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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019) and AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021).

Friday, January 08, 2010

Electric Playground on the Terminator franchise


Over at Electric Playground, you can watch a short video that examines the Terminator franchise and speculates about its future. There are interview snippets from a few commentators, including me. I distinguish how the franchise began with The Terminator, in many ways a classic horror movie with the focus on an implacable, demonic enemy from another order of things: Sarah Connor's everyday world is suddenly ruptured by the arrival of a terrifying killer cyborg from the future. But the logic of the back story has caused the movie franchise to shift modes - to the point where Terminator Salvation is something much more like a war movie.

I should say that I don't necessarily agree with the views of the other commentators. In particular, I do agree that The Terminator must be seen in the context of the Cold War, which had intensified at the beginning of the 1980s. But I think it's a misreading to see the Terminator and the other war machines referred to as somehow representative of communism and coerced social conformity, as one of the commentators suggests. Writer/director James Cameron was and is no cold warrior, and let's not forget the narrative premise that America incorporated these advanced machines into its strategic weapons system. (This is even clearer in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where we learn specific detail about Skynet).

Rather, the sinister, destructive machines stand in for the madness of the cold war, in which both sides built nuclear arsenals capable of mass destruction on a planetary scale. Beyond that, the machines can stand for all the madness of escalating war technology: I don't see these movies as unambiguously technophobic, but they certainly explore the darkest side of humans' use of technoscience, our penchant, over the centuries, for creating weapons of escalating destructive power. In doing so, they don't neglect the almost pornographic allure of guns and war machines (captured once again in Cameron's Avatar, but that's a topic for another post). At one point, the action of The Terminator takes place in a nightclub called Tech Noir, and that pretty much sums up the writer/director's theme.


The Terminator itself has nothing to do with communism, but is simply an unstoppable enemy - one that is ultimately revealed as an image of death, when its camouflage of human skin and flesh is burned away, and it rises from the flames as a walking metal skeleton with red-glowing eyes. At the end of the movie, as the pregnant Sarah Connor drives in the desert, menaced by a coming storm, it is not the triumph of communism that she anticipates but the madness of a nuclear war that will largely exterminate humanity.

Disagreement is healthy, though, so have a look at the video and decide for yourself.

It's especially useful to see short excerpts from all of the movies (and the TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles) in the space of just a few minutes to show how much of the original look and feel has been retained, even as the emphasis in the movies shifts from the horror of one woman's pursuit by a sinister, unstoppable, seemingly-human but effectively demonic enemy ... to the larger scale of war. The war depicted in Terminator Salvation is fought against malevolent, powerful, and inhuman adversaries, but now on more equal (though certainly not symmetrical) terms. While the most recent movie retains much of the grim feel that has existed throughout, and some of the horror elements - particularly in the final scenes, which somewhat reprise the endings of the first two movies - the logic of the narrative has moved on, and that will need to be acknowledged in any future episodes.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Salvation was one of the sillier movies that I've seen at the cinemas. There are so many plot inconsistencies and mistakes throughout the whole thing. Even if you ignore the universe... eh I can't begin to put the amount of plot errors into writing. Probably on IMBD.

I think the terminators have gone on a sliding scale, Original = A, T2 = B, RotM = C, Salvation = D

Russell Blackford said...

Any opinion on The Sarah Connor Chronicles? I've actually been pretty impressed from what I've seen - but have a helluva lot of catching up to do.

Richard Wein said...

I thought the first season of TTSCC was excellent. I liked the fact that it kept many elements of the movies, but also took advantage of the opportunities a TV series has to develop multiple stories and characters in greater depth. I particularly enjoyed the stories of Cameron (the terminator sent to help John) and the FBI agent pursuing John and Sarah, both of whom were very well acted.

I liked the second season too, though it suffered from being much longer than the first, and felt at times as if the writers were running short of ideas. Also, some of the more interesting characters and story lines from the first season took a back seat, while the new characters were not as good. The season ended with a development which would have taken the series in a completely new and promising direction but to my disappointment the series was then cancelled.

For anyone in the UK, Virgin 1 (Freeview) is showing the series again, starting Friday 15/1, and I'll be watching it.

I haven't seen Salvation, as the bad reviews put me off. I'll probably watch it when it comes to TV.

Eamon Knight said...

I saw the Terminator movies only recently, with few preconceptions. This meant that, in T2, it took me a little while to realize that this time round, the Schwarzenegger character was a good guy, and the other arrival from the future was not human, but in fact a bigger and badder terminator. The element of surprise definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the film.

T3 however, I didn't like so much.

Richard Wein said...

Eamon, when I saw T2 I'd already seen lots of advance publicity, so I knew Arnie was going to be the bad guy/terminator. Shame, because I agree it would have been better to be surprised. You were lucky! So, when I saw T3, I was carefully to avoid all publicity, though I couldn't help seeing from the posters that the new terminator was female. Turned out, though, that there were no big surprises in T3, so it didn't matter.

Unknown said...

I havent seen SCC, will get it all on dvd one day.

I think 2009 was an amazing year for Science Fiction.

'Avatar' got a lot of publicity, and was a great film, but not the masterpiece I was hoping for.

'Star Trek' I could probably say the same thing about.

'Surrogates' and 'Wolverine' went okay although they were pretty empty films, apparently a lot of people liked them, not me so much.

'Moon' is supposed to be better than them all, although I haven't seen that yet.

But the best of the year I think has been 'District 9'. It's great fun, very original, and uses SF to say something that probably no other genre could - which, I think, is the point.

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