Trick or Trailers: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Sure, I hear you: "T2 isn't a horror movie!" But with positive early word coming in on Terminator: Dark Fate, I've got Terminator on the brain at the moment. Besides, T2 got plenty of coverage in FANGORIA back in the day so that alone makes this a valid candidate for Trick or Trailers! You can't argue with a Fango cover - it makes any film legit!

And as trailers go, you've got to admit, this one's pretty awesome:



This trailer brings me back to a time that doesn't really exist anymore, back when the summer movie season was THE time of year that genre fans - with their subscriptions to mags like Starlog, Cinefantastique and Fangoria - looked forward to, the months when studios would bring out their big guns and everything else would have to step aside to clear the way for this year's blockbuster behemoths.



Now, of course, that time is year round. The summer movie season no longer is confined to the summer. We live in a world where what was once nerd fare begrudgingly tolerated by the adults in the room is now the center of popular culture.

Once upon a time, a Terminator sequel represented a genuine event that the whole movie year could legitimately revolve around. Now Dark Fate is simply one of many big budget franchise films. It's a drop in the bucket. Practically small potatoes in the scheme of things.

The world has changed so much that rather than be a summer tentpole, Dark Fate is opening at the beginning of November, on Halloween weekend. That's a release date that would have, in years past, been reserved for the low rent likes of Vampire in Brooklyn, not a new Terminator movie.

In the summer of 1991, there was nothing that could even touch T2, spectacle-wise. Absolutely nothing. It was the summer of The Rocketeer, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Point Break, if you even want to try and call that a "summer," for crying out loud. Now it's a far more competitive market where spectacle is commonplace.

Of course, that does not sit well with some people.

We've all seen the recent headlines, right?

I have to think about what Joe Dante said in Maitland McDonagh's 1995 book Filmmaking on the Fringe, talking about how his career path co-incided with the rise of what were formally B-movies to A-pictures: "All of a sudden, ideas that would once only have been considered suitable for second features or serials were being blown up to A-feature proportions. If you told someone twenty-five years ago that there was going to be a multimillion-dollar version of Dick Tracy or The Lone Ranger or The Addams Family or any of those things that were once considered cultural detritus when I was a kid, nobody would have believed you." And this is back in the mid-'90s we're talking about. It should be no surprise that, twentysomething years later, things have only gone much further down that road.

Much like the upgrade from the T-800 to the T-1000, we're always looking to build a better machine and improve on last year's model.

That's why we've gone from this:

To this:

To this:

To this:

You can't stop progress, right? You can bitch about it and you can absolutely kick and scream about it, but you can't actually fight it. Fighting the future, well, that's the kind of stuff that only happens in the movies.

Avatar

It's often been reported that writer/director James Cameron has a something of a big ego. I can't personally verify whether this is true or not but after seeing his latest opus, the long-in-development Avatar, I'm gonna go ahead and say that any ego he has is well-deserved. While there's never any excuse to be a jerk, in regards to Cameron thinking he's the shit when it comes to making movies, he's clear to have an enormous head. To watch Avatar is to watch Cameron mopping the fucking floor with everyone else out there.

Some reviewers have been churlish towards Avatar's storyline, saying that it lacks originality, but while its story of an Earthman who becomes assimilated into an alien culture and rises to be a leader of his adoptive people has plenty of precedents in pulp literature and film, it's how Cameron pulls these elements together that matters. He's out to make a film that is timeless, mythic, and universal in its appeal so it should be no surprise that a story with such broad intentions would have roots in other tales that have been told many times over. Originality is not the most important element of a work of fiction. What makes a story interesting is not whether it's ever been told before but how well it's told and as a storyteller, Cameron is no slouch.

As for Avatar's much-touted technological advances, I can't say how far this film moves the industry ahead or whether this is a 'game-changer' for filmmakers but I can say I've never seen anything quite so jaw-dropping as what Cameron and his FX team deliver here. It's not about money shots or specific moments, it's about everything - the whole package. This is one of the most immersive, intricate environments ever created for film. The painstaking attention to detail and the verisimilitude of everything we see here - machinery, plants, wildlife, aliens - is astonishing. This is a film that single-handedly decimates nostalgia for the methods of the past and leaves you hungry to see what else can be realized with these tools.

There's a moment in Avatar relatively early on where the character that Sam Worthington plays, Jake Sully, is lost in the forest of Pandora at night in his avatar body and he's prowling among the trees and vines while holding a torch while alien animals are encroaching all around him and I couldn't help but marvel at this moment, how every single detail of this complicated scene (on top of the fact that it's at night and that it has to be 'lit' by animated flames) is so beautifully rendered. There's many, many moments like this in Avatar where I sat amazed at the fact that everything on the screen was born entirely in a computer. I thought I was accustomed to CG animation by now but this is far beyond anything I've seen. The character work on the Na'vi alone is breathtaking. The love interest for Jake, Neytrini (Zoe Saldana), is such a convincing presence that I can imagine a day when the film industry starts to give CG acting awards. Neytrini goes through every possible emotion in this film from joy to anger to sorrow and never once do her facial expressions look like something that came out of a computer. There's real acting at play here that goes beyond Saldana's vocal work. The illusion of life that is put into Neytrini's face (and those of the other Na'vi) by Cameron's animators is miraculous.

If it sounds like I'm writing a love letter to this movie, well, I am. What baffles me is how anyone else who loves movies wouldn't do the same. I can understand someone not being interested in Avatar to begin with or to be skeptical of Cameron's ability to pull off his ambitions but it dismays me to see the dismissive attitude of some reviewers towards Avatar where they're engaged in petty carping about the storyline or the dialogue (neither of which are sub-par) and giving just a back-handed acknowledgement of its technical accomplishments. When these are the same web critics who can't say enough about a film like Punisher: War Zone (which hey, I enjoyed myself), it's galling to see them piss on a movie that's genuinely trying (with success) to expand what's possible on film. Dismissing Avatar because the story isn't appropriately complicated or adult by some imagined yardstick is like dismissing, say, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) because the characters are perhaps a little flatly written.

Some might say that effects are just window dressing or eye-candy but I disagree - they're a part of what makes movies a transportive experience. I'm sure that Up In The Air is a fine film that speaks to our current times, but does it have any battles between man-made war machines and primitive alien races who fly through the sky on the backs of dragons? I'm guessing no. Movies can speak to our times and to our everyday concerns but they can also take us out of our lives, out of our bodies, and let us experience realms purely of the imagination. And as a means to enable that, Avatar is as deeply felt and important as any work of art.