Thursday, 11 June 2009
Christian Bale is the angry champion of humanity, but he can't salvage anything worthwhile from Terminator Salvation.
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Be aware that I reveal plot details in this review, but I refuse to call them "spoilers". This film came pre-spoiled; it was ruined in the production process, wrecked before it left port, shot down in flames as it left the runway. Christian Bale's infamous meltdown on the set is the most entertaining thing to come out of this film, and it's free to listen to on YouTube, so there's no need to give this overhyped abortion any of your hard-earned money. (I and some comrades went on Orange Wednesday, but nonetheless I resent every penny spent.)Let me start out by saying that I don't think there is a single, "right" way to do the Terminator franchise. Patriots look to the first two films with a tear in their eye and pride in their heart, and that's more than appropriate, since they are by far the best the movies have to offer. (I make no comment on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, seeing how I haven't watched it, but a Terminator spin-off that understands that James Cameron's original vision was always more about Sarah Connor than it was about John definitely has its heart in the right place.) At the same time, it's easy to forget that The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day do not present 100% consistent visions. The most obvious example is in their treatment of time travel: in The Terminator the future is coldly deterministic and as immutable as the T-800; in Judgement Day we find that it is possible to change the future, that our fate is in fact as liquid and mutable as the T-1000. James Cameron offered two highly divergent views on the same premise, which led to a pair of movies with very different tones that nonetheless represent a single artistic vision, with Cameron offering point and counterpoint.
This has caused immense problems for people trying to direct sequels, because none of them are James Cameron. You can tell the difference because James Cameron isn't a talentless hack.
Again, let's take time travel as an example. The Terminator embraced determinism; Judgement Day argued passionately for free will. This didn't leave Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines with much in the way of distinctive philosophical territory to claim in this regard. The smart thing to do would have been either to say "no, actually things are completely deterministic and all the optimism in Judgement Day was misplaced", or "yes, Judgement Day had it right, the future is ours to change but we have to constantly fight to get the future we want". As things stood, Rise of the Machines jumped onstage only to um and ah a bit, mumble something about alternate timelines, and eventually settle for a sort of fuzzy determinism-with-perhaps-some-free-will-maybe which succeeded in satisfying almost nobody. It did, however, at least try to engage with the time travel aspects of the series on something resembling a logical and coherent level, doing its level best to be consistent with what has been established so far and, beyond the time travel, tried as hard as it could to remain to the essential axioms of the previous instalments (of which more later).
Terminator Salvation takes the opposite approach: where The Terminator said "The future is coming and there is nothing you can do about it" and Judgement Day said "Your fate is in your hands", Terminator Salvation says: "You know what? Fuck it. Let's watch robots blow up!"
As a robot-themed action movie Terminator Salvation is a reasonable attempt, but can't match the spirited mayhem of Judgement Day. As an entry in the Terminator franchise, Terminator Salvation has major problems. Many of these problems stem from director McG (what sort of idiotic pseudonym is that?) just not taking the job very seriously. Terminator Salvation is a film which believes that its audience is stupid, and chooses to be equally stupid in turn. It is a bread-and-circuses spectacle of CGI robots that abandons the strengths of its forefathers in a misguided attempt to compete with Michael Bay's Transformers sequel. Its treatment of time travel is a case in point; although no jaunts back to the past happen in this film, the major plot thread involves John Connor trying to save Kyle Reese, who in later life will go back in time, fuck Sarah Connor, and die, siring John in the process[1]. However, the writers seem to have no inclination to think through the implications of their script and plug the holes in the same way that the authors of the first three films clearly did. SkyNet knows that Kyle Reese is John Connor's dad; what's more, it knows precisely what he looks like. No effort is made to even hint at an explanation for how it knows this. What's more, SkyNet wants to kill John Connor, because it is aware that he is extremely important[2]. SkyNet considers John Connor to be such a threat that, when it couldn't kill him on the nightmarish battlefields of the 21st Century, it repeatedly sent Terminators back in time to kill him, or (ideally) kill his parents before he was even conceived. At a crucial point in the film, SkyNet's systems recognise Kyle Reese (who in his subjective future will become John's father, remember) in a gaggle of human prisoners, in the middle of SkyNet's main LA base, with nary an escape attempt due for at least a few hours.
Now, if you were SkyNet, what would you do in this situation?
If you picked any option other than c), you are more intelligent than the people who made Terminator Salvation. Not only that, you are also more qualified to write a Terminator sequel than they are, because not only do you understand the time travel plot in a way that they simply don't, but you also understand one of the central axioms of the series, a rule which the other entries in the franchise have stuck to rigidly because in its absence anything resembling consistency across the series is lost: SkyNet and its agents are ruthless, implacable, and coldly logical. Whenever they see an opportunity to achieve their goal, they take it, immediately and without hesitation.
- a) Whisk Kyle away and execute him immediately, wiping John out of the timeline.
- b) Kill all the prisoners and then do a through check to make sure he's not playing dead under the piles of bodies.
- c) Take him prisoner to lure in John Connor, so you can kill John Connor. Who you could eliminate at any point during this time by killing Kyle, but for some reason you're not doing that.
The writers of Terminator Salvation do not understand this principle; or if they did, they don't care for it, because it doesn't suit their plans, which involve SkyNet acting like a sixth-rate B-movie villain[3]. In fact, the writers seem incredibly unwilling to consider factors which don't suit their intentions for the story. I don't mind a certain amount of happy coincidences, poetic licence, or authorial sleight of hand on the part of writers, it's a necessary part of the craft; people who quibble that the Joker should never have been able to hide all those bombs in that hospital in The Dark Knight are missing the point horribly. But at the same time, when writers start ignoring facts that they have already established (sometimes in the same scene that they contradict them in), then scripts cease to tell stories and end up becoming horrible games of Calvinball, suspension of disbelief comes crashing down, and the audience will simply stop caring about what happens on the screen. When it is important for Kyle Reese to be captured, the SkyNet base is a terrifying fortress patrolled by implacable death machines. When it is important for John Connor to successfully infiltrate the base, rescue Kyle, and blow the place up, SkyNet can only muster a couple of Terminators to come after them. This despite the fact that this whole sequence takes place IN A T-800 FACTORY. Essentially, the authors are more than willing to cheat like motherfuckers if it makes it easier for them to pull John Connor's fat out of the fire, and this results in plot holes you could drive a truck through.
