Saturday, 06 June 2009
Moronic, Dumb, Stupid Bullshit. OOOOH! AN EXPLOSION!
A man wakes up in a dark room. Around him, he is surrounded by the dull lick of flame. Distant away, he can hear bangs and thuds. What sounds like explosions. It's no way to wake up.
Last thing he remembered was a needle in his vein. And then everything went dark. Fade to black.
There is a quiet fire dotted around him. Bodies. Blood. The wreckage of some very recent conflict. This is not heaven.
He gets up, neither hungry nor tired. No idea why or where he is. Nobody recognises this place. Over this darkness, credits quietly appear on the screen. There's a thin sliver of dusk somewhere up above. He climbs out. To be surrounded by mangled steel. Where is this place? What happened?
Around him, there are satellite dishes, mostly collapsed, shattered, broken. Around him, fallen helicopters. Corpses of man. And the skeletons of fallen steel, carrying weaponry.
Over the next few minutes, this man walks through this wasteland. We have no idea when – or what – happened. All we know is that there is one man, in a wasteland, waking in a nightmare, the end times, and whilst we, as movie goers know something bad is about to happen, somewhere, we neither know what or when or how whatever it is is.
In the distance he sees a figure standing in the felled wreckage of a city.
“Hey!” he shouts.
The figure turns.
The sand around him explodes. Something wants him dead. And it is brutal. We don't know what it is. All we know is that it wants to kill him.
This is how a film should start. Tension, release, and curiousity. Terminator : Salvation is not a good film. It is a dogshit confusion. It is everything that is wrong with modern cinema : it tells you everything and shows you NOTHING. It is conventional, dull, and tedious.
What's wrong with the new Terminator movie? Well, let's ask another question : what's right about it? Nothing. Not a one second of it is vaguely worthwhile. There's not one fraction of it as iconic as anything in any of the other three.
Christian Bale steamrolls his way through a movie by INTENSELY SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. (Apparently, he rewrote the script to give Connor more screentime, which seriously undermines the movie, as Connor would have been a better and more effective character - at least for the first third of the movie - as a distant, iconic voice).
And in the attempt to overdo it and top the previous movies, they've diminished it. Less is more. In the others it would take 95 minutes to even paralyse a Terminator, here Connor does it in 6 shots. Terminators here are castrated grunts with no menace in them at all. And the story?
This film has no tale to tell. There is no man crossing time for love, or a woman saving her child. Just a bunch of stuff blowing up. It's an episodic story, no more important than 30 minutes of a soap opera : you can miss this, and miss nothing.
Let us not even reflect on how cannibalistic this film in. It steals great swathes from Aliens. The Great Escape. Alien 4. Terminator. Blade Runner. There's the usual stupid-kid cutesy sidekick, like Newt or Short Round. In this film the kid does nothing but stand around. The film doesn't need them.
And the dialogue? Christ, it's bad. The whole film feels like an extended trailer. I swear the DVD might actually make sense. There's one scene in a submarine where I swear there's three minutes missing. The three minutes that actually make sense of the film.The whole film is abbreivated. The dialogue. Thats what death tastes like? Who speaks like this? No one. You can write this shit, but no one will believe it.
This whole film is an emotional void. An immature impersonation. Like a kids ideal of love, a paordy, a caricature. It's bullshit. Facile, stupid, noisy, useless bullshit.
One of the cancers that is raping our eyes is the insistence in cinema on making stuff that goes fast and goes bang but doesn't make sense. I've lost count of when someone shouts “BULLSHIT!” at a screen during a movie. Because directors and screenwriters seem to think that if a movie moves fast enough, we'll forget about gaping plot holes and stuff that simply does not make sense.
Great movies are great movies for a very simple reason. People have sat down and thought about what's actually going to happen, so that the audience's finely-toned Bullshit-o-meter doesn't touch the red when watching it. Audiences are smart, and they know when there's a turd in their soup. A few afternoons sitting down, logically picking apart a script and plugging the holes is all the difference between a brilliant movie and a bullshitfest.
I thought I was watching a 107 minute set of super-expensive FMV scenes from a piss poor computer game.
Whats wrong with it? Well, it'd be quicker to write whats right with it. Nothing. But what's wrong?
