The second movie of 2013 where the White House comes under attack while a special agent tries to save a kid inside, this one was Roland Emmerich's continuation of his Edifice Complex, where he made movies just to see famous things blow up. Now, it should be noted that we are talking about White House Down and not Olympus Has Fallen—in which Gerard Butler plays the "die-hard" agent trying to stop an attack by North Korean terrorists. In THIS one, Channing Tatum plays a "die hard" agent trying to stop an attack by home-grown terrorists who are whiter than white.
Which one seems more likely? Well, neither of them. But since 2001 the terrorist attacks on the country has mostly been by white guys...as they were before 9/11. As they were on January 6, 2021
Oh, yes, and in both films, an African-American male is the president for a brief time. That's because, at the time, an African-American male was president full time.
The reason for attacking the White House doesn't have anything to do with the sitting President being an African-American—ostensibly it's to gain access to the nuclear codes to launch an attack on Iran for the deaths of relations and comrades of the attackers—but one can't help but wonder why the movie (and in fact, both movies) were timed to be at a time when an African-American was president. Did they think they could take advantage of bookings at White Supremacist Film Festivals?
Whatever the motives, the film looks at a day in the life of Capitol Police officer John Cale (Tatum), who's looking to move up from his job protecting Speaker of the House Eli Raphelson (Richard Jenkins) to a job with the Secret Service protecting the President, who happens to be James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). His application does not go well, being rejected Deputy Special Agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Perhaps it has something to do with their past history. Perhaps it has something to do with his being a divorced parent to his daughter Emily (Joey King). If it has anything to do with work experience, he's going to get plenty of that.
The plan for the terrorists (and one can not call them anything but that) is to blow up the Capitol (sounds familiar...) and in the resulting confusion, the Speaker of the House—Raphelson—gets sequestered because he's No 3 in the presidential chain of command. He's put in an underground bunker under the Pentagon. The Vice-President (played by Michael Murphy) is evacuated by Air Force One (because Air Force Two—the Veep's plane—supposedly isn't good enough). At that point, an assault team, led by some whacko former Delta Forcers storms the White House with the intention of taking the President hostage.
The Secret Service—supposedly the best and the brightest—is easily overrun and the President (Foxx) is taken by his retiring head of protection Martin Walker (James Woods) to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House. Except for one thing: it's Walker who has planned the assault (which is why the Secret Service was taken out so easily). So, now, the President is held hostage, and Walker is free to use a hacker to get into the PEOC's command center and try to get the codes for a nuclear strike on Iran.
Cale, however, takes down a couple of the terrorists, and using their communications and weapons is able to rescue the President from the PEOC. They are presumed killed trying to get out of the White House, and aboard Air Force One, the Vice President is sworn in. He orders the White House be attacked by air to try and take out the terrorists, which fails when all the attack helicopters are shot down. Walker has his hacker launch missiles from NORAD and Air Force One is blown out of the sky, thus making the Speaker of the House President.
Watching this from a hotel room while doing some government work, I couldn't help giggling at the outlandishness of the whole thing (although kudos for having the President using a missile launcher from a moving vehicle). It is so over-the-top, so hysterically hyperventilating that I couldn't help seeing the whole thing as just a silly exercise in taking Die Hard to the federal government, every Yippee-ki-yay intact (I think Tatum was even wearing Willis' old wife-beater, too). The movie was already out of my mind when, that evening, I watched news coverage of Biden being declared the winner of the 2020 election.
So imagine my surprise when on January 6th, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was overrun by a bunch of wacko's (including a "voice-over actor" dressed in a Buffalo headdress) storm the Capitol and gum up the gears of government with their own poo-flinging. This seemed over the top, as well, but I didn't giggle. Lives were lost. A coup had been attempted, and it, too, was an "inside job"—the National Guard had conveniently not been deployed that day. The President was apparently having too good a time watching it on TV.