Another axion of the Terminator series is this: nuclear war is fucking terrible, the worst thing that could possibly happen to the human race. Bizarre as it may sound, Terminator Salvation tones this down. Maybe this was necessary - the few glimpses of the future we had in the earlier movies were impossibly bleak, nightmarish visions of a tiny handful of human beings struggling for survival against forces that massively outgun them - but I think giving the resistance submarines and a functional air force is a bit of a stretch. Furthermore, the future wasteland is at points oddly beautiful - there's no nuclear winter (unlike the darkness-shrouded eternal night of the flashforwards in Cameron's films), nobody worries about clean drinking water or radioactivity, and people stroll around postnuclear Los Angeles without even considering the fact that a city that has had the shit nuked out of it probably isn't the healthiest of places to hang around in. Oh, and on not one but two occasions John Connor's helicopter is flying about less than a mile away from the epicentre of a nuclear explosion and he (and, the second time, his passengers) are perfectly fine. Now, I can understand people deluding themselves about the consequences of a nuclear war - it's not nice to think about - and I can understand why the writers would go easy on it, because absolute accuracy and realism isn't really on the cards when Terminators are involved, but the incidents with the helicopters go well beyond downplaying the impact of Judgement Day and into "nuking the fridge" territory. Somewhere in Hollywood there is a screenwriter who believes that nuclear weapons are just big explosives; someone needs to find this person and hand them a copy of When the Wind Blows and a pearl-handled revolver, lest they infect future generations with their bizarre atomic revisionism.
If Terminator Salvation's treatment of nuclear war is flippant, its treatment of John Connor, its apparent hero, is baffling. On one hand, he's clearly meant to be the saviour of mankind, and nobody contradicts him when he talks about the time travel stuff - his knowledge of the Terminators has been proven correct too often for that. On the other hand, it was clearly established in the earlier movies that John is the leader of the Resistance, and he seemed to step into the role (by accident, admittedly) at the end of Rise of the Machines. But in Terminator Salvation, he isn't the leader - and at the same time, he is. In theory, he's part of a command structure masterminded by an international cabal of generals who sail around in a submarine (unfortunately not painted yellow) and who regularly send radio messages worldwide to co-ordinate the resistance effort. (You'd have thought that SkyNet would be able to home in on a transmitter that powerful). In practice, he snarls orders at people and they obey him anyway, despite the fact that he's always angry at everyone. Christian Bale has made something of a career out of playing emotional cripples, but in John Connor we find his most unlikable portrayal of a character yet. It does not help that he uses his gravelly Batman voice throughout. (Someone needs to tell Bale that orphans don't talk like that.) To give him his due, out of the three film portrayals of John Connor so far his is the one most likely to have actually been brought up by the Sarah Connor of Judgement Day, but at the same time in Bale's hands the character has less emotional depth than a bunch of robots and Kyle Reese's random Mute Black Kid sidekick (seriously, those are the only three character traits the child displays).
In fact, the only character I could bring myself to care about in the course of the film was Matt Damon's. Marcus is a former Death Row prisoner who, on his execution, sold his body to Cyberdyne Systems prior to the nuclear conflict for research purposes; naturally, SkyNet chooses to turn him into a cyborg, a half-man half-machine hybrid that follows SkyNet's instructions despite believing all the while that he is human[4]. Out of all the actors in the film, Damon is given by far the most interesting role, in that he's someone new, a brand new element to add to the series. It's kind of a shame that such a potentially interesting character should be squandered serving the tired old Reese-Connor-SkyNet plot that has supported three films so far, but which can't support the franchise on its own any more.
This last point is really the killing blow against Terminator Salvation: it's a tired old retread of a dance we've seen before. The best features of the film are inevitably sly references to the previous movies (mainly to the first two, of course); this culminates in the battle against the prototype T-800 at the end of the film, whose human form is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger - or rather, Arnie as he was around the time of the first film, deftly CGI'd into the scene. This T-800, incidentally, is pretty much the only Terminator worthy of the name in the film: other robots drop like flies. Arguably, this is only to be expected of a new and improved model of killing machine, but I also think it's another symptom of the hole the franchise has dug for itself: the Terminators in the original films were so relentless, so terrifying, so hard to destroy, that the only way the writers can think of to save the skins of the heroes is to make sure they only fight primitive, easily-destroyed ones.
Hell, why mince words: SkyNet is completely castrated in this movie. We were told in the first film that its systems were nigh-ubiquitous, and yet apparently there were plenty of military submarines and aircraft not under its control when Judgement Day came. We've been led to believe that it's the most advanced computer system known to man, yet pretty much every member of the resistance can hack SkyNet systems in a matter of seconds. In the earlier films we were told that the resistance was fighting a desperate guerilla war, but in Terminator Salvation there's the aforementioned aerial patrols and other implications that there's a distinction between human territory and SkyNet territory. Not only this, but what strengths SkyNet does possess are inconsistently applied. In some scenes, playing loud music is enough to get motorcycle Terminators sent after you, like high-octane angry neighbours. In other scenes, you can yell and scream and let off gunshots in the middle of the night (when the Hunter-Killers are supposedly more dangerous than during the day due to their infrared sights) and SkyNet doesn't notice at all. And this is where Terminator Salvation fails as an action movie, as well as a new take on the ideas expressed by the previous films: it's Christian Bale and Matt Damon pitted against an implacable foe who is forced to have one hand tied behind its back at all times by the writers.
Whether Terminator Salvation is better or worse than Rise of the Machines depends on whether you solely care about The Terminator as a violent visual spectacle or as a genuinely smart examination of both SF ideas and of human interactions. If you just want to see robots blow up, then Terminator Salvation does the job a little better than Rise of the Machines did, but then again Transformers 2 is coming out around now and that might serve you better. But if your favourite aspects of the series include the deftly-handled time travel plots, or the development of Sarah Connor from self-conscious and slightly passive waitress to a determined mother intent on taking control of her future because she knows she can't leave the job to anyone else, Terminator Salvation is going to be bitterly, bitterly disappointing. The first two Terminator films are enduring classics; Terminator Salvation will be remembered in future years mainly as that film where Christian Bale completely lost his shit on the set, if it's remembered at all.
