Thursday 3rd July 2003
It's always nice when I switch over to a new version of the site, and then I'm too busy to write a What's New for a few days. Although I don't actually remember that ever happening before now....
Of course, V14 has a couple of problems already. There's some JavaScript error showing up online [it doesn't actually appear in C:\www\gremlin.net\main.html where I'm writing this; I'm not sure what in hell is causing it yet], but it's otherwise about done. Simple, and a little boring; but it loads quickly and fits into less than 800 pixels. So that's a start.
There will probably be a V14.1 soon enough. Once I have more time to see what I can add without making it too big to download again.
In other news: I saw Terminator Three. In case you're one of the five people who haven't seen this thing yet: go away; there will be spoilers....
Okay. Where to begin. Which might be the same question the people involved in making this comedy failed to answer in the first place. I guess we'll start at the beginning.
The story takes place in July 2003, twelve years after the thirteen-year-old John Connor was saved from termination in 1994. And no, that's not my mistake in the math; that's the timeline to date. A kid conceived in April 1984 was thirteen in 1994 and twenty-five in 2003. But that's okay: lots of shit gets blowed up in a minute.
Of course, John Connor has been replaced by Nick Stahl this time, since Eddie Furlong couldn't play a drugged-up drifter these days. This presents another problem. Because the recent trend in Hollywood is to take seriously ugly people like Tom Cruise and turn them into stars, thus convincing chicks that they're actually looking for short, bignosed freaks. Given that Nick Stahl looks like a twenty-five-year-old Chief Wiggins, I'm hoping that this trend has finally run its course. If anyone else had directed this film, they'd have had a terminator drop into our current present from each of this mutant's nostrils.
Fortunately, Conner is nicely balanced by Claire Danes and her immutable expression suggesting that something smells really bad nearby. Also fortunately, Claire's dad is the guy in charge of the SkyNet project in a supersecret Navajo Mountain next door to the actual supersecret Crystal Mountain in Colorado Springs. A plot development which in no way suggests that the answer to the question of how in hell SkyNet can still exist after the destruction of Cyberdyne was pulled directly from Night of the Comet.
But that's okay: shit gets blowed up in a minute.
The CSM101 T800 has been replaced by, apparently, a CSM101 T850. Meaning that the entire endoskeleton is nicely advanced, but it's still encased within an ageing Austrian with a speech impediment. On the bright side, the T850's HUD has evolved from that 1983 TRS80 thing to something designed by Netscape. Not that that's much of an advance, I suppose....
Of course, the CSM101 T850 isn't technically a CSM model at all, since Cyberdyne have been defunct since 1994. The good news is that one of the Cyberdyne hackers jumped ship to the Defence Department at some point, and brought along all the neat stuff they'd worked out to date, which is now being used to build prototypes of the HunterKillers running the planet in 2029. The CSM/DD T1-xx have a ways to go before becoming the ED209 from Robocop; but it is kinda neat that they're the only things in the entire film which aren't made of polygons. Which brings us to the next unfortunate issue.
The T-X. Which should really be called the T-XP. This is an amazing machine. Better than the old T1000 model, this thing is a TransFormer surrounded by liquid metal with nanotechnological capabilities. Which is not to say--apparently--that it resembles the SID6.7 from Virtuosity in any meaningful way. Instead, it's a simple metal machine which is somehow capable of transforming more junk out of its internal cavities than Inspector Gadget ever could. Somehow, its metallic carpels and phalanges are able to shift about until they assemble into a phased plasma cannon, flamethrower, rotosaw, and so on.
Meanwhile, the T-X can infect squadcars with a virus which causes them to drive about. Since the 2003 Crown Victoria Police Package happens to include computer-operated steering, braking, and acceleration.
But that's okay: nothing short of an exorcist can prevent squadcars, firetrucks, and ambulances from leaping into that GrandTheftAuto FourStar WantedLevel HockeyGame and making shit get blowed up.
Which is where this film finds its purpose. Ninety minutes of bullshit oneliners James Bond would roll his eyes at, computer techtalk an AOHellion could refute ['so far, the firewall is holding up against the virus'], some really terrible CG, and, just for the rabble in the pit: ten-minute chases set five minutes apart. The Dukes of Hazzard put less focus on doing dumb shit with cars.
