Topic: The Movie Thread

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Halloween was movie night with the family. Watched Terminator 2 (we saw the first film again last night) and, of course, Halloween '78.

It was a good time, because both films are masterpieces of their respective genres.

Terminator 2, along with Die Hard, is the model that I judge other action films against. It's conceptually interesting, has a number of interesting character dynamics (John & Arnie, with a touching father/son dynamic; Arnie & Sarah, which grows from almost instinctive distrust on Sarah's part to a wary mutual respect between both parties; Sarah & John, who share a frayed but honest emotional connection; Arnie's developing sense of selfhood throughout the film, once he's switched out of "Read Only" mode), the action setpieces are dynamic, violent, and often desperate, the writing is intelligent, and, most importantly, the film emphasizes the vulnerability and mortality of its human characters. While the liquid metal special effects of the T-1000 are a little iffy today, almost everything in the film just looks fantastic, and the combination of CG and practical effects has led to the film aging like wine. Contrast this with the original and its ridiculous-looking animatronic Arnie and stop-motion Terminator skeleton near the end. Like any good sequel, it improves on the original by analyzing the emotional implications of its events and expanding on the worldbuilding in a way that makes the cinematic universe that much more engaging. Also notably present in this film is a sense of impending doom: The Terminator feels much more like a conventional thriller, whereas T2 feels downright apocalyptic throughout. The film means this to be the case, of course, which is why it opens on disturbing imagery like a playground that is engulfed in flames. Like the graphic novel Watchmen, the fear of nuclear war and the existential threat it poses is baked into every frame of this film.

Halloween isn't nearly as well-balanced a film, on the other hand, but it redeems itself by choosing to do one thing, and doing it EXTREMELY well. I could, of course, go on about the genius use of subjective viewpoint and the recently invented Steadicam at the start, or the brilliantly minimalistic score, but I wanted, instead, to focus on the centrality of The Shape throughout the film. Generally, in "slasher" films like this, or in most horror films, really, a status quo of safety and comfort is established before the monster or maniac or whatever arrives and upends it. This status quo never exists in this film, however, and is quite effectively deconstructed throughout. It really dawned on me, while I was watching it tonight, just how clever it is that The Shape is in virtually every single scene in this film. The first scene is the initial murder he commits as a child. IMMEDIATELY afterwards, it jumps to him fleeing the asylum and stealing the car Loomis was riding in. We then transition to a sunny Illinois town, which is when most horror films would busy themselves with establishing an atmosphere of normality. Not Halloween, though. In pretty much every daylight, scene-building part of this movie, The Shape is lurking somewhere in the background, stalking main character Laurie Strode after she drops off a pair of keys at the old Myers house. Oftentimes, the film announces this with a creepy score, indicating the presence of the shape as he lurks around the periphery of the screen. Just as often, though, he's barely noticeable, and receives no musical accompaniment: a distant figure staring at Laurie Strode outside of the school, who disappears the next time she glances out of the classroom window; a ghostly face haunting the edges of the screen as he prepares to kill his next victim; or even just a car that happens to be closely following behind one of Laurie's friends. A sense of unease and suspicion is cultivated throughout, so that, even in the brightest hours of ordinary daylight, things don't feel right, and, like Laurie herself, we never feel particularly safe. Things COULD happen at any time, and, even though violence only really happens at the very beginning and near the climax of the film, the viewer feels menaced throughout.

@crimsontadpoles See, the thing with horror movies is that lower budgets generally result in better films. At least, that's the case with competent directors. They can't throw everything on-screen as much as they might want, and they have to take a "less is more" approach. There's a reason a lot of the best horror films ever made were made a shoestring budget.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, Life was absolutely disappointing. Conceptually empty (anyone who has seen Alien or any other space horror film, really, has seen a better version of this plot), and without the skill needed to carry a film on execution alone. One of the worse Jake Gyllenhaal films I've seen.

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So... Terminator: Dark Fate. This isn't going to be sleeky written as an impression. It might resemble an angry rant, actually. I don't know. I'm tired.