[1]: By the way, good luck following this if you haven't seen any of the earlier movies, because McG certainly has no interest in explaining to you why this is important.
[2]: In a climactic scene of the film it turns out that SkyNet is fully aware of every attempt it has made on the life of John Connor and his parents. Maybe it downloaded the first three films off BitTorrent or something.
[3]: They even have SkyNet give a gloating supervillain speech to Matt Damon at one point, the writers having decided in their infinite wisdom that faceless ubiquitous hostile AIs are less threatening than floaty heads who explain the finer points of their plan to people who they could just reprogram obedience into if they really wanted to.
[4]: I get the impression that the revelation of this fact is supposed to be a major plot twist, but anyone who can't see it coming from the first scene of the film... is probably still smarter than the scriptwriters, now that I think about it[5].
[5]: Oh, and by the way, this is one of the big paradoxes introduced by this film. Kyle Reese never mentioned cyborgs like Marcus when he went back in time; attention is drawn to this fact. But Kyle Reese meets Marcus during this film, and presumably hears about his status from the rest of the resistance even if he never actually saw Marcus with half his skin off. It turns out that SkyNet came up with Marcus after the other time travel plans went wrong, hence Kyle not knowing about it... except now he does, so he can tip off Sarah, who can mention it to John... at which point SkyNet will have to come up with another new plan... which Kyle can then go back in time and mention to Sarah... The very idea just opens up a can of worms that's best left unexplored.
Themes: TV & Movies, Sci-fi / Fantasy
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Good God, you're right. It's Sam Worthington looking almost supernaturally like Matt Damon.
Leia:
Yes, I noticed that; the problem is that, based on the events of this film, Kyle's lines in the past would almost certainly be different. Instead, they make it clear that he never even mentioned Marcus in passing - which is pretty unbelievable, given that Marcus does at least as much for Kyle in this movie as John does.
Incidentally: Marcus is so cool, John can restart his heart using the classic Hollywood "any old electric shock will do" treatment... even when his heart's stopped because a Terminator has crushed it.
The nightmare future of the first two Terminator movies was backplot: a framing device to explain why Sarah Connor was being chased by big scary robots. The "future" is to the Terminator franchise what the "Old Republic" was to the Star Wars franchise, something strange and indistinct of which we see only glimpses and fragments.
A lot of what doesn't make sense about this movie is stuff that never made sense about the Terminator series. For example, part of the problem is that the resistance actually seems to have a good chance of winning, and Skynet seems kind of powerless, but if the situation really *had* been as hopeless as it was painted in the original Terminator, you would be forced to wonder why Skynet needed to bother eliminating Connor at all. If humanity had been reduced to fighting a "desperate guerilla war" against Skynet then Skynet had functionally won, in which case it shouldn't have had to worry about Connor. On the flip side if Connor presented such a threat that Skynet actually had to invent time travel just to deal with him, he must have had some serious power. As the Guide to Surviving a Robot Uprising put it: if "invent time travel" is your best and most practical way of dealing with a threat, you are totally screwed.
None of this matters when it's the implied backstory of a film which, as you point out, is basically about a waitress who discovers something terrible. It matters a lot when the film is actually directly about Skynet, John Connor, and John Connor fighting Skynet.
This was dealt with quite elegantly in the first film; Kyle mentions that Connor had managed to smash SkyNet's "defence grid", whatever that was, so the time mission was sent back as SkyNet was unravelling and had no other hope of safeguarding its survival. I think the implication was that the humans won through some sort of clever guerilla action that exploited an inherent weakness of SkyNet, some sort of flaw that was so ingrained in its systems that it couldn't just send back a repair machine into the past to apply a patch.
Of course, we're only able to fill in the gaps because we see barely any of the grim darkness of the near future in the original film, and we know almost nothing about SkyNet and how it works. (Even then, it hinges on SkyNet not simply sending a Terminator with intelligence on the guerilla attacks, so that it can make sure they don't succeed.) As you point out, the Terminator timeline only really works if you concentrate on the action prior to the nuclear war and don't worry too much about what happens after that, which isn't an option open to a film set entirely after the war...
I agree. I was responding to your 1st footnote where you imply that a 1st time viewer won't understand that Kyle Reese time-travelled back to conceive John.
I think the problem is that the Terminator movies, or at least the 1st two, were Sarah Connor's story. The full-grown John Connor is such a larger-than-life personality, such a - let's face it, the initials aren't subtle - Messianic archetype that it's impossible to write his story. T2 works because it's the story about the child John Connor not becoming "The Great" John Connor. But how do you write the story about a man who saves the world by, to all intents and purposes, creating himself?
I think it's a tough call; yes, there is some explanation, but it's crammed into a brief scene, and the film's attention is already split almost evenly between John and Marcus (for reasons the CHUD article makes clear). It's one more slice of exposition in the middle of a minefield of exposition - blurb about the war, information about the resistance and SkyNet, the plot with the magic shortwave signal. I was having to concentrate to follow all the strands myself, and I have the benefit of knowing the backstory; if I didn't know that a) I'm fairly sure I would have been completely confused, and b) I'm not sure I would have been able to pick out the time travel references as being the most important aspect of the plot, especially when taken next to the death signal and Marcus.
Tentative conclusion: Christian Bale is a grotesque egomaniac who turned down the most interesting role in the film because he wanted to play JC instead, and then warped the film out of all shape to accommodate the role he demanded, and he treated people on the set like shit. He's an awful man, and McG is a terrible director for letting him do that to the project.
(Mr Bale, if you object to any of the above feel free to record your objections and post them to YouTube for the public's entertainment.)
It made me actually start thinking about the Planet of the Apes movies which seem to really do this sort of thing right. It's been a while since I've seen them all, but they seem to embrace the idea that there's no "right way" to do them, so each movie has a very different tone and point. Which is probably easier as the story started to suggest different metaphors and things that this doesn't. It was pretty clear from the first movie that the most important thing that made this series work was that the future was coming, but should never get here within the series.
