It was a crummy weekend, ladies and gents:
1) Stupid arguments with parents
2) Missed the first 10 minutes of Up
3) Saw Up in 3D when it had about 1 scene that utilized the feature
4) Didn't like Up very much at all (but you'll hear about that in due time)
5) Friends seemingly upset with me
6) LOST MY COVETED BRIGHT EYES 7 LP BOXSET ON EBAY WHEN I THOUGHT I HAD IT IN THE BAG
7) Didn't do as well selling things at the Record Exchange as I'd hoped
8) Record exchange didn't have the album I was hoping for
9) Domino's pizza was kind of crappy
10) Had an immature argument with a group of bratty middle schoolers
I figured it might have been karma for neglecting this. Anyway:
#8: Terminator
At this point in the game I had seen a few consecutive disappointing movies. Aside from This Is England, I'd suffered through Observe and Report, Wolverine, Dance Flick (which my friend convinced me to see), and The Soloist. Scary Movie was just okay. So for all intents and purposes, five of the seven films I'd seen were failures; a bunch of disappointing films does not a happy Alex make.
I bought the Terminator trilogy a while back because if its reputation (and reasonable price) but I never got around to watching it. Because I'd hoped to see the newest one in IMAX with a good friend of mine, I decided it was about time I get up to speed with the series. It couldn't have come at a more opportune time.
I'd heard that T2 was the end all be all of action movies. I also knew that so many people had seen T2 first so the first one paled in comparison. I had the distinct advantage of watching them in order. This movie blew me away for what it accomplished at its time. The acting is good for what is effectively a science fiction film. Besides the cheesy blue lightning at the beginning the special effects were very impressive. The premise was brilliant; I love post-apocalyptic things to begin with, but this concept was just excellent. It upsets me that every movie released now is either a sequel, a prequel, a spinoff, a parody, based on a book, based on a television show, or based on a true story. This is the time of unique film I wish my generation could boast.
The action sequences in the movie are genuinely suspenseful. So many movies now want to depict action in terms of large-scale battles to show what film is now capable of. The problem is that there is so much going on you often lose the intricacies. I loved The Dark Knight, for example, but there are multiple scenes which despite the fact that I saw it twice in IMAX, four times in regular theaters, and five times on DVD, I still can't quite figure out where certain explosions are coming from or what's going on. Here, the simplicity made it very clear what you should focus on and become emotionally involved in: The Terminator on one side, Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese on the other. You know who's going after whom, so when you see where Sarah is and the scene cuts to show you where the Terminator is, you obsess over the logistics of how she's going to get out of her situation. I watched it at work, but I was still practically sweating over what was going on.
*Speaking of watching it at work, of course a customer walked in when Arnold Schwarzenegger's junk came on screen. Just my luck.*
I'll be writing soon about my T2 experience, but with all the hype T2 (deservedly) receives it is wrong to forget about the first. It's just such an excellent film that it endures and remains entertaining to this day. Many are inclined to write off blockbuster action/sci-fi movies as cheap--striking them from discussion of good cinema--but this is the type of film I think deserves to be included in a film studies course. It was groundbreaking in terms of special effects and there is so much more to it than a battle of man versus machine.
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