Reviews have been saying it's the best film in the Terminator franchise since T2. And... that's probably technically true. As a noisy action-blockbuster, it's pretty competent fare. Lots of slick visuals and setpieces. In more ways than one, it reminds me of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: a pretty, but empty and creatively bankrupt affair that only manages to be notable as a sequel because it's not aggressively bad like previous sequels were.

In this case, it's basically T2, but with diversity-friendly casting and all the things that made T2 great systematically stripped away. It starts out with a twist: a T-800 that was sent out after the T-1000 in T2, but before Skynet ceased to exist, manages to assassinate John Connor in front of his mother one morning on a beach. A surprising opening, but maybe one that might have been an interesting lead in to a unique film. It's just business as usual after that, however: you have a young woman in Mexico City, nicknamed "Dani," who is being chased by a Terminator that looks like it's made out of liquid metal (although, in a bizarre and unexplained twist, this Terminator is able to effectively duplicate himself by separating his outer body, made of mimetic polyalloy like the T-1000, from his endoskeleton; but the mere presence of solid metal bits underneath makes him weirdly inferior to the T-1000, who could sustain any level of physical injury thanks to his composition). A cyborg supersoldier from the future named Grace (I couldn't help but see a young Ellen Degeneres) is sent back to save her. Meanwhile, the two run into Sarah Connor, who is being fed the coordinates to spots where Terminators will show up by a mysterious source. It turns out that this source is actually the T-800 who killed John Connor years ago. After having carried out his instructions, he loses his purpose in life and, after a few months, apparently finds it in the form of a hispanic woman and her young son, who are being abused by the woman's husband. Having magically grown a conscience, he tries to help Sarah work through the trauma of her son's death by sending her locations where other Terminators will show up. Grace actually has the coordinates for the T-800's log cabin in the woods tattoo'd on her body, which is how she finds him. This bit is never really explained. Anyway, Sarah and Co. have to work alongside the T-800 to help save Dani from the new Terminator.

I could go on recounting the film's plot, but I'm a bit tired of talking about it, and you can probably imagine how it ends. Because there was absolutely nothing surprising about this film. It's just a loud, busy, stupid action movie. Gone is the tension of the old films and the thrill of the chase (this new Terminator chases them, of course, but he's so ridiculously good at his job that it just starts becoming a parody of itself; at one point the characters escape from a facility onto a plane to get away from him, so the Terminator somehow acquires a plane, flies up to their plane, jumps onto it, there's this big action sequence, the plane everyone was on crashes near a hydro power plant, with the main cast escaping on a... jeep with airbags (a vehicle with a parachute, actually; lol I did say I was tired) on it, or something. Anyway, immediately after this ridiculous, nearly 20 minute sequence, the Terminator is immediately on top of them again... it's so relentless that it stops being menacing and becomes like something out of a cartoon skit). No moody cinematography or frightening dreams of the future. We see the future, but it has lost the dark, stylized feeling you got when seeing the future in the old films: these sequences just feel like something out of a standard futuristic war movie. There are no interesting character dynamics (it approaches something interesting when Sarah is asked to work alongside the T-800 who killed her son, but this is never really explored). The action isn't cinematic and sleek, like in T2, but more like something out of a Transformers film. The characters are almost universally forgettable, with the sole exception being Sarah Connor. No iconic lines of dialogue are introduced here, and the actors seem so exhausted that they barely seem able to manage to alluding to classic dialogue from the first two films (at one point, Sarah boredly intones: "I'll... be back;" at another point, the T-800 picks up a pair of sunglasses, the classic Terminator music starts playing, and then he just sort of sits them down and walks off. The film doesn't even have the decency to shamelessly pander to the audience. I don't understand what the point was of killing off John Connor and practically invalidating the first two films if they were just going to retell the same basic story, but in a worse fashion.

EDIT: The T-800 in T2 reveals that they're put into "read only mode" so that their algorithms can't grow or evolve and make them into less efficient killers. How, then, is the T-800 in this film apparently able to randomly grow a conscience without some external help, and without a strong socializing presence in his life from the beginning? You know what? Doesn't matter.

I was prepared for the worst, yet somehow still ended up feeling insulted by this production. I can't necessarily say it's a "bad film." It's worse. It's an utterly soulless one. It feels like it was designed by a committee of people in grey suits. It's what happens when late stage capitalism happens to an iconic sci-fi property.