Our country is a fragile thing, expected to run on automatic pilot with the least amount of effort and the inevitable failings falling through the cracks when such an attitude is taken. That's how we do things in the U.S., in business and government. Do as little as possible. Hope for the best. And, as viscerally feverish as White House Down is, it still seemed more concerned with getting the most amount of property damage, than with the damage done to institutions that are expected to be just "there" for us when things are in crisis. I'll bet a lot of the terrorists on January 6th still expected their Social Security checks the next month.
And I'm left with one little evil thought—the most satisfying moment of the movie for me, actually—that I mutter every time I see one of these jacko's complain about their harsh treatment being charged, or some mis-begotten throwback of a senator or representative talk about it being BLM behind it all—all those white people...really?—or that it was just "a normal tourist visit."
It's become my mantra straight from the bile duct and it's from the scene below and I say it through clenched teeth and with quite a bit of dudgeon. I find it satisfying and I'll probably be saying it for quite awhile: "No jail for you, ya little bitch!"
"You Know That Thing We Talked About" or How Are Things in Tora Bora?
Writer Mark Boal and director Katheryn Bigelow have made the two most important dramatic films about The War on Terror: the 2009 Best Picture Oscar Winner The Hurt Locker and now, Zero Dark Thirty,which covers the behind the scenes investigations to track down Usama bin Laden and the subsequent Operation Neptune Spear in Abottabad, Pakistan. The film originally started as a feature about the carpet bombing of Tora Bora, and the field work leading to the decision and was scheduled to begin filming when the raid occurred. Immediately, the other film was shelved, and Boal began writing this, incorporating his research from the previous work which dovetailed with the earlier effort. It's a fascinating, troubling story of human beings waging war on an intimate level, trying to secure threads of information on a specific target, while also trying to keep track of new terror acts that might occur any time, any where.
It focuses on one woman, a CIA analyst named Maya(played by Jessica Chastain)—her IM handle is "Maya173", but "Mark Owen," the nom de plume of one of the Navy Seals participating in the raid, refers to her in his book "No Easy Day," as "Jen." Maya is book-smart, street-savvy, but must learn "the ropes," literally, of interrogation by any means necessary. She is trained in the way of torture by Dan (Jason Clarke), who has been at this for awhile and has it down to a science—the speech "If you lie to me, I will hurt you," the loss of control, the humiliation, the physical and mental stresses, the releases from which information may come. Dan offers to keep Maya out of it, but she demurs. She will participate. She will actively sweat information out of the "detainees" in the euphemisms for prisons like "CIA Black Sites." "You are not being fulsome in your replies" she yells as she slams her hand in the interrogation table.And when she's not participating,she's poring over other interrogations, reams of intelligence, and being a general pain in the rear to her superiors and colleagues. For station chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), the job is to walk the razor's edge of politics and prevent more terrorism—he doesn't even care about bin Laden anymore, as there are too many attacks he's trying to prevent—every attempt that gets by is a failure.
But, for Maya, bin Laden is an obsession, her white Muslim whale, and it takes a zealot to find another zealot. She'll veer off into other investigations, particularly when some of her own are killed in an attack, but time only intensifies her resolve, almost becoming a mania, and her patient investigation is off-set by a gloves-off approach to her superiors (when asked her role in the briefing by the C.I.A. director—at the time, Leon Panetta—played by James Gandolfini, she replies "I'm the m#####-f##### who found this place, sir"), almost as if her persistent pressure torture techniques are being applied up the chain.*The Obama White House dithers over action until absolute proof is obtained that bin Laden is held up at theAbottabad compound, but Maya is resolute. When more cautionary analysts give the odds at 60%, she defiantly ups the odds to 100%—"Okay, 95%, because I know certainty freaks you guys out." But, it's that certainty that fuels Seal Team 6 in their mission—in the videos below, she's specifically mentioned and lauded in Mark Owen's account.
It is a fascinating movie, but a draining one, starting with torture scenes and ending with a recreation of the raid as it went down, shot mostly in tense disorienting night-vision. The character of Maya, or "Jen" or whoever she is, is a fascinating one, a portrait of obsession and the toll it bears—she's repeatedly told that she looks "terrible" throughout the movie—and when she lashes out at her superiors for their lassitude, or just plain pusillanimousness, there is a definite sense of someone unhinged—controlled, but pushed to the breaking point. A fury waiting to unleash, she is our version of a Holy Terror, a match for her enemies, and one can't help but wish her peace...suspecting that it will never happen.
