We Need To Be A Little More Constructive Here, Okay?

After watching the first Terminator film, I felt an almost overwhelming urge to watch the first sequel, that which filled so many days for me back in my childhood. And so watch it I did.

Like with series such as The Godfather and the Aliens series, the Terminator series is another where the second film is possibly better than the already acclaimed and successful lead-off. With Terminator 2: Judgement Day, I'm going to come right out and say that it is definitely better than the original. Set a number of years after the original, the 1991 film focuses on John Connor (Ed Furlong) and his mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton), with John as a rebellious juvenile in foster care, convinced his mother, now locked up in a mental facility, is crazy for her beliefs regarding her initial Terminator encounter.

However, when a second version of the initial Terminator who had been sent to kill his mother (Arnold Schwarzenneger reprising) comes after John he is quickly convinced, and the two set about escaping from the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a far more advanced terminator, rescuing Sarah and destroying the SkyNet software and hardware that enable the entire future to happen in the manner outlined by the Terminator.

Terminator 2 is far more action-packed and the effects really ramp it up. However, it is also a great story well told and well acted from all involved. Furlong does really well as the young kid (watching it I remembered the phenomenal crush I had on him when the film was still new - I would have been about the same age as he was in the film whilst this crush was going on, so I promise it wasn't anything untoward...) and Hamilton pulls in a stunning futuristic action fantasy performance on par with Sigourney Weaver's in the second Alien film (or Aliens as it is otherwise known...) Schwarzenneger has more lines but it is ostensibly the same characterless character, and Patrick is suitably unemotional and cold to watch.

James Cameron flexed his muscle with this film (at the time, the first film to cost more than US$100mil to produce) and showed that he is very strong when he's working with the right material, which is pretty much all he ever does. He cut his teeth with the first one, and rammed it home with the second. Everything works, which gives good reason to the fact that Terminator 2 won four Oscars from six nominations while the first won zero from zero (apparently the first and I believe only time a sequel has won an Oscar where the original hadn't even been nominated.) Truly entertaining from start to finish, 5 stars.

Your Clothes... Give Them To Me Now.

It suddenly dawned on me, reading something about Avatar the other day and the references to previous James Cameron movies, that I didn’t think I’d ever seen the original Terminator film from 1984. I know I’ve seen Terminator 2: Judgement Day numerous times. I think we had that one taped and would watch it over school holidays - it’s a great film. I also remember at the time thinking about the fact that I’d never seen the original, but it kept slipping my mind to actually check it out. Maybe I had seen it - I’d never know unless I checked out the DVD and revisited it.

Turns out, I’d never seen it. I’d never seen the original Terminator. I’ll be damned.

Cameron co-wrote and directed this breakout sci-fi smash, putting Arnold Schwarzenegger into probably his most famous role and making Linda Hamilton a household name. For a while. Hamilton plays Sarah Connor, soon to become mother of John Connor, father of the anti-machine resistance movement in the 2020s. The machines send a terminator (Schwarzenegger - man, that’s an irritating name to type out. Props to all journalists covering Californian politics) back in time to assassinate Sarah before she can give birth to their arch-nemesis John. The humans manage to sneak in someone to protect her also, sending back soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to make sure the terminator can’t have his way.

From this prospect comes a fairly typical action film with a love story undercurrent between Sarah and Kyle. Hopefully nothing is given away by giving away the fact, 26 years after the film’s initial release, that this love affair blossoms and is, in fact, the relationship that begets young John. So, John has sent his own father back in time to protect his mother, posing some intriguing and paradoxical circular ideas of how the past and future could possible interact considering neither the past nor the future could exist without the other. But how could John have sent Kyle back to save his mother if John in fact wouldn’t exist without Kyle having gone back? How could Kyle have begat John in what is, for him, the past if, without being sent back in time by John, who can’t actually exist considering the fact that Kyle isn’t sent back in time until John is, what 43 or something. See what I mean? Best not to think too hard about this and just enjoy the neat conclusions.

It is a rollicking romp or a film. Hamilton is soft and gentle, stepping up rarely and quite emotional throughout the film, really relying on Kyle to see her through the trauma of being pursued by Schwarzenegger’s fairly impressive force. Cameron knows how to keep his stories rolling, and even at this time shows an adeptness with special effects. Sure, they look clunky compared to what could be achieved now, but this was almost three decades ago! Give the man some credit. It’s pretty damned impressive. Schwarzenegger, for his part, plays the role perfectly, considering he doesn’t need to do much more than hulk around and shoot stuff, muttering the occasional dry line of not-really-dialogue, and by nature of his being can’t really exhibit much in the way of expression. Biehn, who must have been quite the heartthrob back in the 80s considering I found him very attractive now despite the hairdo, was suitably dramatic and mysteriously knowing with his representations to Sarah.

All in all, it’s a good film. I knew the story of it, just from picking it up from the sequel and word of mouth, so it was no revelation of understanding as to the story of the terminator and the second installment. But it was nice to finally see it, an enjoyable action film that isn’t as good as the second one but is a tidy little start. 4 stars.

It Seems Diplomacy Has Failed.