The Plot. To be spoilereffic, this film relies on an 'Idiot Plot'. In short : the plot happens because the characters are idiots. If any of them had half a brain cell, they'd realise what was happening and the film would be over quite quickly. The film relies on watching people dumber than you doing stupid things, people dumber than you writing the plot, and people smarter than you persuading you to go and see it. You can see the Idiot Plot in almost every movie : notably any horror movie, where most people who just Get The Fuck Out of There, in the moofies, everyone hides in the basement, screams, has sex, and curiously asks the man in the white hockey mask what the time is. The biggest plot hole is dead simple.
1.SkyNet is dumber than a box of frogs. It's target is Kyle Reese. Not John Connor. But Kyle Reese. Where Skynet went wrong in the whole movie is that whilst it is targeting Kyle Reese, it doesn't actually have a clue what to do once it gets him. If Kyle Reese was that much of a priority, Skynet would have simply dispatched a nuke to evaporate the whole damn area code when it identified him. Instead, SkyNet picks him up, and put him in a box like a Christmas Present.
If Skynet has an effective military strategy, it would simply have snuffed Reese out like a big, fat fleshy bug. Instead, in a classic case of Blofelditis – the bit where you don't shoot the good guy dead on sight but capture him, tell him your plan, then let him escape – Skynet proves that it has faked its way through the interview at the Evil HQ, and is actually incompetent.
Were I Skynet's MD, I'd be starting disciplinary proceedings for fucking up the plan good and proper. Kill Reese and Connor never exists. Dead fucking simple. Kill Reese, and Connor would fade out of existence whilst playing a Red Gibson to the tune of a Chuck Berry song in a deleted scene from “Bleak To The Future.” So why Skynet is using Reese as bait to capture Connor, why not just kill Reese and wipe out Connor for free, in some kind of post-apocalyptic Buy-One-Get-One-Free?
Skynet, YOU'RE FIRED.
Or perhaps, more simply, lets look at McG's explanation : “Kyle Reese must be kept alive, so he can be sent back in time from 2029 to protect Sarah Connor, impregnate her and she’ll give birth to John Connor who will save us all. And the simplest way to understand that is to protect the triangle of Kyle, John and Sarah. Any deconstruction of that leads to more headache than satisfaction”.
Which is his way of saying this film shouldn't really exist because the reason Skynet is stupid is because there would be no movie if Skynet was half as smart as a worker ant.
2. Time Travel. There's no time travel in this film. Well, there is, in so much as there is time travel in every film : linear, one-second-at-a-time time travel that we call everyday life. Were I Skynet, I'd stuff the conventional notion of time travel. Why go back to 1984 when Connor was a teenager? Why 1997 when she has a child? Why 2012 when Kyle's a 20something? Why not think, fuck it, and get really evil.
Skynet knows where and when Connor was born. Go in there whilst Linda Connor is spitting out a baby, pop a cap in her head during childbirth when she's defenceless, and whammo, human extinction. Easy.
Go back in time to 1944, during the second world war, get a Terminator in a Nazi Uniform, and wipe out Linda Connor's parents. Come on, Terminators and Nazi's? Set in Roswell, and you'll have Aliens as well : the Holy Trinity Of Cool.
Go back in time to 1884, for example, and have Wild West Terminators. A battered Schwarzenegger Terminator in a Western. Who could knock that? Sure, it would be a short 8 minute movie as the Terminator Plasma Laser Rifles a Nevada shanty town. The next 100 minutes could be a post existential “I Am Terminator” as the immortal Terminator ponders a lifeless desert town and plays chess with himself, slowly going robotically mad for the next 113 years waiting for his robot buddies to nuke mankind.
The point with Time Travel is that you can go back and forth in time to anywhen. Anywhen. Send a T-800 into the future to avert Connor's successful plan at its weakest moment. Go anywhere, anywhen. Come on Skynet, think! The world is your non-linear Oyster Card.
3. Tapes. We all know that when what the survivalists call “The Crunch” hits (also know as WTSHTF 'When The Shit Hits The Fan' or TEOTWAWKI 'The End Of The World As We Know It'), the Electromagnetic Pulse from the Thermonuklear explosions will destroy all magnetic media. Every piece of magnetic tape will be wiped forever. So those ancient cassette tapes on battery powered tape recorders will simply vanish out of existence to blank nothingness. So what the hell is Connor listening to? The frantic babbling of his own Post Traumatic Stress Disorder imaginary friend?