The sad thing is that one of the chase scenes was reportedly dropped, at one point, after the film went over its rumoured budget of $200million; lucky for us, Schwarzenegger invested 1.4million of his own funds into the film to get the scene to happen...since it was really important to the storyline to have a Champion speeding along, GodzillaTailing every building for six blocks with its nanobot-infested crane.
For those people with functioning brains, this will be a short film. It goes like this.
In 2029, SkyNet sent a machine back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, to prevent the existence of John Connor, who was the most directly respnsible for defeating SkyNet in 2029. Also in 2029, SkyNet sent a machine back to 1994 to kill Connor himself. In 2031, SkyNet sent a machine back to 2003 to kill the machine sent by Kate Connor to ensure that she and John--who had no prior knowledge of the adjusted date of the war--would survive 'Judgment Day', and eventually assemble and lead the Resistance through 2031, destroying SkyNet.
This is actually good news. This means that SkyNet actually sent the T-X back in time not specifically to kill anyone, but to prevent the Connors from surviving an inevitable event. It doesn't save the film; it's just kinda neat to consider that the T850 was logically sent before the T-X was, which is a bit of a change from the trend to date.
SkyNet, meanwhile, turns out to be what most of us--we with functioning brains--have assumed all along: a software programme. It's kinda right there in the damned name, after all. Hell: if the first film had been any better at predicting the future of the real world, it would have been called sky.net. It's virtual. Viral. An artifical intelligence strain, infecting everything, everywhere. Cyberdyne had almost nothing to do with it; they just made hardware for, among other clients, the Department of Defence, who, after the loss of Cyberdyne, just moved along as quickly as they could to create the warmachines which would eventually, inevitably, be infected by the runaway SkyNet virus. This is good news, since it's approximately the only way for anything in any of the three films to make any sense at all.
Here's the bad news: the cast of T3 have all signed on for both T4 and T5, crushing our hopes that this final film with eighty-five minutes of explosions and five minutes of total explanation will do its job. We can apparently look forward to Terminator Four: The Divine Plan, in which a sixty-year-old CSM101 T850 is sent back in time to 1982 on a mission to kill Jim Cameron before this doomed series ever gets greenlit in the first place.
Okay, so I grade hard. The film is pretty bad, but not a total waste. Mostow, who most recently sucked in directing U238--or whatever that historical fiction, about the Duhmericans capturing the Enigma cypher a couple of years after England had already got it, was called--actually did pretty well with this one. It's not nearly as dark as Cameron would have made it, which is upsetting; the TechNoir motif was most of what made the first two films work. With T3, he actually did a pretty good job with what he had...which was a bad cast and a worse filmscript. The imagery and effects not relying on CG looked pretty good; things really only failed when the polygonal elements looked nearly as good as the Licker from Resident Evil did.
I should probably note that Schwarzenegger played himself pretty well. Which is to say that, despite other films over the last twenty years, in which he's begun to evolve into an American, he was able to revert back to that indecypherable accent from the first film--to the extent that half the things he said will remain a mystery until the DVD is released with subtitles. Also, there are some scenes in the film where he actually looks like the thirty-five-year-old villan from the first film...at least until half his face is burned off and he starts looking more like Pat Robertson got beat up.
There were a few amusing elements here and there. Mostly sendups of the first two films, though. The T850 goes through the normal routine of acquiring clothing, this time getting a pair of starshaped shades from a gay stripper. That sort of thing. Nothing truly funny.
And the ending. Which was actually surprising. Throughout the film, we hear the same broken record about SkyNet's rise to power being inevitable, and the mission to try to stop it being tactically dangerous, and the whole predestination rap disallowing anyone from preventing anything. The same shit we heard throughout the first two films, right up until the disaster was eradicated. Or, at the very least, postponed. This time, the formula changed. In the end, the missles were launched [in a montage lacking only the soundtrack from Doctor Strangelove], and SkyNet won. For a little while. Until the same predestination mandates that they be destroyed within three decades.
All things considered, it's a good conclusion to the story, shown in small commercial breaks between bumpercars and bombs. My largest concern is that it won't be the conclusion. There will probably be a fourth film.
And, just to make things worse, the fourth film will probably bridge Terminator to Alien to Predator, just to put a weak ending to three overdone concepts at once.
More later....
--Gremlin