won't give him their location, he jumps out of a helicopter into the ocean. WHAT???
First off, if you jump out of a helicopter from that height, you are probably going to break your legs. And even if you don't break your legs, you are still stuck in the middle of THE FUCKING OCEAN, and would probably freeze to death. Instead we cut to...
INT. SUBMARINE -- Michael Ironside (who can do these roles in his sleep by now) chewing John out in typical, "You're a loose cannon, Connor!" fashion. He briefly says something about how the dive team rescued him. OK...dive team? How did that happen? That's a long, possibly involving sequence that sort of needs to be seen! I mean, it seems to me that John Connor really only transported his way into the sub via the magic of jump-cut cinema.
That on its own isn't so bad, but T4 is riddled with these "logic issues," as my old prof Phil Messina would say. I never really liked Phil that much, because I thought he stifled our creativity and instead forced us to make the movies HE wanted to see, but he had a point. It's too bad McG didn't take a class from the guy.
But the biggest issue staring T4 right in the face is the main plot, where John Connor has to rescue Kyle Reese. SkyNet apparently has a "most wanted" list out there, and on it John Connor is #2. Fine. Connor is constantly making his radio broadcasts, leading the resistance, and riling up trouble. But #1 on the list is...Kyle Reese.
Hey, wait a minute...in this movie, Kyle Reese is a teenager. Nobody knows who he is. Only John Connor. And since Connor doesn't send Reese back in time until he is in his 30s, and this movie takes place in 2015, we've still got until 2030 before time travel is even invented. How would the robots know the significance of what Kyle Reese will do, if nobody else does? Just because the audience watched T1, doesn't mean SkyNet did!
And don't try to tell me the robots who were sent back in time gave "messages" to the future. That doesn't work. All the robots sent through time were destroyed. If they gave messages, we didn't see it. And we NEEDED to see it if it did happen, as that is vital information. Bottom line: there is no way the robots would be out to get Kyle Reese right now, as he hasn't done anything yet.
This is more than a plot hole. This is a gaping problem with the overall story in its ENTIRETY!!! I could never take anything in T4 too seriously, because all I kept thinking about was, "Bullshit...this would never happen."
The same problem happens when Marcus Wright makes his way back to SkyNet, and SkyNet reveals to him that he was designed to be an infiltrator against his will. Now first off, the character of Marcus Wright I really liked--it's a cheap attempt at the whole Blade Runner cyborg thing, and I dig it. BUT...
SkyNet says to Marcus, "We tried several times to kill Connor in the past. It didn't work. Which is why we created you..."
Um...no. As I already said, time travel hasn't been created yet. It's only 2015. We still have another 15 years. You haven't sent ANYONE back in time yet, SkyNet! It isn't even a possibility that has crossed your bionic mind! You stupid robo-network...
Plus, I understand that a global robo-network needs a base of operations. But SkyNet HQ was incredibly accessible and easy-to-use for humans. The entire place has keycodes, walkways, and stuff that is clearly designed for people. But SkyNet is for robots! Duh! To be fair, this is a problem you see in a lot of science fiction ("The Matrix" for instance). But sometimes they try to explain it away by saying, "The robots want to be like us." No such explanation attempts here.
Another major inconsistency was how the humans survived in this post-apocalyptic world. For the most part, it's Mad Max style (complete with a mute wild child from "The Road Warrior"), which I dig. Except, for some reason the Human Resistance has a base of operations with the outfitting of a fully functional air force. How??? In this time of war, how do they defend it? How are they allowed this luxury? I assume the robots have taken over the rest of the world, so why does this one little pocket still exist? This isn't a huge problem, except that it needs to be explained, so we understand WHY. Instead, it's just THERE. In broad daylight. With people running around. And no patrolling robots in sight.
As I said before, though, it's the robots who steal the show and are the centerpieces of the film. The sound design and special effects teams went all out to deliver some of the coolest, scariest metal adversaries humanity has ever had to face (I especially liked the robo-leeches that inhabit the water). But even then, there are things that bugged me. There are these giant robots called Harvesters that pick up people and put them into cages (to do their skin-testing). Every time a Harvester showed up, its giant claws punching through a roof, I leapt in my seat, and it definitely gave me the gut "oh shit" reaction they were looking for.
But these brontosaur-robots are HUGE. And SLOW. And the earth shakes when they walk! Wouldn't people see or hear them coming? And if a Harvester was instead dropped by one of the Hunter-Killer robo-jets, you'd have hard the jet coming (as indeed we do on a few occasions). What did the Harvester do, tiptoe? Did it unfold itself from a far smaller, quieter object, Transformer-style?
And in the final showdown, Reese and Connor face off against two T-800s in the bowels of the SkyNet assembly line (pretty cool, actually). In the biggest "holy shit!" surprise of the film, one of the T-800s looks EXACTLY like Arnold. And we're talking, young, early-90s Arnold, thanks to (ironically) computer wizardry.
But, in the final fight the T-800 gets burned by molten metal. In T2, this is how Arnold kills himself (actually, he let John do it...because robots cannot "self-terminate"). Yet in T4, the robot gets up out of the "lava" just fine, and is then frozen by liquid nitrogen-ish stuff (again, like T2). First off, the freezing stuff kind of comes out of nowhere, and secondly, that would totally kill a T-800! They aren't stronger than the T-1000!
Also much has been said about Christian Bale's rant on set (check this out if you haven't yet, and if you haven't, where have you been?). However, having seen his take on John Connor, I can see exactly WHY Bale went off on that DP. He was just in character! John Connor spends practically the entire movie yelling at people, so it's natural for him to yell at everyone who was on set. I like Bale, so I'm hoping this was McG's direction (or misdirection) and not a character choice from Christina himself.
Another bummer about T4 is the ending. I'm tired of seeing Hollywood cop out over a daring finish, and instead go with something generic, simply because "that's what the test audience wanted." A similar fate befell "I Am Legend." I got news for you...test audiences are IDIOTS! That's why they don't make the movies!
It was rumored that the original ending of T4 was going to have John Connor actually die, but they would place his skin over Marcus' robot body in order to rebuild him, and keep the name and idea of John Connor alive. It's a bit sacrifice-Batman-ish (not the John Connor we want, not the John Connor we deserve, but the John Connor we NEED), but it seemed pretty bold and ballsy. I would have LOVED to see them do something like that. Would it have made T4 a good movie? Probably not. But it likely would have made me give it a piddling but overall good review instead of a piddling but overall bad review.
All in all, McG did deliver finely on the action, but the acting, story, and character elements all fell apart in a bit of a misguided mess. I did enjoy myself, but only in a "check your brain at the door" sort of way; only on a basic mechanical level, and the Terminator series deserves better. Human thought and logic was erased in favor of awesome CGI, and so ultimately the robots did win. As I already said, it's sometimes OK for a movie to not make sense when you think about it hard afterwards (T2). But it's not OK for a movie to have basic logic problems continuously cropping up AS you watch it.
Finally, I also wish they could have incorporated dogs into the movie, since I always liked the concept that they could sense terminators, but oh well.

