Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

The first two Terminator movies were a bit of a headache because of the bootstrap paradoxes.  If The Terminator hadn’t been sent back to kill Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese never would have been sent back to protect her only to become John Connor’s father.  Thus, the correct way to get rid of John Connor before he was born was to not try to kill him before he was born.

When this movie opens, Sarah is in a mental ward and John is in foster care.  He’s grown up thinking that she’s a nut job, which is a justifiable point of view.  She’s telling everyone that a machine from the future came back to kill her before her son was born.  This hasn’t stopped the apocalypse, which she needs to help John prepare for.  This would look like maybe the absolute worst Cassandra complex ever.  Except that it’s true.

Skynet has sent back an even better Terminator, the T-1000, to terminate John as a child.  Also returning from the future is a reprogrammed T-800.  This time, the original Terminator is going to protect John rather than kill him.  The same dynamic exists with a superior hunter and an inferior protector, but the same imperative exists: John Connor must live to defeat the machines.

The movie is done well enough that you can enjoy it without asking too many questions.  I originally wondered why the T-1000 didn’t, say, overload a power plant and destroy the whole city.  That would have been too easy.  Plus, the T-1000 has to be sure.  This means actually finding John Connor.  Still, you’d think that a computer system designed for defense could make a machine that could do better, or maybe even send back several terminators to work in concert.

In this case, I understand why some ideas weren’t used.  Sure, Skynet could have killed Sarah Connor while she was pregnant or killed John Connor as a baby, but this is something audiences wouldn’t react well to.  Sending something back in time is probably difficult, so sending an army back probably isn’t a viable option.  There isn’t a really great, obvious idea that I can think of.

We do get two more bootstrap paradoxes.  First, it seems likely that the arrival of the T-1000 either allowed Sarah Connor to get out of the hospital, or at least got her out early.  This allowed her to further train John Connor, who doesn’t appear to be battle ready just yet.  (Had she stayed in the hospital, John may not have done as well against the machines.)  We also find out that the arrival of the T-800 in the original movie gave Cyberdyne the idea for the terminators’ hardware, thus allowing for the creation of Skynet.  So, where did Skynet come from?

The movie could have been a simple action movie about two machines fighting over the future of the planet.  Instead, we get a commentary on the destructive nature of humanity.  Throughout all of the Terminator movies, the downfall of human civilization is inevitable.  We tend to fight one another.  This is what leads to the creation of Skynet in the first place.

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Proud Mary (2018)

I’ve always wondered how professionals feel about how their professions are portrayed in popular media.  Do police officers look at shows like Law & Order and pick out all the mistakes?  Do doctors look at ER or House and think that medicine is portrayed as overly dramatic?  While watching Proud Mary, I wondered if any hitmen had seen the movie.  Does Taraji P. Henson’s portrayal of a hitwoman named Mary even come close to the reality?  (If you actually do this for a living, I don’t expect a response.)

The movie begins with Mary carrying out a contract.  She kills the target only to realize that his son is in the house.  He’s playing video games with his headphones on, so Mary is able to leave unnoticed.  Fast forward a year and the boy, Danny, is delivering drugs for a man who goes by Uncle.  Uncle is not a nice man.  He either beats or threatens to harm Danny for transgressions like stealing.  (Danny took some money to buy a pastry.)  Mary catches up with Danny after he collapses in an alley. She takes him in, neglecting to mention who she is.

It turns out that Mary works for a crime family that’s competing with Uncle’s family.  Mary has inadvertently started a war between the two families.  Uncle’s side knows that it was Mary’s side, but not Mary specifically.  Benny is the head of Mary’s family.  Benny assures the other side that he’ll look into it and take whatever action is appropriate.  Mary now knows that she has to get out.  She soon realizes that that’s not going to happen.

This is a movie I probably never would have seen without MoviePass.  I don’t even think I would have seen it on DVD.  This is a movie I would have added to my Netflix queue and let sit there until it was about to be removed from the streaming service.  I’m not saying that the movie isn’t entertaining.  My feeling is that a better job could have been done with the material.

The timeline of the movie is pretty straight forward.  I don’t think there were any flashbacks or exposition.  What little history there is tends to be minimal.  Mary was going out with Benny’s Son, although I think that’s only used to explain why he has a key to her place.  Danny tells Mary about what happened in the intervening year, but I get the impression that’s only to explain to the audience why he’s on the street.  Otherwise, we’d be wondering if he doesn’t have any other family.

The story basically serves to prop up the lies Mary has to tell and the gun battles she has to engage in.  I’d say that this is the Lifetime version of Léon: The Professional, but I think that Lifetime could have done a better job with it.  It’s hard to see Mary and Danny as anything more than basic characters.  Mary has a nice apartment and a nice car.  There’s exactly one moment where she tells Danny that she was once like him.  I didn’t sense any depth to the characters.

