“Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.”
— from George Orwell’s “1984”
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
— from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
Photo credit: By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Young people, let me try to explain what it was like for a kid who loved movies in the early 1980’s.
There was no trivia section for the Internet Movie Database. There was no Internet Movie Database. There was no goddam Internet. This meant that information about new movies came mostly from other second-, third- or fourth-graders. And that was one imperfect grapevine.
Sometimes the information was flat out wrong. Brad Fisher told me at the beach in the summer of 1980 that Han Solo dies in “The Empire Strikes Back.” (Yes, “Star Wars” fanatics, I am aware that Harrison Ford wanted the character to die. Now grow up and watch Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica.”)
Other times, the information was technically accurate, but confusingly articulated. Such was the account of Jason Huhn, the kid across the street, of Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” (That was a 1979 movie, but I wasn’t even allowed to watch the bowdlerized version that was on television a few years later.) “Its head is like a tube.” Jason told me thoughtfully. “It has, like, two mouths. It has a mouth, and then a mouth inside a mouth.”
Finally, the other boys’ reviews were occasionally just too spoiler-heavy. In 1984, I had the entire rope-bridge scene in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” memorized in detail before I got to see the movie myself. (Maddeningly, most of Mr. Greiner’s sixth grade class had seen it before I did, and Jason Girnius was particularly exuberant in recounting its climactic fight.)
“Halloween III: Season of the Witch” was something of a different animal. None of the kids in the neighborhood could figure that one out.
“Michael isn’t in it!” That was the buzz. To a boy in the 1982, Michael Myers was an icon on par with “Friday the 13th’s” Jason. (Leatherface was a bit before our time, and Freddy Krueger and Pinhead hadn’t arrived in theaters just yet.) Even those of us who weren’t allowed to watch the movies had heard all about him. It utterly confused us that that a “Halloween” movie could be made in which he was absent.
It … looked pretty scary, at least. Its poster and tagline suggested that young trick-or-treaters would be victimized instead of teenagers old enough to babysit, so that was more frightening to a young boy. (As an adult today, I suggest that this movie absolutely did not turn out to be a classic horror film, despite the pretty terrifying basic plot device revealed at the end.)
Today a simple Google search would inform us of John Carpenter’s plans — an anthology series in which every subsequent “Halloween” sequel was a standalone horror story with the holiday as a theme. (I think I’d question the wisdom of that even as a kid; the studio wisely resurrected the slasher four years later.)
But the gradeschool grapevine was not so informed. There weren’t even any tentative hypotheses among the kids on my street. I think we just shrugged it off and returned to talking about “Star Wars.” We just figured that adults sometimes did some really puzzling, really stupid things. That’s a belief I still hold today. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I occasionally engender that belief in others.
I’m following up on my blog post yesterday linking to that 2009 Daily Mail article about George Orwell’s last days. Pictured below is the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, where Orwell died shortly after completing “1984.” Jura is situated on the remains of a 15th Century Gaelic settlement.
It’s documented that Orwell’s intermittent stays there between 1946 and 1950 were trying, as he fought to complete his world-changing novel while struggling with the tuberculosis that would kill him. (This was the subject of the article.)
Even with this in mind, however, I swear that looks like a lovely place to write.
Photo credit: Ken Craig [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Photo credit: By Zilchy111 george weir (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
He died of tuberculosis six months later. I think the idea that the book’s completion killed him is only surmise on the part of the author here, but it’s both sad and amazing what George Orwell accomplished despite being sick.
From the 2009 article: [“‘I began to relapse about the end of September,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I could have done something about it then, but I had to finish that wretched book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months and which the publishers were harrying me for.”
Working on the Hebridean island of Jura in the cold and damp, the worst possible climate for tuberculosis, Orwell had produced a manuscript illegible to anyone save its author.]
There. You see that truly sucky play on words that I employed in the headline for this blog post? That should give you a sense of the quality of this film’s script. I’m serious. When one character expresses their desire to rule the world, another character shouts “Rule THIS!” before blasting the former with a laser. Because the future is a long, looooong way from Tennessee Williams, Baby.