2020 Addendum: Zero Dark Thirty came under some attack at the time of the release for its presentation of torture and its techniques and the implication that information obtained by it led to the critical information that led to the Abottabad raid. The movie is vague enough and the information so voluminous that one comes away with the impression that it wasn't critical to the intel (indeed, the location was confirmed by other means). As for the portrayals being an endorsement of torture, that's a little hysterical—to not portray it would have been 1) a whitewash of what was going on and 2) leaving out a specific chunk of the shaping experience of Chastain's "Maya"—one might just have well kept out the car-bomb attack that killed her colleagues. The character is driven by her experiences, hardened by them...and by her personal need for revenge. Her torture training is part and parcel of it. I came away from the film seeing a revenge drama that ended up, not in triumph, but in hollowness. The dead are still dead and the threat is just as real. There's no "Mission Accomplished." Just an "X" placed in a ledger that never empties. I'll repeat what I said in the asterisked point. Zero Dark Thirty walks such a fine line that one can see whatever they want to in it.
The FBI's notice of bin Laden's death and the Situation Room during the raid. Bear in mind, one helicopter went down during the raid.
* There are torture scenes, but they're not commented on, and any politicizing of it is so much hot-air—one can see in the film any position they want. It walks a very fine line, merely presenting, and if someone tries to see their point of view in it, they're merely counter-projecting.
“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
Astronaut John Glenn
The Man in the Glass Booth
or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I read James R. Hanson's biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, "First Man" some months ago—I'd always been fascinated by the American Space Program of the 1960's when I was a kid—and I found the book a tedious slog. Despite my interest, it tested my ability to be fascinated by Armstrong's career, going into such extreme depth as listing Armstrong's scores during military flight training in the 1960's and the grind of astronaut training...as well as the author's fervently pushed sub-text that Armstrong was a mythical figure on a par with Adam. Plus, Armstrong was such a tight-lipped, interior soul that one got the impression that, despite the scrutiny and coverage of his career before and after the first moon landing, the man was pretty much a cipher, so unknowable that the author depended on other people's impressions to such a large extent that one never really got the sense that you knew the man, and certainly never warmed to him. The flaws were the most interesting things about him: he was an ace test-pilot but a horrible driver, seemingly never able to concentrate on the road, he had a stoicism that kept him apart from those he loved—his grueling schedule usually ensured that, anyway—and he was an innate problem-solver, which did him well at his job of controlling machines, but, on a human level, stymied him, particularly in the challenge of death—of Navy comrades, his only daughter Karen,***and fellow astronauts (particularly Ed White, his next-door neighbor) killed in the process of the head-long rush to achieve the Moon landing within a ten year time-span.
With Armstrong's death in 2012, it was probably inevitable that they would make a film of Armstrong's life.*First Man encapsulates (pun intended) the intense period of Armstrong's life between the tail-end of his time testing X-15 rocket-planes to the moon landing of Apollo 11, a period of 8 years.**It begins with a disorienting shot looking out through grimy windows from the cockpit of an X-15. The camera buffets wildly. The noise is deafening, from the wind-shear, the clacking instruments, the creaking strains on the metal exterior, the rattling of anything not bolted down in the little compartment, the squawking chatter of the radio. Everything except the rattling of the pilot's teeth. That X-15 is strapped to the underside of a B-52 and it will be dropped like a bomb, and, once it's fallen far enough to safely do so without blowing up its host-plane, the pilot will light up its rocket engines and take the X to its limits (which turned out to be a height of 67 miles and a maximum speed of 4,520 miles per hour). That plummeting drop might be the calmest part of the ride, because once the engines kick in, the X-15 is a shaking, vibrating brick that gets red hot in the friction of the atmosphere. Now the film is in 3-D (I didn't see it in that format or in IMAX), but, if it was also presented in Sensurround it would be intolerable. Damned effective in communicating what it's like in that circumstance, but probably beyond what a casual viewer munching popcorn could handle. It's a neat primer on what First Man does differently in the depiction of space travel that separates it from previous films on the subject in regards to the actual experience of the pioneers doing it.