There are a few characters that serve only to die.  Uncle, for instance, sticks around just long enough for us to get that he’s a horrible person.  Then, Mary kills him.  Poor Walter meets a similar fate.  Mary and Walter work together, but she kills him hoping to make it look like the other family killed him for retribution.

We’re even denied any sort of a happy ending.  Yes, both Mary and Danny survive.  In fact, I think they’re the only main characters that do make it to the end.  However, the end has them simply driving off into the proverbial sunset.  We don’t even know exactly where they’re going.  We just know that it’s over.  I suppose I can at least be thankful for that.

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Transcendence (2014)

I’m usually a good judge of whether or not I’ll like a movie based on the coming attractions.  When I saw the coming attractions for Transcendence, it looked interesting.  A guy is able to upload himself to a computer.  I was thinking it would be about all the horrors that might ensue from having a human mind freed from the constraints of a human brain.  The movie wasn’t anywhere near what I expected.

Dr. Will Castor is said guy.  He’s an expert on AI.  He’s even had success copying the brain of a nonhuman primate to a computer.  Not everyone likes his work.  They fear what they don’t know.  Some are so afraid that they confront and shoot him.  Castor survives the bullet, but not the radioactive material it was laced with.  He’s forced to upload himself to a computer.

But is it really him?  We have no way of knowing if it’s his consciousness or just a program using his memories.  Will’s widow, Evelyn, is convinced it’s him.  Others, not so much.  The group behind the shooting are after her and the AI.  They’re even able to turn his friend to their cause.  Still, Will (in AI form) is able to set up Evelyn with more money than she’d ever need.  She uses the money to build a complex to house Will’s AI, allowing him to make all sorts of medical breakthroughs.

Things turn sinister when it’s revealed that by treating people, Will is able to absorb them into a collective consciousness.  Evelyn can’t stand the thought of losing what remains of Will.  Everyone else sees the inherent danger.  Eventually, she comes around, but the odds of her being able to help don’t look good.

For those of you that don’t like spoilers, I should warn you that the movie starts with the final scene, making it somewhat obvious that things don’t end well.  I’ve always hated this movie because I’m constantly wondering what brought the movie to that point.  I’m always trying to read things into everything.  It doesn’t really work well here.

Also, I know I’m not the first person to point out that the movie is kind of derivative in many respects.  Fear of AI is nothing new.  Could Will help people by curing all manner of problems?  Yes.  Could humanity lose its humanity?  Maybe?  Is it really Will?  As I said, there’s no way to be sure.

Also, the idea of uploading consciousness has been seen in The Lawnmower Man, Max Headroom and Caprica.  The idea of assimilating people has been done with Star Trek’s the Borg and Doctor Who’s Cybermen.  If you are the kind of person that really likes science fiction, you’re going to notice parallels to other movies and TV shows.

That was my big thing here.  I don’t feel like the movie did anything new with any of the ideas.  Actually, I don’t feel that the movie did much of anything with any of the ideas.  Most of the movie is Will in computer form.  The other characters are worried about what this could mean.  The most obvious threat is that he could absorb all of humanity and/or bring about The Singularity.  There isn’t much said about this other than it’s happening.

There are other issues that could be explored here.  Will is a nice guy.  What would happen if a dictator had uploaded himself?  Also, power corrupts.  Will is shown as being a little more aggressive, but at no point does Evelyn ever state that it’s gone to his head, so to speak.  Will is able to do almost anything he can think up.  What would stop him from becoming a dictator?  Is it better to stop him out of fear of him becoming ruler of the world or do you let him help people?

The movie seems like an episode of The Outer Limits stretched too far.  Where does humanity end and technology begin?  How do you stop someone who could easily become unstoppable?  The movie touched on these subjects, but not very well.  It was a 48-minute concept that the writers had to stretch to two hours.  It seemed forced.

Ultimately, the movie fell flat.  I kept waiting for the action to start and it didn’t.  There was no suspense.  There was nothing to make you think or feel for the characters.  Once Will is dead and uploaded, he’s not really shown as being in any danger.  The danger lies with Evelyn, who’s effectively being held hostage.  However, she has a nice-looking place to live and enough food and water to last her indefinitely.  The only problem is that she’s at Will’s mercy.  The movie presents the issue, but doesn’t deal with it.

I had used a free Redbox code to rent the movie.  I’m glad that I didn’t have to pay money for it.  It ended up being a disappointment.  It ended up being a movie in desperate need of a direction.

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