McG is just a terrible director. Salvation is a terrible movie. Who would have thought Full Throttle would be the better movie?
d) Say to yourself, "If I kill Kyle now, before he goes back in time, then John will never have existed. But in that case I will never have had any reason to want Kyle dead: time-paradox. A popular theory holds that causing such a paradox will destroy time and space, so it might be safer not to do that. Moreover, a more plausible theory holds that it is simply impossible to cause such a paradox, and therefore any attempt I make to kill Kyle now will fail. So I'll use Kyle to lure John so that I can kill John in this timeline and avoid any risk of a paradox. Yes, that'll do the trick. Except, hang on, Kyle fathering John when he would never have gone back in time if John hadn't been born is itself a paradox, and it happened, and the universe is still here, so clearly this is not a problem. So that's fine then, I'll kill Kyle now and that will be okay. In fact I am obviously destined to come to this very conclusion, because I will later send various different terminators back in time to try to kill John (or prevent him being born) at various points in time in a way that would, if successful, create the same paradox that I was initially worried about. Although, actually, now that I think about it, if I'm destined to do all those things then that shows that any attempt I now make to kill Kyle will be unsuccessful after all, because otherwise I wouldn't need to make the later attempts. But if I know that now, then why won't I know that in the future when I will apparently fail to apply the same reasoning to my decision to send back those other various terminators? Or, no, wait a moment, that's in the future from my point of view, whereas John's conception is in the past from my point of view, and although the past is fixed the future may not be, so perhaps I can successfully kill Kyle now and thus prevent the future timeline in which I have to send terminators back in time. Or is the future as immutable as the past? Does this film exist within Terminator physics / metaphysic or Judgment Day physics / metaphysics? I know it follows on from Rise Of The Machines, but that doesn't help much because Rise Of The Machines was non-committal on the issue..."
Honestly, though, even in the worst case scenario shooting Kyle in the head would at least give SkyNet some empirical data on whether paradoxes are possible in the first place. That's got to be worth it.
But as we saw from that whole business with Miles Dyson in Judgment Day and, interestingly, the one thing Rise of the Machines did cover, SkyNet is inevitable given computers and networks.
Although it would be awesome if they did go back in time, prevent electronic computers from being conceived... and give birth to a steampunk timeline!
Then the Terminators would just work on steam.
Nuclear steam.
I'm not quite sure whether it's depressing or simply interesting that modern submarines and power stations do, in fact, run on nuclear steam.
I suppose it's the problem with steampunk; either the technology eventually resembles ours anyway once you advance the timeline enough, or you have to come up with an alternate history where entire fields of scientific research simply aren't pursued by anybody.
I've always liked the fact that with only a tiny number of exceptions (Wind and Hydroelectric or Tidal power basically) all electricity, and by extension most modern technology is still basically powered by the steam turbine.
And thinking about it, Wind Farms and Hydro stations are even *older* forms of technology...
Somewhere in Hollywood there is a screenwriter who believes that nuclear weapons are just big explosives; someone needs to find this person and hand them a copy of When the Wind Blows and a pearl-handled revolver, lest they infect future generations with their bizarre atomic revisionism.
Word.
IIRC natural-gas-fired plants usually use a gas turbine, but a quick check on Google to get my facts straight shows that they usually also have a steam turbine to get energy from the waste heat! So you are, in fact, right :-)
Unfortunately, if even a scrap of the CHUD article is true it's probably just down to him being Hollywood's latest Most Spoilt Baby In Town. It's dismaying. He's even beginning to look a little like Tom Cruise.
But really, would you try to stop a guy in the middle of a rant like that? I'd be too busy fearing for my life.
I thought the same thing. But I guess they'd have to follow it up with the second angry rant about the first angry rant being played over the credits.
On the other hand, in the film as it stands SkyNet captures Marcus and then doesn't bother to reprogram him, even though it has him unconscious and under its control for at least long enough for it to repair him. Instead, it tries to get him to obey it by reasoning with him - this is the sequence where SkyNet appears as a floaty head on a screen and gives a supervillain speech, incidentally.
It's like the writers made it a point of pride to toss all the prior depictions of SkyNet out the window or something. The SkyNet of Terminator Salvation is about as ruthless, cold, and methodical as a warm cup of tea.
What bothers me is that the franchise is chained to the idea that John Connor is the Chosen One, the one who will save humanity, but the problem is that Connor doesn't seem like some exceptional leader. He isn't particularly charismatic and he doesn't set himself apart from the others (except for his amazing ability to survive a nuclear explosion). The second film had the "we make our own fate" message, so why can't someone else take Connor's place? He's just another Resistance member when the film takes place, so why does everyone listen to him? Hell, he only becomes leader because everyone else was killed on the submarine!
In Rise of the Machines, he was an unlikeable dick who seemed to become leader of the resistance by default, just because he happened to have a bunker and a radio when the nuclear war went down. (A bunker that SkyNet doesn't have any records of, and a radio which SkyNet can't trace for some reason. Oops.)
But Terminator Salvation is really really strange when it comes to John's leadership of the resistance. He's clearly important, because he sends out all these radio messages, and yet the guys on the submarine are making all the command-level decisions, and he doesn't even lead his own squad on the mission we see him on in the beginning. This despite the fact that he has the cassette tapes with intimate details about SkyNet and the future from his mother, the details of which are repeatedly confirmed by the resistance's discoveries.
So, the resistance believes that he's meant to lead them, but doesn't let him lead them officially, but the ground troops obey him anyway, and the guys on the submarine try to give him orders but them let him have his way anyway, until the plot demands that they defy him. At which point they are killed. And he becomes leader of the resistance at the end of Terminator 3, and then it seems that someone decided that that wasn't realistic, so we spend the entire film learning how John becomes leader of the resistance again.
This seems to be yet another consequence of the rewrites Bale forced on the script; if they'd gone with the original plan, with Connor spending most of the film on the submarine making the broadcasts, it would make a lot more sense. The way the broadcasts are written, they sound like they come from the supreme leader of the resistance, not a local field commander, and I wonder if they weren't just preserved as-is from the original draft.
The irritating thing is that we seem to be stuck with him. We might be able to make our own fate, but the filmmakers seem unable to make their own timeline that diverges from the one reported by Reese in the original film.