For First Man, like its subject, is not exactly romantic when it comes to the Conquest of Space, but is, instead, realistic and practical. While most films look at the tiny vessels contrasted with the vastness of the space they're pushing through, First Man keeps you in the cockpit, from the vantage point of the sailors strapped in for dear life, who are warily watching the attitude indicators of their control panels as opposed to dreamily gazing at the stars out the window. Zero G is not something to be luxuriated in, it's a problem to be worked around, so that a stray foot doesn't hit the wrong toggle-switch and the floating clutter doesn't get in the way of the job.
Armstrong might have been the perfect candidate for the job. He loved flying and he loved the problem-solving of the task, trying to get it "just so" in the engineering from the time he had his siblings throwing out balsa wood airplanes from his window, so he could mark with popsicle sticks stuck in the yard the differences his adjustment would make in their aerodynamics. When the film starts in medias res of that X-15 flight, Armstrong goes too high and too fast, so that he ends up "skipping off the atmosphere" and has to find a radical way to use his attitude jets to give him enough drag to get the X-15 back to the ground. He makes it, but glances are passed between the ground crew: Armstrong's flights have been shaky lately; something's going on.
I see the moon, the moon sees me shining through the leaves of the old oak tree Oh, let the light that shines on me shine on the one I love.
What's going on is shown in the next scene as a large menacing piece of chrome lowers to the head of a little girl; it is the Armstrong's daughter, Karen, and the worrying parents, Neil (Ryan Gosling) and Janet (Claire Foy), watch, their arms around each other, stricken—the child is being treated for a brain tumor, and, as we'll see, Armstrong keeps notebooks on her treatment, just as he does after his X-15 flights, but it's not going well. And over a shot of Armstrong watching over his sleeping daughter, as his fingers consider the strands of her hair, we hear a deliberate creaking of rope...
...it is the sound of her coffin being lowered into the ground, as Armstrong watches hollow-eyed. There will be flash-backs to the shot of her hair in his hands, the tactile sensation of his daughter later in the movie, but Armstrong, rarely—if ever—mentioned his daughter's death—at 2 1/2 years old—in the many interviews that he actually would allow. One can speculate, as Hanson, "writing to silence"****in the biography, did, that his daughter's death informed the course of Armstrong's actions for the rest of his life and probably played a hand in his becoming a "deist," after having been raised by the devoutest of mothers. But, Armstrong's life was a full one and, no matter how artfully done in the book or movie, it probably can't be thinned down to making his daughter Karen the "Rosebud" of the movie, the Rosetta Stone that has all the answers.
After these scenes, the film then turns episodic—as so many bio-pics do—between highlights and low-lights in Armstrong's astronaut career: his applying for NASA and acceptance (during his interview when he's being questioned, one of the NASA hierarchy starts "I'm sorry about your daughter." and Armstrong's reply is "I'm sorry, is there a question?"), some training footage (which will become pertinent later), the deaths of fellow astronauts Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, and Armstrong's pick as commander of Gemini 8, which would prove an essential stepping-stone to the Apollo moon landing; It's mission is to rendezvous and dock with a previously launched Agena target, which Armstrong pulls off smoothly until he's out of communication with Mission Control, at which point the two locked vehicles begin to spin wildly out of control, and Armstrong makes the decision to separate from the target vehicle thinking that it has malfunctioned.
Once that happens, the capsule begins to spin faster—it wasn't a fault with the Agena, it is with their own capsule, and as it begins to spin faster and faster, approaching speeds that will cause the astronauts to black out, Armstrong shuts down his main thruster systems on the ship, suspecting them as the problem, and uses the forward thrusters for re-entry to bring the vehicle out of its death-tumble, effectively ending the mission as required by NASA protocols. The mission is seen as both a success and a failure—yes, its objective was achieved, but it is aborted early, days before its scheduled conclusion, lest the already used thrusters become essential for an eventual return to Earth .
