Terminator: Genisys

If you like action movies with great visuals and a reminder of your movie-going past, this is the summer action movie for you.  But if you're looking for a really good sequel that moves the story of the Connor family, with Reese and a cyborg and a liquid-metal thing duking it out in present-day, in 1984, and in future L.A.--well, you'll be a bit disappointed here.

Maybe it's unfair to compare, as James Cameron's first two films were almost perfect movies of their type.  Plus, this latest is more of a reboot than a sequel, and the ending practically shows you how the next one will start.  Some movie needed to veer the series off its finished course, and this was it.

But there's still a lot wrong.  Some of them include (and, yes, there may be SPOILERS here):

* Ah-nuld's Terminator (and perhaps Ah-nuld himself) should never be called "Pops."  By anyone.  Even his own kids.

* Exposition and info-dump are sometimes necessary in films like this, but such info. needs to be delivered by someone who speaks English better than Ah-nuld does.  It's not that he doesn't speak the language well; it's that he doesn't enunciate it well, and it's grating in a movie if you have to listen to him and figure it out.

* This movie tries way too hard to be as "funny" as the second one.  I never found that one as amusing as many did, either, mostly because Edward Furlong's voice sounded like someone had just stepped on a cat's tail.

* James Cameron understood that story trumps special effects.  Genisys doesn't.

* Ah-nuld's smile is more creepy than funny.  It's even creepier since it's creepy-trying-to-be-funny.

* Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor was as jacked as a movie heroine is likely to ever get, surpassing even Sigourney Weaver's Ripley.  Emilia Clarke, playing a Sarah Connor who has known since she was nine that she would grow up to be kick-ass Sarah Connor, needed to be just as buff here.  She wasn't.  Part of the problem is that Emilia Clarke couldn't get jacked because she has to be in Game of Thrones, too.  (Daenarys as a buff dragon queen simply wouldn't work at this point.)  Another problem is that she's simply too pretty in a soft-looking kind of way.  And maybe she always will be.  (Linda Hamilton was just as pretty, jacked or not.)  But she's soft, and she stays that way.

* Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, in this movie, have zero chemistry.  When they kiss and declare their love for each other (they have to, or John Connor doesn't get born), you won't believe it.  To be fair to the actors, the script gives them zero chance to actually fall in love, anyway.

* Jai Courtney was also in the last Die Hard movie, which worked as an awesome action movie, but failed miserably in its attempt to be a Die Hard movie.  This movie works the same.  A good action / special effects movie.  A bad Terminator movie.

* And Michael Biehn needs to get more credit for his role.  Jai Courtney does not measure up here.

* Emilia Clarke tries her best, but she doesn't exactly catch Linda Hamilton's grasp of the character.

* The original, 1984 Terminator and the sequel's liquid metal monster are done away in quick fashion here, to mostly good effect.  The biggest problem of the movie, though, is that the real villain is (SPOILER) John Connor, and that absolutely does not work. Sarah doesn't seem to care that it's her son killing everyone (though, of course, he kind of isn't, yet) and Reese doesn't, either.  It's a mess.

* The script also mandates that John Connor was fooling everyone all the time, including in his rare scenes from 1984.  Though he could be considered a victim of SkyNet when Reese was sent back, he just doesn't hold up in any way as a good villain.  And it's 3 (often, 4 or 5) against 1, which seems unfair.

* This is a concept movie that never unveils itself.  SkyNet is the internet, of course.  And this movie, much like the second, is a warning about letting computers run everything.  (WarGames and every other flick of this type were, too.)  This one goes the extra step and posits the dangers of being too connected, via phone, laptop, iPad, iPhone, or whatever the hell your electronic addiction is.  But it loses its own point amidst the failed attempts at humor and significance.  This movie would've been much better had it just played it straight.

* And it doesn't cover any new ground at all, since it tries to follow the first two, yet break off from them, at the same time.  (It pretends the 3rd and 4th ones never happened, which perhaps we should as well.)  Maybe you can't do both simultaneously.  (And there was a nice tip of the cap to Cameron and his famous True Lies scene, too.)

Well, you get the idea.  It's a good action flick, and I didn't feel like I'd wasted my money or time, but beware that it is what it is, and it's not what it tries to be.  Do not expect a Cameron Terminator.

Notes from A Stephen King Interview, Part 2

Photo: Stephen King at The Harvard Bookstore, June 6, 2005.  From his Wikipedia page.

[This is Part 2 of a blog started a few days ago, which you can go to here if you don't want to scroll.]

[Stephen King gave this sort of loose interview to The Atlantic on April 12, 2011.  The interview was in conjunction with a new-at-the-time short story, "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," which you can read here.  (You should read the story first before continuing on with this blog entry.)]

To another vein.  You know how your writing and English teachers always tell you to walk around with pen and paper (or, today, an iPhone, or an iPad, or just talk into your cell, or--) because you must write down that great idea or you'll forget it?  Well, the guy who has sold more books than anyone currently alive says:

I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own.

For the record, I also believe this, and I very rarely write anything down.  When I do, I hardly ever use them.  I also believe that ideas you'll use will germinate in your head and simply not leave until you write them into a story.  All the other ideas are unwanted guests who are correctly shown the door.  The more I practice this, the more writing I get done.  The more I let every single idea take root, I stray or the elevator stops.

Out of nowhere, practically, King gives a pretty good description of what poetry is good for:

[Poetry] takes ordinary life, it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that's what you get. When the Philip Larkins or the James Dickeys do that, you get something that is heightened, that says to us that reality is finer and more beautiful and more mysterious than we could ever possibly express ourselves. Which is why we need poetry.

Indeed so.  I'm not a good enough poet to do this myself--I've only managed to sell one poem, though it's also true that I've only sent out one poem--but I agree that this is what good poetry can do.  It's life, super-concentrated, super-compact.  I wrote a line that says, "A poem is a thought shared in compacted time."  I believe this to be true.

But I respectfully disagree with King on one point.  When asked to compare the short story markets of his youth to the ones today, King said:

All those magazines published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction.

While this may be true in terms of physical, tangible magazines you hold in your hands, this is not true overall.  There are a ton of markets--many of them big, that pay well--on the Web.  They're called e-magazines.  I've been published in a few of them, and they often pay better than the hand-held, paper ones.  A sign of the times, but a fact nonetheless.

In fact, when King says that people don't read short stories (or much else) anymore, I would politely disagree with that, as well.  Those online mags wouldn't be able to pay what they do if nobody was reading them.  And there's a ton of decent-paying online mags. Again, I know: I've been in them.

And, finally, here's an interesting irony:

JP: It is odd, though, if you think about it, that with all the speeding-up that we're being told about, and the dwindling of the attention span and all that, that people would rather chomp their way through a 400-pager than just get zapped by a little story ...

SK: And so many of the 400-pagers are disposable in themselves. When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: "These are basically books for people who don't want to read at all." It just kind of passes through the system. It's like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any part of you. I don't want to name names, but we know who we're talking about.

This is also true.  I'll name names for him: James Patterson.  Many of the heart-felt vampire books, or young-heroine dystopias.  But, I should also add, in all honesty: Stephen King himself, sometimes.

I think he would admit that, most of the time.  He was just having a negative, cranky interview.