The particulars of John Connor aside (because I haven't seen this film and can't entirely remember whether I've seen Rise Of The Machines either), isn't this a frequent and perhaps inevitable problem with Chosen Ones in fiction? If So-And-So is thought to be the only person who can save the world (or whatever) because he or she (although is it ever 'she'?) has certain qualities or skills, that tends to imply that So-And-So could in principle be replaced as saviour of the world by anyone else with those qualities or skills, which rather undermines the whole Chosen One idea. If, on the other hand, So-And-So is fated to do it because that's just fate, that means that his or her qualities and skills are entirely irrelevant and he or she might as well be a boiled egg with a face painted on it.
Unfortunately, Terminator Salvation completely loses sight of this; John is the Chosen One because of a prophecy, all of a sudden (whose prophecy? His mum's?) and SkyNet knows it, but like every badly characterised villain on the wrong side of prophecy struggles against it anyway.
The irony is, of course, that if the CHUD article linked to earlier is correct then John Connor could, in fact, have been replaced with a boiled egg with a face painted on it for all the prophecy cares, so long as it's a suitably technologically advanced and super-realistic egg...
Yeah, that's the beauty (to me, anyway) of The Terminator: it's a predestination tale that actually works. Sarah Connor must be saved in order to give birth to the saviour of human kind because John Connor has already saved human kind.
The irony is, of course, that if the CHUD article linked to earlier is correct then John Connor could, in fact, have been replaced with a boiled egg with a face painted on it for all the prophecy cares, so long as it's a suitably technologically advanced and super-realistic egg...
I am not a Bale fan but thank goodness for his egocentric demands. I did *not* want to watch a Terminator movie about some erstwhile unheard-of guy who wakes up in the future, knows how to survive better than Kyle Reese, and saves everybody's hide, all the while being a super-speshul Robot who will eventually become the Saviour of Humanity in a John Connor body suit. As it was, I was irritated enough that half the movie was spent following erstwhile unheard-of guy who wakes up in the future, knows how to survive better than Kyle Reese, and saves everybody's hide, all the while being a super-speshul Robot who will eventually donate his heart to the Saviour of Humanity.
Although it's hard to tell right now, but I'm pretty sure there've been more interesting Gary Stus in fanfiction.net.
I actually enjoyed the Marcus segments more than I did the Connor segments - until SkyNet's awful supervillain speech - but both strands really have the same problem; Marcus is a Gary Stu, John is a Canon Stu.
I think at the end I preferred Marcus over Connor because Sam Worthington (who looks spookily like Matt Damon, don't you think?) gave an excellent performance, and the character was allowed to be imperfect and make mistakes and be humiliated occasionally. Connor, by contrast, was just Bale looking moody and intense between short bursts of being a leet special ops dude and growling away in his Batman voice. ("What are you, retarded or something? I'm goddamn John Connor...")
Better the Stu you know, and all that... And considering that in Salvation, John Connor's position was so different from what we've been told it was in the earlier Terminator stories - he's not a leader, he's not respected - one can even argue the Sue-factor. (Plus, can you really object to John Connor being a Canon Sue? It's pretty much the foundation on which the whole series is built on.)
But excellent performance? Really? He was the stereotype Alpha guy who is tougher, smarter, and more competent in an environment he wonders into than the people who've been living there all their lives. Kyle Reese quotes his lines, and fanboys him as hard as Connor himself (1st clue?). Blair would have fallen to her death, cutting *herself* from her parachute if not for him. John Connor gets his heart. If he was humiliated or imperfect, I don't remember. And he's a very *unique* and *important* Terminator, let's not forget. So unique that Skynet personally takes the time to repair him, play Evil Overlord, but somehow is incapable of re-programming him. About the only person at the end of the story who isn't bowled over by his awesomeness is Kate Brewster.
Yes, Sam W does look lots like Matt D. Weird.
I really don't think this is the case. He's only "not a leader" when the scriptwriters need to show him being a badass rebellious sort, and switches back to being the leader as soon as our attention is taken away from the submarine, and he is unfailingly respected by everyone, to the point where the ostensible leaders of the resistance show him a truly staggering level of tolerance.
Which sounds to me like an excellent argument not to make films about Connor-as-Messiah.
I think he did very well considering the part they gave him; I try not to blame actors for the deficiencies for the script. Yes, he's alpha, tough, and smart, but he's the co-protagonist and protagonists in action movies who are passive, weak, and dumb sort of spoil it. What I especially enjoyed about his alphaness is that it wasn't a case of him being square-jawed and heroic so much as a matter of him being a death row inmate who had been given a new chance at life and basically wanted to just look out for himself and only himself, but felt compelled to look out for Kyle anyway because a faint and weak conscience was being kindled in his heart.
Kyle Reese also saves his life in their first meeting, and knows far more about how to survive and avoid the Terminators than Marcus does, so it's hardly an unequal relationship. (Also, you can't blame Worthington if New Chekov chooses to play Reese like a little wuss.)
Again, this is a contrivance of the writers, not the actor, although I'm not sure the fall would have necessarily killed her, although it doesn't help that McG's shots didn't really give me a good idea of the scales involved. Still, it would have been really really dumb of her to just cut her parachute if she'd have fallen to her death afterwards. (Besides, doesn't she jump down after Marcus grabs her hand anyway? What's that, a difference of two or three feet?)
I'm thinking of the scene where Kyle Reese has to save him, I'm thinking of him being strung up and tortured by the resistance, I'm thinking of him having to beg John Connor for a chance to prove himself, I'm thinking of him being duped into helping SkyNet despite himself, I'm thinking of him being beaten to a pulp by the T-800 and having to be saved by John Connor restarting his heart.
I don't think SkyNet did that because he's special, SkyNet did that because SkyNet is a fucking moron in this film. Again, writer's fault, not the actor's.
In your own words, Marcus, an unknown character, is promoted to co-protagonist (btw, if you dislike the John-Connor-as-Messiah concept, that's a problem with all the Terminator movies, and not just this one) in a movie with 3 established canon characters.
As for the humiliation - that's Harry getting dissed by Rita - a temporary setback to reveal how much more awesome(R) he is. Kyle saves him from a Terminator, then loses his gun to him, picks up his lines and is kicked out of the driver's seat (metaphorically, as well.) The Resistance string him up so Blair can prove her loyalty to something/someone that she has no reason to trust - because he is that charismatic. John Connor distrusts him but is persuaded by sheer exuding of good intentions that he lets Marcus, a Cyberdyne machine to all intents and purposes, walk away to the mother ship with the location of his base and Heaven knows how many secrets Marcus has gleaned about the Resistance. Then John Connor also saves his life - by electrocuting his crushed heart into beating again.