Once Armstrong is cleared of any failure on his part—he is, in fact, lauded for saving his own life and that of his crew-mate, Dave Scott, he is then used as a NASA ambassador among politicians, and it is on one of those junkets he hears of the Apollo 1 fire, which costs the lives of veteran astronauts Gus Grissom, his neighbor Ed White and Roger Chaffee.***** He also narrowly escapes his own fiery death by his last minute ejection from a lunar landing trainer that malfunctions and loses control.
The rest of the film follows his subsequent training and command for Apollo 11, which, planned to be the first lunar landing if all the objectives are met, is the most prized assignment among the astronauts, but bares heavy responsibility and scrutiny, something that only makes Armstrong withdraw further into his work and away from his family.
The work is isolating, and, given all the unknowns about the lunar surface and whether diseases might be brought back to Earth from contact with the soil, the crew is kept in hermetically sealed chambers for press conferences and maintain a restricted access. As if the suits and pressurized conditions aren't enough, it seems like layers upon layers are being put between Armstrong and his family. At one point, just before leaving for the isolation before the launch, Armstrong's wife Janet demands that he sits down with his sons and explains to them the danger of his mission...and that he might not come back, something Armstrong wants to avoid talking about given the company line of "highest confidence in the Mission." It goes awkwardly and with not the best of resolutions. No one is exactly comforted.
The tensest part of the film is, of course, the Moon Landing itself, as Armstrong has to pilot where no pilot has gone before to a landing field that is nothing but pot-holes that could break one of the lander's spindly legs, all the time that alarms are going off warning that the computer can't process all of the information being funneled to it, the lander is low of fuel and running on fumes, and its auto-pilot decides that it's going to land in a large crater strewn with crippling boulders. Armstrong has to yank control from the targeted systems, try and overshoot the crater's lip, draining the fuel even more before touching down on another world. It was tense when it was happening live on television 49 years ago, and it's just as tense when Chazelle has his choice of angles and a galloping soundtrack from his composer Jason Hurwitz.
Damien Chazelle has now made three movies (he's now 33)—Whiplash, First Man, and La La Land (which was made during the long and complicated pre-production of First Man) and those three movies could not be more different in style, genre, and energy, but each one is a confident and accomplished film about obsession and sacrifice in pursuit of a cherished goal. The other films were wild, fast-moving things that frequently soared, where First Man—which is all about soaring—has its most sublime moments in stillness and incredible silence. One can quibble with Gosling's performance as Armstrong being too morose, generally—one can't find any fault in Claire Foy's performance...at all—as Armstrong may have been restrained but hardly the "Debbie Downer" one might assume from this movie. But, as a portrait of a sacrificing hero, First Man quite triumphantly communicates the measure of a measured man.
* Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. bought the rights to "First Man" in 2003, but the film never moved forward until acquired by Steven Spielberg for his Dreamworks Studio.
** Although Armstrong's boyhood fascination with model airplanes is hinted at by the sound of toy engines over the Universal/Dreamworks logos before the first image of the film—in the cockpit of an X-15—appears.
**** "Writing to silence" is a lovely little phrase that you can't "google" to any accuracy, but refers to the writerly act of speculation when there isn't anyone alive to provide the inspiration...or rebuttal...to what you commit to the page.
***** Okay, let's talk about the "flag" controversy. It's a non-issue, like complaining about no hedge monsters in The Shining. There are flags and stars and stripes all over First Man. But, for some reason...for some people...this discerning mature portrait of an American hero succeeds or fails on whether there's a scene of planting the American flag on the Moon (we DO see it, by the way, the flag, I mean). Okay, maybe these "critics" have their priorities (or something) "out of whack," but the filmmakers solved a potential problem that would REALLY get folks up in arms. One of the things that Armstrong revealed in the biography was that when he and Aldrin launched from the Moon's surface, the blast of the engine basically flattened the flag and knocked it to the ground. It wasn't stuck in very well as the astronauts had a hell of a time trying to hammer it deep enough into the clay-like lunar surface to make it anything other than precarious. Maybe nobody should mention it. Maybe those folks should find a way to get there and fix it. Maybe they should take a trip to the Moon.
