(no subject)

I saw Terminator: Genisys on Sunday, mostly because it was a fast day and that limited my interest in doing anything more active. As I have mentioned, with the reclining seats at my local movie theater, I will gladly see even terrible movies. Terminator: Genisys was terrible.



To start with, WTF was with the title? Terminator has this uncomfortable relationship to Biblical legend... John Connor is a Messianic or sometimes Anti-Messianic figure, and the last Terminator movie, which I haven't seen, was called Salvation. We all know this, http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/100698.htmlI made a vid about this. So Genisys, the weird techno-pun on the book of Genesis, is an obvious Biblical reference. But it's not clear what the reference is.

In TSCC, the Eden imagery belongs to Derek Reese, who grew up East of Eden and was blessed/cursed to return to the Garden. The show consciously played with this, dwelling on the way that circumstances John took for granted were paradisical miracles for Derek. (I have also worked on a vid about this theme. What can I say, I love Biblical themes in Terminator.)

But in Terminator: Genisys, even though Kyle Reese spends nearly the whole film in this Eden, the movie is not at all interested in seeing him adapt. So the title Genisys is not clearly a callback to that.

For a while, I thought it might be a Paradise Lost theme with Kyle Reese as Lucifer cast out of Skynet's heaven into the past, but the thematic development on that theme was too lazy to merit mention.

Otherwise, I'm lost. There's a muddled John as Messiah of Skynet-God idea that doesn't really line up with anything else in the series. Genisys in the actuality in the film is a somewhat childish proto-skynet as Microsoft Cloud, the anxiety of Star Wars and Cold War weapons gone rogue transmuting into our current anxiety about the omnipresence of corporate control of technology. (Literally transmuting... Genisys is created, with Time Traveling Skynet's help, by the son of Cyberdyne's Miles Dyson.) At best, the resonance I can find for the name is Genisys as a Beginning, but it's not even really a beginning in a movie that starts timelinewise with a T-800 rescuing a 9 year old Sarah Connor.


Otherwise? The idea that Skynet sent Terminators back in time to when Sarah was nine and tried to kill her is fascinating on so many levels.

First, because it suggests a progression of the tactical back and forth between Skynet and John Connor that is just interesting in a student-of-war way, no matter how horrific it is. That each is probing the others' defenses and searching for weak points and striking ruthlessly at the heart of any weak point available.

Second, because the resulting Sarah we see is really interesting conceptually. She has grown up knowing that she is 'supposed' to be the mother of the savior of mankind. That she is 'supposed' to meet Kyle Reese, fall in love with him, have sex with him, get pregnant with his son, and then Kyle Reese is 'supposed' to die. And if she prevents any of these things from happening, humanity dies. So for this Sarah Connor, wondering about fate is the most eminently practical thing imaginable, because she knows the life she is predestined for, and it is stark and terrible, and yet anything other than that life is worse. Fate has taken away her bodily autonomy.

And she hates this, she hates that she lost her family when she was nine, hates that she was raised by an absolutely absurd machine she calls 'Pops', hates that her life is not her own, but at the same time, she has adapted to it. She's had fifteen years to get used to the idea that this is the shape of her life, and she has become good at it. She's good at fighting Metal, good at out-thinking Skynet, good at pulling people together to fight, good at being Sarah Fucking Connor. And when she meets Kyle Reese, she is excited, because he is everything her life has been building towards, and she is nervous, because that is a really adult thing to confront, and she is still to some degree a child.

But for this to work as designed, the acting needs to be better than it was. Sarah needs to meet Kyle Reese and, even though she's steeled herself against any kind of emotional response, even though she's trying to force herself to 'love' him mechanically so that she can save the future, she needs to fall in love with him anyway, so that she has to fight these two forces within herself, the force that believes in subordinating her emotions for the sake of humanity and the force that is hopelessly letting her emotions pull her toward (or possibly away from) the fate that she has grown up believing is unavoidable.

Emilia Clarke is a good enough actress to pull this off. Jai Courtney is not. His Kyle Reese is so bland, so emotionally empty, so ridiculously and pointlessly devoted to the idea of Sarah Connor, that Sarah falling in love with him is utterly meaningless.



And then there's the film's time travel. Terminator time travel never makes sense, and that's fine. It's never clear if it wants stable time loops or branching timelines, and that's fine, that's part of the ropes when it comes to being in Terminator fandom. But in this movie, Sarah is so nervous about the falling in love with Kyle Reese thing that they timeskip over the birth of John Connor, without even questioning its potential impact. Later, there's a little babble about how Kyle and Sarah have become islands in the time stream, able to affect it without being affected by it, but I found that unclear and hard to swallow even in the circumstances. The tropey All You Zombies elegance of the first movie's Sarah/Kyle romance erodes deeper and deeper into silliness with each successive iteration.



The good things about the movie were limited to Arnold being ridiculous and awesome, Emilia Clarke being badass, and some surprisingly good comic relief from JK Simmons, as a cop who'd encountered Reese and Connor in 1984 and spent the rest of his career chasing after evidence of their existence.

(no subject)

At Loncon I went to this panel on the state of British SF, because I figured it'd be guaranteed to be insidery and useful as an American looking for recs on up and coming British writers who haven't crossed the pond yet. Instead, it was one of my least favorite panels, lowlighted by an editor repeating the nonsense that the only reason women aren't published as frequently as men is because they don't submit as much work of sufficient quality. The panel talked broadly about 'trends', which was stupid and useless and usually ultimately ended with them conceding that the 'trend' they were talking about was inconsistent and could equally be argued the other way. They barely mentioned authors and mostly the authors they mentioned were big names who everyone knows. The one useful recommendation I got was for Chris Beckett, and it slipped out in exactly the way I'd hoped the whole panel would go- as an off-handed reference to a writer I gather is a pretty big deal in the UK.

Beckett's Dark Eden, which I read last week, won the Clarke Award from the BSFA in 2012, so clearly it wasn't slipping under any radars, but I'd never heard of Beckett before that panel. I am now grateful to the panel for at least that, because the book is spectacular.

It's a story about the descendants of a couple that was stranded on a remote and strange alien world with no way to communicate offworld and no way to get offworld. 150 years later (200 wombs: This alien planet has no sun, and thus no way to account days or years other than through human biological processes. Days have been replaced by a count of 'wakings', months by 'periods', years by 'wombs', which are of course roughly 3/4 of an Earth year long.)

In the ensuing 150 years, there is cultural and linguistic drift, which Beckett captures incredibly vividly and creatively. I particularly love his reinvented vocabulary for concepts that the Family had lost and then rediscovered. For example, they had legends that back on Earth, people rode on the back of animals named horses. When they discover that animals on Eden can be domesticated, they coin the phrase "make a horse" to describe the process of domestication.

But it's also, besides being great at being a novel of ideas, a great novel of character. Beckett's characters are wonderfully individuated as they struggle with questions of morality, leadership, love and family that are potently Biblical without seeming a bit old-fashioned or allegorical. Nobody's choices are right all the time. The novel's protagonists are achingly flawed and painfully aware of it, and painfully aware of the costs of their errors. Which has me really excited to read the just-out sequel, which apparently jumps forward another few hundred years to show us just how fucked up society got as a result of our heroes' decisions.