As for Skynet, it makes a point on congratulating Marcus for killing JC, something no Terminator has ever been able to do in the past or the future or multiple timelines so that there already puts Marcus in a league of his own. Then it practically gives him the "join me and together we will rule" speech. Sure it's stupid. But in your own words (more or less) the plot and every other character, is contrived in such a way that their stupidity/wussiness/incompetence is the backdrop for Marcus Wright, an erstwhile unknown to shine.
Isn't that like the formula of just about every Gary Stu badfic on ff.net ever?
I think Arthur's point is that if you're going to cast somebody as the Messiah, you have to keep them offscreen, or play up the fact that they're not suited to the job.
Connor-as-messiah works when he hasn't been born yet, and when he's just a regular kid. It becomes a problem when he's supposed to *actually* be doing the "saviour of humanity" schtick that it becomes a problem.
To draw an analogy with Star Wars, when you first discover that the little scrawny green dude is actually an awesomely powerful Jedi Master, it's fantastically cool, because it's totally unexpected. You're like "wow, that little guy who totally doesn't look like a Jedi master is a Jedi master". Then in the prequels they give Yoda actual fight scenes, and they're completely stupid.
"That little kid who could be any kid you know grows up to be the saviour of humanity" is interesting and, more importantly, believable. "This dude here is the saviour of humanity, and he saves humanity by doing the stuff he is doing right now" has much bigger problems, because you can look at what they're doing and say "well, how is that supposed to help anybody?"
I think basically Arthur and I agree on the 'details' (contrived plot & characters/Marcus only salvageable thing), we're just placing different *values* on these details, if that makes any sense. I *think* Arthur sees the character of Marcus as the best thing in a bad movie. He's right. But I see the fact that the new guy is the best thing in a story about characters that should be awesome and are not = Gary Stu. It's a perspective paradox.
I liked Marcus because even though he was handed a deeply flawed and badly-written role, he did the absolute best job he could of it without veering wildly off-script. I somehow doubt that Sam Worthington had anywhere near the same ability to force rewrites that Christian Bale did, so he had to do what he could with what he was given. New Chekov was alright as Reese but had a little too much of the trembly lip and not enough thousand-yard stare, whilst Bale just squatted in the middle of the screen and masturbated directly at the audience whenever he appeared.
Also, whilst Marcus might be a Gary Stu, he's the only one who shows any character development throughout the film: he goes from being a guy who just wants to survive to a guy who is willing to take risks to help out his friends to a guy who is willing to die for someone else's sake. Meanwhile, Kyle Reese gazes on in beatific awe at all that goes before him, and John Connor learns a lesson about trusting robots that he already learned in Terminator 2.
I guess what I'm saying is that to my mind Marcus was the best element of a horrendously bad film. If he's a Gary Stu, then he's a really strange sort of Stu who actually improves and enriches the story he has been inserted into rather than damaging it, and if that's the case does he really count as a Stu?
Nobody starts dying for Connor until Salvation, and unsurprisingly, Marcus W is the most prominent casualty. Which he volunteers to do for the same reason he donates his body to medical science on death row – because he’s seeking salvation. When he wakes up in the post-apocalyptic future, his first intention is to find Skynet/Cyberdyne and find out what happened to him. It’s Kyle & gang who want to run in the opposite direction and survive (and this is the opposite of what you said). There’s no real character growth for Marcus Wright. He starts out as a guy who wants to sacrifice himself to make up for his past crimes and ends up as a guy who sacrifices himself to make up for his past crimes.
Arthur, a while back you stated that you don’t blame the actors for their portrayals of the characters and plots, but now you turn around and praise Sam W for Marcus. Blame and praise are just two sides of the same coin. You can’t have it both ways – he’s either the best thing in the story because the writer made damn sure that the character they had a copyright on was the best thing in the story … or Sam W is so awesome that he shines in whatever role he plays, no matter how stupid the lines/plot are.
Bale put himself in the role of writer when he started dictating/making script re-writes. So whether you blame Bale-as-egocentric-writer or the other writer(s) for letting Bale hijack their baby, it’s still a writer that is responsible for what we get on the screen. But even before Bale’s re-writes, Marcus Wright was going to be the focus of the movie (and Christian Bale’s character) as the new-guy-as-hero/super-speshul-Terminator with Kyle Reese-the-wussy-sidekick and Blair-as-damsel-in-distress.
At least Bale’s ego stopped Marcus Wright from actually becoming John Connor.
If he's a Gary Stu, then he's a really strange sort of Stu who actually improves and enriches the story he has been inserted into rather than damaging it, and if that's the case does he really count as a Stu?
Yes, because like every Gary Stu before him, Marcus improves and enriches the story because every other aspect of the story has been impoverished and demeaned for his glorification.
Definitions of what exactly a Gary Stu varies from time to time, but a pretty consistent attribute of a Gary Stu/Mary Sue is a character for whom the established rules of the world they are inserted into, are ignored/reversed to the advantage of the portrayal of said new character. It’s very simple, really. If every other light is dimmed, of course the only lit candle is going to shine. As I said before (and going back to the perspective paradox with you looking at the movie in isolation and I looking at it as part of a story with known constants), if Terminator Salvation was a standalone movie/start of a new series and Marcus is supposed to be our hero-character – well and good. But Terminator Salvation is part of an established series, populated by characters that we know are capable of much more than we saw in the theatre. And when the writers take all that away from us, and ‘redeem’ it by giving us their shiny new character, it’s not a trade-off, it’s a cheat.
In other news: yah! I’ve got Ferretbrain ID!
I don't blame or praise them for the shit the writers make them speak, I do blame or praise them for the way they deliver it. Am I making any sense at all?
The post-apocalypse story started impoverished before Marcus was brought into the picture. The post-nuclear segment of the Terminator timeline is not and has never been a rich tapestry from which new and exciting adventures set in the same fictional universe* can be drawn, it's a paper-thin backdrop that exists to shoot antagonists and supporting characters back in time to where the actual story happens.