The second group of selected astronauts responding to a direction to "stare off in the distance." Armstrong is in the upper-left looking up with his mouth agape.
*****
The ill-fated "Apollo 1" crew—White, Grissom and Chaffee—take a dim view of a model of their Apollo space capsule. At another time, Grissom hung a lemon on the capsule under construction.
***
The Armstrong's before NASA: Neil, son Eric, daughter Karen, Janet
For Sale on Craigslist: "Vintage" Android: Recycled Parts, Slightly Worn and Rusty,Old Programming, Not Very Expressive—Would Make a Credible Republican Presidential Candidate. or Artificial Un-intelligence As if one needed another reason not to visit San Francisco this movie summer,Terminator Genisystears up the Golden City that has been already been flattened by the Mother of All Earthquakes, invasions by apes, Godzilla and kaiju, dropping star ships, and everything from A (an atom bomb in A View to a Kill) to X (X-men: Last Stand). This time the threat that San Francisco faces is from a movie that seems hell-bent on imploding itself out of existence through that most feared Weapon of Mass Destruction to movie-geeks: continuity errors. We know the story already, as they've told it every—single—movie:*a miltary-designed artificial intelligence named "Skynet" goes a little "off-program" and takes the "deterrent-idea" a little too far by destroying the one thing that causes all the wars in the first place—us pesky humans. "Skynet" launches a planet-wide nuclear attack, and after the conflagration of "Judgment Day," hunts the non-crispy humans into extinction. The humans' only hope is their rebel leader John Connor (he's been played by Edward Furlong as a kid and Michael Edwards, Nick Stahl, and Christian Bale as an adult), who, after the machines invent a way to time-travel, sends one of his operatives Kyle Reese (used to be: Michael Biehn, now is: Jai Courtney) back in time to protect Connor's mother, Sarah (then: Linda Hamilton; now Emilia Clarke) who is under threat from a "Terminator" (the once and future Arnold Schwarzenegger) missioned to kill Connor before he is even conceived. Ironically (HEDGED SPOILER) the plan ensures that John Connor is born, despite the death of Reese while defending Sarah. Silly robots.
Good Idea for a Movie. Bad Idea for a sequel, which are variations of the same theme as Skynet sends ever better, sleeker and less Austrian robots to do the job, and the rebels send their own increasingly aging "terminators" to stop them. Surprisingly the films were not called "Try, Try Again" and "The Robots Don't Realize if You Do the Same Thing Over and Over Expecting a Different Outcome, You Have a Screw Loose," or even "Another Waste of Time-Travel." But, if Skynet is dumb, the humans are even dumber: every time they fix it so that Skynet doesn't come about, it still manages to come about.
As it does here. We go over the same Skynet story for the fourth time, and then, again, Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to save his mother...again. We even get a reprise of the first film where "The Terminator" (a CGI-zenegger) confronts the same 1984 vintage heavy-metalers and tells them he "vahnts" their clothes. Then something different actually happens: he is confronted by a figure in a hoodie carrying a gun. Low and behold it's an old Arnold Schwarzenegger, who blasts away at his earlier version, and they get into a knock-down-dragged-on fight between "new" terminator and "old" terminator, with the grayer version getting the worst of it, until he/it is rescued by...Sarah Connor? Huh?
With Terminator: Genysis, Arnold Schwarzenegger again announces he'll be back (and it's never sounded more like a threat). The former California Governor—who can't credibly run for President as a Republican because The Terminator always enters this country illegally—is looking a little worse for wear. It seems he's been around for a bit longer than the movie-going audience has previously suspected....approximately since 1973 as he's seen rescuing Sarah as a child in a flashback (the whole thing is a flashback, really, if your perspective is from the movie's starting point). And ever since, has been giving her a crash-course in bad-assery. So, things have actually changed from the original "Terminator" movie. Why, Sarah Connor never even goes through the "big hair" period of the first film.
So far, so odd. Let us file away the original movie's notion that time-travel is limited in the future and that if Skynet is ultimately defeated, who or what sent this "Olde Arnold" back to the past (earlier than the ones already sent) should be a mystery, if not an impossibility. Skynet wouldn't have the ability to send it as their precious time-travel gear has been captured, and the rebels would have no reason to because the war is over. File this, because it will become irrelevant and minor compared with the whoppers to come.
