Tyler and I went and saw the latest installment of the Terminator saga this week.
I’m not really into the new Terminator movies. The first is a sci-fi classic and one of the best, tensest, scariest movies ever made. The second actually does move the story forward and the two of them together are absolutely perfect.
There was nothing more to say.
The three additional movies are just opportunistic, commercial nonsense.
But Zack saw this one (the fifth fer cryin’ out loud!) and he liked it. He told me that the key to a great Terminator movie is that Arnold must star in it.
Well, there are four iterations of Arnold in this one and it is pretty fun.
They got away with this particular plot by making it alternate-universe. I guess they figured if Star Trek could create an alternate reality, why not Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese?
Spoiler Alert.
I’m not sure how I feel about making John Connor the bad guy but I guess in AU, anything can happen.
The story is fun, the performances are fine and the special effects are okay. I guess I’ve reached the point where too much special effects are a problem. The temptation to do everything with CGI is understandable but when there’s too much of it, I don’t care how skillfully it’s done, a cartoon is still a cartoon and the longer you show an effect the more boring it is. All the CGI in the world can’t compare to that homicidal robotic skeleton that just wouldn’t stop in the first movie. Nothing will ever be scarier than that was.
The chick who played Sarah Connor was good. She even looked a little like Linda Hamilton. Without the white blond hair, I didn’t recognize her as the Khaleesi at all. She had the kick ass toughness down but not the ripped to shreds body that Sarah sported in T2. This Sarah had been fighting the future since she was 9, so she lacked the maniacal, waiting for the world to end, clinging to sanity by her fingertips edge that Linda Hamilton had.
The movie was fun but ultimately forgettable.
The first two, the Terminator and Judgement Day are still absolutely perfect alone.
The plot of this movie is the idea that SkyNet was inevitable. That the advent of artificial intelligence was unavoidable once computers became too powerful and too connected. Skynet had actually become a virtual person whether or not it was a missile system; the conscious computer would always seek to destroy its creator; human kind. A 21st century take on Frankenstein’s monster, I guess.
So the heroes of our story, instead of just trying to survive, which was enough in the first movie, are now trying to find and destroy the computer system that will bring Skynet to life. This birth will happen the moment the fully integrated system, Genisys, comes online. Throughout the movie, we see the screens of billboards, cellphones and everything in between lit up with the countdown to Genisys.
The world can hardly wait.
Of course, Genisys is a Trojan horse; along with the interconnectivity of computer systems comes the ability to control all of them. One ring to rule them all.
Skynet will destroy the human race, one way or another.
This is much more realistic than the original idea, which was SDI run amok and turning our own weapons on us. In fact, Skynet needn’t even exist.
Have you noticed when you’re out and about, the groups of young teens and twenty somethings, sitting at the same table but ignoring each other while busily sending out messages to people other than the ones they’re ‘with’? And the folks getting all those tweets and pokes aren’t paying any attention to the senders, either; they’re too busy tossing their own pebbles into the abyss of modern technology and hoping to get an echo in reply.
The more connected we get through technology, the more insulated we are from each other.
I read a book a year or two ago that was the memoir of a modern day exorcist. It’s called An Exorcist Tells His Story by Gabriele Amorth. It is fascinating and frightening in how matter of factly Amorth writes about his encounters with the demonic.
He recalls an incident when the exorcist asked a demon a question about the relationship in hell between two evil men who hated each other. The demon sneers at the question, calling it stupid. He says that there are no relationships in hell; each soul is disconnected, alone, turned in on itself, by itself for eternity.
Sartre was wrong, hell is not other people; hell is the inability to connect with other people.
The actual definition of ‘hell’ is simply where God is not.
In his novel Descent into Hell, Charles Williams tells the story of a man who condemns himself to perdition. He doesn’t commit any huge sins. He doesn’t kill anyone. The loss of his soul comes through smaller choices, the cumulative weight of which push him deeper and deeper into his own desires, cutting himself off from everyone who might have saved him. One step at a time, the man makes choices that take him further from God until finally, upon his death, he shrinks down into himself completely, unable even to comprehend what he’s lost since imagination and reason are two of the things he relinquished in his pursuit of selfishness.
Another book I’ve been wading through for a while now is The Architects of the Culture of Death by Donald De Marco and Benjamin Wiker. Each chapter in the book is dedicated to a person whose life work has had a great and terrible effect on modern culture. From Schopenhauer, Darwin and Sanger to Singer, these philosophers, scientists and social warriors have several things in common. For starters, they all seem to have hated and been loathed in return by their mothers. A deep, unwavering hatred of women seems universal. For the women in the book, it’s not enough that they wished to be like men; they want to abolish the very concept of womanhood.
Since these folks had lousy relationships with their parents, they leap the unimaginative conclusion that that must be the normal state of humanity. No wonder they think life sucks.
I would pity them all if it weren’t for what follows from such a truncated view of humanity. Seriously, taking life advice from Nietzsche or Rand makes about as much sense as taking work out advice from Steven Hawking.
Each of these ‘great thinkers’ pushes the idea that there is no higher calling than selfishness.
These so called philosophers and scientists have merely dressed up in fancy language what every two year old already knows.
According to the Bible (which every one of the architects of the culture of death dismisses) God is love.
The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
ISIS burns a man to death in a cage and the world is indifferent.
Christians, even children are beheaded on a beach and the world is indifferent.
A soldier is hacked to death on the streets of London and the world is indifferent.
A woman is shot to death on a San Francisco pier and the world is indifferent.
Planned Parenthood sells the organs of the babies they destroy and laughs about it on video and the world is indifferent.
That group of kids at the next table, ignoring each other while texting away on their devices may or may not know about any of the aforementioned events but either way…they’re indifferent.
We’re not building Skynet.
We’re building Hell.