The very idea of making a post-apocalyptic Terminator film as though you were simply making a sequel to the previous films is bankrupt, because Terminator has always been about the present. Effectively, the writers had to approach this as if this were the inception of a new series because it pretty much is. The Terminator franchise isn't "the fictional universe and timeline in which SkyNet and its opponents exist", it's "the stories of time travellers from a nightmare future in their efforts to meddle in the past." The very concept of setting the film after the nuclear Armageddon in itself breaks the established rules of the fiction, because one very important rule has always been "we only ever get brief glimpses of what the world is like after Judgement Day".
Actually, I think part of the problem here is that terms like "fictional universe" and "timeline" prompt us to think about storytelling as though it were simply the process of recounting the made-up history of an imaginary place, as if every text must be approached as though the writer were trying to be Tolkien. That really isn't what James Cameron was doing with the first two movies.
But in this case Young Kyle Reese and Old John Connor are also Gary Stus. They are for all intents and purposes "new" characters; John has changed beyond all recognition since Rise of the Machines, Kyle needs to grow a mile of spine before he begins to resemble the Kyle we remember from The Terminator.
And the rules of the fiction are broken all the time for their benefit. SkyNet is hesitant to kill Kyle because he's Too Important to kill right now, even though killing him will achieve all of SkyNet's ends. SkyNet uses Kyle and Marcus as a lure to bring John in because, despite the fact that killing off his parents before they get to conceive him was always good enough beforehand, this time it wants to kill him, personally, in the very heart of its power. Marcus dies of being punched in the heart, but John is able to resurrect him because he's JC and he can bring Lazarus back from the grave.
John Connor in Terminator Salvation is the result of Bale looking at Marcus and thinking "Naaaah... he's not Gary Stu enough."
The post-nuclear segment of the Terminator timeline is not and has never been a rich tapestry from which new and exciting adventures set in the same fictional universe* can be drawn, it's a paper-thin backdrop that exists to shoot antagonists and supporting characters back in time to where the actual story happens.
….
Actually, I think part of the problem here is that terms like "fictional universe" and "timeline" prompt us to think about storytelling as though it were simply the process of recounting the made-up history of an imaginary place, as if every text must be approached as though the writer were trying to be Tolkien. That really isn't what James Cameron was doing with the first two movies.
No, it’s not Tolkien but from the 1st movie alone, it’s illogical to claim that the future is a paper-thin backdrop. We’re given enough glimpses and straight-out flashbacks (flash-forwards?) in Kyle’s memories – for us to have a pretty good idea of what to expect. And, it goes without saying, that Kyle Reese is not a new character to be invented. Young Kyle Reese isn’t something the writers need to re-imagine – we know virtually everything we need to know about him growing up after a nuclear war from the conversations he has with Sarah Connor in a parking lot in one scene. And while I agree that John Connor will always be a problematic character to portray, that does not excuse Marcus Wright.
The Terminator franchise isn't "the fictional universe and timeline in which SkyNet and its opponents exist", it's "the stories of time travellers from a nightmare future in their efforts to meddle in the past."
Isn’t that a matter of opinion? Because it seems to me that it doesn’t have to be either or. The first movie was about predestination. The second was about to changing your own fate. The first was about man vs machine. The second was about machines becoming like men. It seems rather narrow to classify the series as any one thing.
But in this case Young Kyle Reese and Old John Connor are also Gary Stus. They are for all intents and purposes "new" characters.
Firstly, not every new character is a Gary Stu. Blair is – obviously– not as she certainly fails in the barely-competent factor. Secondly, regardless of how differently Salvation’s Kyle Reese and John Connor are written from their first incarnations, as long as they are supposed to represent established characters in an established story, they can never be ‘new’ characters. They can be ‘canon’ Stus (which I agree somewhat for John but will debate against for Kyle later) but not ‘Gary’ Stus.
SkyNet is hesitant to kill Kyle because he's Too Important to kill right now, even though killing him will achieve all of SkyNet's ends.
That is a plot contrivance that serves the Glorify-Marcus-More Agenda more than any other character in the story. Saving!Kyle Reese (he becomes a damsel-in-distress, not exactly an attribute of Gary Stu) puts Marcus’s in Blair’s, and the Resistance’s path, and becomes the Great Hero’s Journey he will undertake. When the Resistance captures him, it’s his primary bargaining chip.
If John Connor were to think about it for 2 seconds, Skynet has no reason not to kill Kyle Reese. So it follows that if John believes that Marcus Wright is speaking the truth (another problem but we’ll roll with this) and Skynet has captured Kyle Reese then Kyle Reese is already dead. So either John is about to disappear into the ether any moment from now, or everything his mother and he feared about time travel was wrong and he doesn’t have a problem. But the plot is contrived so that this is not even considered. Instead, John Connor blindly trusts a Terminator - though everything in his life since before he was born has taught him otherwise - because it promises that it will save Kyle Reese; and in the end, this wins Marcus his life and his salvation.
Marcus dies of being punched in the heart, but John is able to resurrect him because he's JC and he can bring Lazarus back from the grave.
Actually, I think Marcus can share the glory with John there. After all it is his big, strong® heart that is so powerful that it can survive being crushed into bits. And JC saving him was a good thing, in the end, since Marcus saves him right back – first by killing off the Terminator that stabbed him, then by donating said big, strong® heart.
John Connor in Terminator Salvation is the result of Bale looking at Marcus and thinking "Naaaah... he's not Gary Stu enough."
Actually I think Bale looked at Marcus and thought ‘Naaah... Canon Stus >>>> Gary Stus who becomes Canon Stu.’
My main problem with Yelchin's performance was that he just didn't seem jaded enough. In theory, he's a resistance fighter who has spent longer than anyone cares to think about surviving with very little in the way of support; in practice, he came across as a raw recruit who has seen barely action and is in over his head.
But if the script is written so that Character Z is a traumatised resistance fighter who's seen too much for a kid his age, there's leeway for the actor to interpret that as "scared weepy kid" or "jaded veteran old beyond his years".
I watched the first Terminator a couple of days before I saw Salvation, and I remember about a minute or so of footage from the future, tops. We can write what we know about the future in The Terminator on the back of a napkin.