Eventually, Reese hooks up with Connor and "Olde Arnold" just in time to defeat another blast from the future—one of the liquid metal terminators from T2 (played by Byung-hun Lee) that seemed unstoppable in that film but is pretty much dispatched fairly early here. At which point, "Olde Arnold"—called "The Protector" or as Sarah Connor calls him "Pops" (yeesh!)—reveals that he has also built a time-machine in 1987 (evidently because he was too busy in the other movies to think of creating one then). Reese and Connor decide to hop forward in time—which, mind you, doesn't exist yet—to right before "Judgment Day" to stop Skynet from launching its missiles. "Pops" says he can't travel in time, only meat-people can (Oh, yeah? How'd he get there in the first place?), but he'll just live for the 30 years or so to catch up with them.** They jump in time to 2017 and make plans to destroy Skynet, which is now called "Genysis"—and it's no longer a military brain-hive, it's an inter-connectivity system for cell-phones, tablets, and the next thing in your junk-drawer. And...funny thing...one of the technical developers for Genysis is...John Connor. Yup, seems that John Connor went back in ti-.......
Wait, wait, wait. Rewind. Remember, the original Terminator movie? (I'm not talking to you kids—you haven't seen it because there's no CGI in it and the FX look "stoopid"). The whole thing about it was that it had that delicious irony that by sending a terminator back in time to kill John Connor's mother ultimately led to John Connor being born. Reese and Connor have the inevitable "fleeing-unstoppable-killing-machines-makes-us-really-horny-moment" and, as a result, John Connor, rebel leader, is conceived.
Unless, I missed something (and I have to admit, this movie made me want to nod off several places), there was no FUKMMURH moment in this movie, and so as a result, the conception of John Connor in 1987 did not occur. At which point (for anyone who has seen the original) this movie...should be over. O-ver.
"I'm John Connor. These are not scars. These are gaps in logic."
No John Connor. So, then no war with the machines (because as this movie would have it, no Genisys). No resistance. No time-travel. No Connor sending Kyle Reese back in time. Nothing. There's no John Connor, so what the hell is he doing in 2017 (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE TRAILERS), having been sent back in time as a killer-cyborg/technical engineer? The movie sets him up as the bad guy, but if the movie were to follow this timeline, he shouldn't even exist...because he'd never been conceived. Never been born. End of movie, right?
Yeah, and this couldn't happen, either...
But, no, it keeps plodding along, not imagining that the very reason for its existence never happened. Unless there's been a second Immaculate Conception, which I don't think James Cameron believes in (and I know for damn sure Schwarzenegger doesn't), the movie should just stop dead in the projector with the forward time-jump, followed by the ushers with the brooms and rolling garbage receptacle. And see, they've managed to completely eliminate the whole franchise in this one dumb movie. It's one thing to change the space-time continuum in a re-boot (Hello, Star Trek), but make sure that you don't eliminate a character that sets the thing in motion—and no, I'm not talking Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor—from the start. Massively, unequivocably...dumb. Blame screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier and director Alan Taylor, who couldn't have an explanation other than "shit happens." Shit does indeed happen. And this movie is the proof.
Rest in pieces
* Not that the original was...wholly original: It's part of record that Harlan Ellison was paid a bunch of money (which he can't disclose) and a special credit tele-cine'd on prints of the film ("...gratefully acknowledge his work.") because he threatened to sue Hemdale and Orion Pictures when he saw an early screening of the film and saw that the opening sequence had a lot of similarity to "Soldier," an episode of "The Outer Limits" that he wrote in the early 1960's. Cameron wasn't happy about it, but didn't want to be sued by the corporations if they lost, so it was all settled out of court. It's claimed on the internets that there's a similarity to "Demon with a Glass Hand," another episode of "OT" written by Ellison, but it is a little more far afield...until this movie. ** Fulfilling the original premise of Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand," one of the "Outer Limits" episodes mentioned above.
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