Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
In 1984, The Terminator was a chilly, conniving, nihilist-humanist animal of a movie, and in 1991, T2 confronted the world as an operatic exercise in baroque fire-and-brimstone pyrotechnics. Both, in their day, were game-changers, and if the sequel’s charm has faded slightly, it still gets points for what it accomplished at the time. Even if the nebulous concept of “bigness” was the purpose for T2 – and a purpose director James Cameron has returned to time and time again to limited results – it was, when all was said and done, a purpose. Both films worked, ultimately, because they were masterminded by a man with something to prove. In 1984 it was his name as a filmmaker at all, and by 1991 merely the fact that he could humbly direct the de facto most technologically-savvy film of all time. Different hopes for different folks, as they say, but both set the man ablaze with passion to make a film. Continue reading
Because of that other Terminator film recently released, trying its best to soil the name of a once-mighty franchise.
And now we’ll take a short look at Dutch madman Paul Verhoeven’s ’90s American pictures, for during the 1990s Verhoeven was one of the few mainstream directors consistently operating at heightened level of mania and adventure in the film world, ever-pursuing and challenging his particular brand of satire until it became almost indistinguishable from truly making the bad movies he was satirizing. Plus I just reviewed Robocop, so it seems like I might as well continue on from there…
Edited for Clarity
End of Watch
Update in late 2019 with the release of Dark Fate: The glum and more self-consciously morose later sequels track, recode, and needlessly convolute this film’s elegant, inescapable trudge toward oblivion, shading and sharding Cameron’s original vision in various ways, but they all completely miss the original’s brilliance: its sense of soul-death. Nominally an action film but far divorced from the self-amused tone of the Schwarzenegger pictures that were in the can as soon as this one made a fortune, The Terminator is as implacable and monosyllabic as its namesake: a blood-and-guts slasher film in a metallic overcoat, and one with significantly less Pavlovian satisfaction at the death it deals. Brutal simplicity at its finest, The Terminator essays a dystopic future that ultimately, tragically, realizes its far-flung visions of eventual catastrophe already came to pass in the present while it wasn’t looking. How far this franchise has fallen …
The Long Take 