And once you extend your scope beyond the first film, the future gets constantly rewritten (in and out of character) anyway, to the extent that by the end of Rise of the Machines almost everything beyond "John Connor is about", "There's a bad computer called SkyNet that makes bad robots", and "Time travel exists" is written on sand.
No, but you cited newness as a requirement for being a Gary Stu.
John and Marcus go on a two-man commando raid directly into SkyNet's headquarters, and John gets to shout down his so-called superior officers, have the entire resistance except for the guys on the submarine support him on the basis of his godlike powers of persuasion, and then get proved absolutely right when the submarine gets destroyed.
...
...
...
Ahem. ;)
I think the main reason that I consider Bale-Connor to be a Gary Stu is that he's clearly killed the previous Johns and taken their place. Gone is the cocky hacker of Judgement Day, gone is the drifter layabout of Rise of the Machines, and in their place is a man whose only tangible connection to the previous Johns is a photo and a bunch of cassette tapes. He's not a development or continuation of the previous characterisations, he's a hateful creature spawned purely for Bale's benefit so Bale could be John Connor and do all the kick-ass stuff Bale wants John Connor to do rather than the sensible stuff the writers wanted John Connor to do.
Not when the script gives him lines like ‘stay with us, we can’t survive without you’.
I watched the first Terminator a couple of days before I saw Salvation, and I remember about a minute or so of footage from the future, tops. We can write what we know about the future in The Terminator on the back of a napkin.
I said, ‘Pretty good idea of what to expect’. Things like a post-nuclear world, for example. Concentration camps where people get numbers branded into their skin and are worked as slaves. People eating rats. Heck, I would have settled for some dogs.
A minute or so...? Not only would that be a pretty big napkin, it would not have anything in common with Salvation’s story.
The future gets constantly rewritten (in and out of character) anyway
Does it? While I agree that T2 ends as if Judgment Day will never happen, Cameron deliberately chose to live it open-ended. I loathe T3 but even I admit that it still ends with a nuclear war.
No, but you cited newness as a requirement for being a Gary Stu
It wasn’t the only requirement. I was very specific about the universe-altering rule. If that was the case, I’d be citing Blair, the dumb child and Common as Gary Stus as well.
Ahem. ;)
I think witnessing a Terminator save your life from another Terminator and deciding to trust it on that basis is a far, far, far, far cry from trusting a Terminator who is a prisoner-of-war that tells you exactly what you need to hear when you interrogate him.
John and Marcus go on a two-man commando raid directly into SkyNet's headquarters, and John gets to shout down his so-called superior officers, have the entire resistance except for the guys on the submarine support him on the basis of his godlike powers of persuasion, and then get proved absolutely right when the submarine gets destroyed.
Firstly, how does this somehow invalidate the Glorify-Marcus’s Agenda? Secondly, John could have still got his ‘Crowning Moment of Awesome’ by being right about the signal/determined that *no* humans be killed. The only reason why Marcus gets to tag along in the two-man commando reason is that he’s rescuing the other character that becomes a damsel in his distress for his plot contrivance.
I think the main reason that I consider Bale-Connor to be a Gary Stu…
Canon Stu… Gary Stu… We could go back and forth on this for days. But what does any of this have to do with Marcus Wright not being a Gary Stu? (For the record, because it seems not to be clear, I’ve never argued that John Connor in Salvation was anything less than badly characterized – if anything my point has been that every character except Marcus Wright is badly characterized.)
But it's a different war from the one prevented in Judgement Day, and there are all sorts of different circumstances. There seems to be a complete lack of lasers, for example, which were present in all the future scenes of the first two films but seem to have disappeared in Salvation.
And I think that having a formative childhood experience in which you learn that a machine can potentially help the cause of man as opposed to blindly serving SkyNet is going to make you more likely to believe a man-machine who genuinely seems to believe he's trying to help you fight SkyNet.
It doesn't, it makes it a Glorify-Marcus-and-John Agenda.
Look, I'm not arguing that Marcus isn't a Gary Stu if your definition of "Gary Stu" is "guy the laws of the universe bend to accommodate". Both John Connor and Marcus are Stus. The difference is that John Connor is an arrogant, dead-behind-the-eyes cunt, and Marcus isn't.
The thing is, though, as we both agree Marcus is pretty much the only well-written character in the story. This makes me hesitate to attach the tag to him because it has certain baggage attached to it. It is an accepted consensus that deploying Mary Sue is a horrible writing technique, and you shouldn't do it, but if you take Marcus out of Salvation you are left with Christian Bale's 2 hour ego trip. If anything, giving the same level of care and attention to John and the other characters in the writing stage would have improved the film immensely.
I don't agree with your definition Gary Stu as "a character who is so awesome the universe distorts to support their awesomeness", because it's missing the clause "...and does so to the detriment of the story". I think this is crucial to the sense of the term as originally coined, and as it's almost always used in this sort of discussion.
tl;dr: "Gary Stu" is a slur, and of all the elements of this movie Marcus (and Sam Worthington's portrayal of him) is the one which least deserves criticism, and had the most potential to save the film from itself.
Said childhood experience started with being saved by said Terminator. Grown up John Connor trusting Marcus because he looked into his big, brown eyes and saw the truth...? (To say nothing of the illogic of thinking Kyle is still alive, btw.) That's not just a stretch, it's unfathomable.
Glorify-Marcus-and-John agenda with Kyle-Reese-as-damsel-in-distress to-glorify-Marcus and Marcus only? We can compromise on that. :p
re: Stu-as-slur. I just don't see how the new guy being the only good character in a movie filled with incompetents is a good thing... Better the Stu, I know... I didn't pay to watch the Marcus Wright Show... tl dr.
(Would you seriously have liked Marcus Wright if Bale had played the character as intended, down to the John Connor body suit?)
Alas, no middle ground here. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
Wait, what??? Well, that handily removes the one reason I had left to go and see the film...
Probably not, but that's because bar a very few exceptions I think Bale is a miserably poor actor.
I think so. (Welcome to your shiny new login, by the way! :D)
@Rami:
Put it this way: you know the cool snippets of the future we got in the first two films? Don't go to see Terminator Salvation if you want to see anything which even slightly resembles that visually. They got the look of the hunter-killer flyers right, but that's about it.