4. John Connor is a Terminator. This is no great spoiler. Because... in order to survive half the shit they throw at him in this film, he MUST be a Terminator. No one can jump from a bridge onto a moving plane and hold on without breaking their legs. No one can jump from a helicopter several hundred feet in the air into the sea and get aboard a submarine without crushing their ribs. (The Indiana Jones effect simply does not apply here : Bale is not Harrison Ford). No one can survive being thrown around like a Rag Doll by a CGI Arnie and simply get up and keep at it. No one can survive being pierced through the heart by a big fat fucking pipe and keep fighting. We've all seen Commando. We know that stuff kills people. So Connor must a Terminator. THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION!
5. The Aim. Terminators are worse than Stormtroopers for fuck sake. They must be using spaghetti guns or barrels shaped like shower heads. These are robot killing machines designed solely to kill people. Their aim should be better than this. Are Terminators running on Vista? A Terminator can't hit a stationary target at 30 yards in broad daylight with a fucking chain gun. Even I could do that. And then, the Terminator falls for the old 'loop on the floor' trick, as used most famously by the fucking Ewoks. Are you telling me Ewoks are smarter than a Terminator?
6. “One Terminator At A Time, Fellas”. So, in a Terminator Factory, there's only about three Terminators in the whole building? How can Connor casually walk right into the Terminator Factory? Is he a Terminator? And if Terminators are so hard that it took a whole movie to kill just one, how come they are so unthreatening in Terminator Salvation? In it, Terminators are scattered around like confetti, and about as threatening as flowers. This does not compute. Anyone worth their salt knows that if you have an intrusion in your Top Secret Factory, you dont just send down one or two guys, you send a goddamn army. It's like some kind of Tag Team: an endless supply of Terminators waiting for their predecessor to be knocked off before they dutifully troop in one-by-one to be demolished by a grumpy military Jesus Christ.
7. The Harvester. OK, Skynet. We can just about accept that you will create a Transforminator that's sixty foot tall, sounds like Godzilla, and picks up humans like KingKong. But how come no one can hear it plodding around a silent and deserted desert landscape? These things dont fly around on jetpacks, and in the desert, surely someone must have seen it somewhere on the horizon when its the height of a six story building? And given that the Transforminator – sorry The Harvester – appears silently and without warning, and disappears about as quickly once it spits out little Bikeinators – it must have a teleporters.
8. Bikeanators. Lets look past the fact that Skynet have made Harleys that only operate on tarmac and are, thus, mostly useless in a post civilisation apocalypse. Instead I'm going to ask a simpler question that that. USB Ports. Why does Skynet operate USB ports with Auto-Run on EVERYTHING? It was bullshit when mankind upload a Windows 3.11 virus to the Aliens in Independence Day. It's bullshit now. And have Skynet never heard of a firewall or disabling these ports? No? Skynet is dumber than a box of frogs, and a box of frogs is still smarter than the scriptwriters.
9. Harvesting. Why are the Terminators collecting all these humans? Are they sentimental? Are they taking them to happy camps and rounding them up like a teacher scoops up errant children on a holiday? What are they doing with the humans? Or perhaps, like most of this dumb movie, the scriptwriters have put something in because it looks cool, and forgotten to actually think of a reason why it might be happening.
10. The Radio. Connor broadcasts on the Radio. Is it on some special frequency that Terminators can't hear? Were I Skynet I'd triangulate the signal and start operation Bomb The Living Fuck Out of John Connor. But no, Skynet must be fundamentally Not That Smart, or else the war would be over real quick.
Bonus Plothole : Spoileriffic!
11. The Restraining Bolt. NEVER in the history of anything, ever, has anyone – Terminator or not – ever been able to rip open their own head with their fingers, and take a bit out. Not only that, but if the primary function of said Restraining Bolt is to prevent independent thought. Therefore, the Terminator would not even have concieved of the idea of taking the bolt out, let alone actually do it, because as Robocop tells us, there is always a secret hidden directive to prevent rebellious thought. Heaven sake, even Omni Consumer products, Asimov, and HAL-9000 know that.
Terminator : Salvation isn't a film, it's a nfirst draft slapped up on a screen without even one decent couch session. McG, you are a cock, and if you think the certins who slopped out Catwoman, Primeval, and xXx:return of Xander Cage are fit to even look at the mantle of Terminator Movies (even if they did do an OK job of Terminator 3), then you are a fuckmonkey who needs to be forcibly removed from motion pictures and forced to flip burgers until you understand what good film-making actually is.
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