But hold up. Believe it or not, this will actually be a positive review of “Terminator Genisys” (2015). I’d reluctantly give it an 8 out of 10, because it was a fun summer popcorn movie, despite its flaws.
And there are flaws. It isn’t high art, and it can’t even approach the pathos, drama, characters, rich themes and great old fashioned movie thrills of the true terminator classics: the 1984 original and James Cameron’s astonishingly superior sequel in 1991.
The dialogue for “Terminator Genisys” is terrible in many places. The story’s most important character, Sarah Connor, falls flat. She’s scripted as a chipper, upbeat, 20’ish “It Girl” who utterly fails to win viewer loyalty, as Linda Hamilton’s traumatized crusader did so beautifully in 1991. I also humbly opine that Emilia Clarke did poorly with the role. This is the first time I’ve ever seen her perform — I’ve heard that she’s actually considered a very good actress playing a queen on … that TV show. “Game of Bones?” “Crones?” Or something? People like that show, right?
A lackluster Sarah Connor might be a serious transgression in the fan community. For a kid who learned to love science fiction movies in the 80’s and 90’s, Ellen Ripley will always be the paradigmatic heroine, but Sarah Connor was second. No, no one can equal Hamilton’s performance, but others can still perform the role quite well when it is competently scripted. Just see Lena Heady’s inspired turn in television’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (2008).
The “timey-wimey” stuff lost me early on. Seriously — the time travel story elements confused and annoyed me as soon as Kyle Reese (Jesus, I almost wrote Corporal Hicks) entered the time machine and began having inexplicable memories of another timestream.
Who is sending multiple terminators on multiple missions? Are they from various timelines and various iterations of Skynet, or are they from a single future? Our heroes have an unknown benefactor with access to time machines? A T-1000 attacks people on a rowboat? Does it … float, then? Walk on water? It seems to me that hopping on a boat would be a rather ingenius way of escaping an unstoppable robot, unless he commandeers his own vehicle … Hell, it’s something I’d never thought of, and I am precisely the sort of weirdo who thinks about things like that. (Is it any worse than when other people have zombie contingency plans?)
I’m not even sure I understand the motives of the story’s antagonist who we see the most. Is this character on nobody’s side, exactly? If this character is a superior model composed of nanobots, shouldn’t Skynet be manufacturing and deploying dozens, instead of just one? For that matter … why do individual terminators each have an individual consciousness and point of view? Can Skynet simply download its own single collective consciousness to every unit?
I felt a little embarrassed at first, but the Internet reassures me that most, if not all viewers, are puzzled about these things. The wonderful io9.com, for example, has an excellent tongue-in-cheek “FAQ” pointing out this movie’s surprising multitude of unanswered questions. Warning: SPOILERS.
http://io9.com/terminator-genisys-the-spoilyr-faq-1716548070
Also … I really disliked this movie’s central plot twist.
Still, I have to give this movie a free pass. I simply can’t give a negative review to a film during which I laughed and smiled throughout. This is a fun summer event-movie. It’s a fast-paced, sci-fi actioner with fantastic special effects, the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and tons of fan service and Easter eggs. (Recreating the 1984 film’s sequences shot-for-shot? C’mon! That was just cool and fun.)
We’ve got nanobaddies, liquid metal terminators (made of mimetic polyalloy, to those of us in the know), aging T-800’s with stiff joints, time machines, terminators arriving in multiple decades, Bot-on-Bot violence, a schoolbus flipping over on the Golden Gate Bridge and … somebody does something totally sweet with an oxygen tank. They really threw in everything but the kitchen sink for this movie. The result is only kid stuff, but it’s still a good time. If you see this movie, and you don’t smile when a T-1000 emerges from a police car windshield, then you have never been a 10-year-old boy.
This year’s “Jurassic World” had none of the earmarks of a great film, but it still entertained. I gave that a positive review, so I’m going to go head and recommend this as well.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 