What else is there to say about the behemoth that is Avatar? It has recently become the fastest film to ever pass US$550mil at the US box office, is only the fifth film to ever take more than US$1bil at the global box office, and as of today (presumably, though definitely by tomorrow) it will have overtaken James Cameron's previous directorial feature film Titanic to become the highest grossing film of all time on the world stage. (Let's not start talking about adjusted grosses or inflated ticket prices for the 3D presentation, because that's all academic, and nor shall we bring in the fact that major markets such as China have greatly opened up since the time of Titanic. Just let the glory ride. After all, it was only a couple of years ago I remember reading an article stating that the honour of box office champion would remain with Titanic for many years to come due to the changing nature of film performance and blockbuster patterns, something that Avatar has just shot down.) It's also the first film to stay at number one of the US box office for more than five weeks since The Sixth Sense did it back in 1999. It's one of the most expensive films ever made (though the actual cost of it is impossible to find out.) And this is all purely fiscal. The film is also extraordinarily groundbreaking for its visuals - each frame of the CGI world took an average of somewhere between forty and fifty man hours to render. Each. Frame.

This film has been the subject of so much publicity for so many years that I'm not going to go into plot, I'm not going to touch on the politics, if you don't know it by now, you're obviously living under a rock. In fact, if you haven't seen it by now you must be living under a rock. And I'd strongly advise you to get out from under that rock and go and see it immediately in a large cinema with those 3D glasses on. It will take your breath away.


Cameron has acquitted himself quite nicely. This film could have gone either way. If the technology hadn't been up to it, the film would have been a disaster. There's no way one could get so involved with a world and a people unless they looked as good as they did. The landscape created for Pandora is phenomenally realistic, awe-inspiring. I want to all of the visual team Oscars, and then knight them all, and then marry them all. Weta and ILM were both responsible (the larger part, I believe, came from Weta) and no superlative does justice to the splendour witnessed on screen. And the film itself, reasonably basic and run of the mill as it is, managed to live up to years of hype and a month of incredible performance on everybody's lips quite nicely - I had such sky-high expectations that were not only met, but exceeded. Those scenes in the Hallelujah Mountains - breathtaking. It did, I think, owe some debts to the world created by George Lucas (without the CGI power of today) in the original Star Wars films. There were many moments I watched and had flashbacks to the many times I saw those films as children. But that was actually kind of touching - an homage to another blockbuster groundbreaker.

This totally doesn't do it justice. Imagine this image, but about a million times better. Or a billion!

Sigourney Weaver as the scientist in charge of the Avatar operation is fabulous, as always. I've long been a fan of hers, and lately she has been doing amazing things for me. How Snow Cake got ignored a few years back is beyond me. Giovanni Ribisi as the head of the company mounting the mining operation creating the conflict in the film is fantastic. I think he is a terrific supporting actor, though I've never seen him carry a film as a lead. Keep him in supporting and I'll keep turning out to see him. Stephen Lang pulls of the role as the head of the US Marine unit on Pandora with amazing style. It's a role that quite easily could have been overplayed and hammed up, but he kept it to the minimum amount of hamming he could get away with and leant his character an air of arrogance and determination the fits perfectly with the setting and story. Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, the prominent Na'vi character, does incredible work considering her character is all motion-captured. (And that motion capture! It's really them on screen! Really! You can see it in their faces! Their expressions! Holy shit!) Sam Worthington has never been my favourite actor, though I'll commend his efforts in Somersault, but he pulls off the role of Jake Sully fine, probably because he doesn't really need to do much. He plays a marine well, though he couldn't quite nail the accent. And maybe I've seen him in too many Aussie movies, because I kept expecting him to pull out that hysterical line in his broad accent from his role as Macbeth, 'Is that a dagger I see before me?' (you have to see the film to understand that hysteria, but I wouldn't recommend it as I just don't think it's any good.)


James Horner's score is a James Horner Score For A Major Motion Picture, which means it's sweeping and majestic and doesn't really try anything new. It suits the film, but I'm not about to go out and buy it. And besides, it's all about those visuals. Not to say the rest of the film doesn't matter (if the visuals had been that stunning but it was let down in story and performance, it would be a shit film), but it is definitely the major element. And I'm going to give James Cameron full credit and a hats off for managing to not only conceptualise it, but then to impart that concept to his team, reign in all the things that could go wrong and make it work, and then inject the humanity of the story and the truth of the performance.


Seriously, go and see it. I'm sure it's going to win a bunch of Oscars (though my pick for Best Picture and Best Director is still probably The Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow, which is actually looking more and more likely as the days go on), and deservedly so. It's a mammoth blockbuster making packets of money that I'm not going to object to. It deserves its acclaim. Bring it.


5 stars.

Holy Blue Gemini.

If all estimates hold up, Avatar just became only the fifth film ever (with the others being The Dark Knight, the last Lord of the Rings, the second Pirates of the Caribbean film and Titanic) to crack through the US$1billion dollar mark at the global box office. Oh, did I mention that it's only just finished its third weekend in release?

That is FREAKING huge. After the biggest third weekend in the States on record (US$23mil more than the old title holder, Spider-Man) it's looking damn likely that the film will hit US$500mil in the States alone. I think it will probably crack The Dark Knight to become number 2, though a number of people think that's a risky prediction. It has a shot at Titanic's record, something I didn't think we'd be saying for a few years yet, on the domestic front, though I'm not going to really make a call either way until I start to see what it is capable of grossing outside of the holiday period. Once people go back to work and school it should fall pretty heavily, but if the January releases don't provide anything to really drag people into competing cinemas, Avatar could just get there.

Can it get another US$800mil worldwide to beat Titanic? That's going to be a big task for it. Though if I'm predicting US$200mil more just from the States, it could, theoretically, happen. Personally, at this stage, I think I'm going to say that it won't get there. It'll give it a red hot go, but I don't think so.

Meanwhile, everyone involved is basking in the glory of knowing they were right. And James Cameron is basking in the glory of pretty much being god.