However, though T4 had issues, it was nowhere near as laughably awful as "Next," which I finally got around to seeing in full. It stars the enigma of enigmas, Nicholas Cage, as a guy who has the power to see anything that will happen two minutes ahead of himself, thereby destroying any hope for suspense the movie could have..
The movie is absolutely terrible, but hilariously terrible. The premise reminded me of that kid at film school who had an idea for a screenplay HE was convinced was awesome, that everybody else knew would be completely idiotic (I heard about a kid who was convinced he could make a good movie about gravity reversing, and people screaming as they went flying into space). In fact, it reminded me a bit of Charlie Kaufman's fake brother in "Adaptation" coming up with screenplay ideas. And Charlie Kaufman was played by (gasp) Nicholas Cage!
The best scene in "Next" has to be the sequence where this balding, old, creepy guy (Cage...duh) manages to seduce Jessica Biel through a magic trick involving a flower. And the "twist ending" defies description (even though I did sort of call it early on).
Truly a stumblefuck of a film. Highly recommended! I like when Cage does magic with a leopard gecko in the desert (leopard geckos are NOT native to Arizona, I may add).

"Alice" This was a very disturbing artsy film that tells the story of Alice in Wonderland through eerie stop-motion animation, often involving taxidermied animals. Other than some inventive stop-motion, there wasn't much here, and I'd skip it unless you are forced to watch it for a film class.

"Management" This was an "almost" movie to me. Steve Zahn works as a hotel custodian in the middle of nowhere, and he falls in love for one of his tenants, played by Jennifer Aniston. When she feels sorry for him to the point of giving him a little pity-sex, Zahn goes on a cross-country trip to win her back, despite the fact that he is a total loser with no prospects.
The film barely succeeds only because of Steve Zahn, who despite playing what is basically a creepy stalker, has such sad puppy-dog eyes that you can't help but root for him. The first act in the hotel is the best, as he keeps showing up at Anniston's room with bottles of champagne and wine, awkwardly trying to start up a conversation with a girl who clearly only wants to get work done. The middle feels like a different film entirely (perhaps a Zucker Bros. screwball comedy?), but in the end everything is reeled back to a sweet close. A film with a lot of problems (and I've never liked Jennifer Aniston in much of anything), but it succeeds on some levels thanks to Steve Zahn's perfect "aw shucks" performance. I wish he would get more roles.

I take pride in having seen every James Bond movie but two (the one with George Lazenby and the one where Madonna sings the opening credits). The best Bond movies manage to deliver both an exciting story and some top-notch action. "Goldeneye" showcases some awesome action sequences, but is also filled with enough spy intrigue to work just as well as an adventure novel; it's arguably the best Bond film since the Connery days. In general though, Bond films are about style and action over substance; you see them for the gunplay, gadgets, and girls, not for a gripping story.
However "Quantum of Solace" was the only Bond film I've seen that was the other way around. A very solid story full of political intrigue, drama, and convincing character motivations, yet the shoddy action sequences practically ruined the movie! It's full of editing mistakes I learned to avoid while at USC, and the shakey-cam stuff failed to engage on any level (the "dramatic" gun chase at the opera was particularly painful).
There's been a habit among action movies lately (especially spy action movies) to go all Paul Greengrass-y in order to get "gritty realism," but what a lot of these filmmakers fail to realize is that while shakey-cam often seems thrown together, Greengrass executes those sequences with just as much precision and planning as any other. Throwing your camera back and forth does not "put one in" the film. It just makes you motion-sick.
Still, as far as the Bond movies go, a pretty engaging story. And Daniel Craig continues to be a worthy successor to Brosnan. Here's hoping they execute the adventure a little better in the next one.