TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.7 KB | 144 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 55

Half a Terrific Terminator


Sure, he can save the planet. But can he save megabudget action
movies?

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles


    You are advised to wear "a sun block of 2,000" on Aug.
29, 1997. Otherwise you will be among the 3 billion people
fried in a nuclear war triggered by some very smart, nasty
computers. Lands will be leveled. Bodies will crumble like
burned paper. Corrosive gales will surge across the earth. This
ultimate special effect will come to pass . . . unless three
little people -- actually two little people and a big burly
cyborg -- can do some serious computer hacking.

    That's the doomsday prospectus outlined in Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, James Cameron's sequel to his wonderfully
reverberant 1984 thriller, which did decent business and minted
Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robust robot star. A few Hollywood
moguls project another, more dire scenario for T2. Their
nightmare goes like this: after opening this week to long lines
and muscular grosses, the film will go flabby. Audiences will
quickly turn to cuddlier movie diversions. The action-adventure
genre, which has worldwide appeal but whose budgets have been
ballooning until they are ready to burst, will finally be
terminated. And Carolco, T2's producer, will be left with a $100
million egg on its face.

    The all-time spendthrift film is still Cleo patra, which
cost $44 million in 1963, or $194 million in 1991 dollars. Even
today, though, $100 million is not peanuts for a movie. (The
first Terminator cost a chintzy $6.5 million.) The T2 price tag
may have achieved its round figure only in the gossip that
passes for hard news in Hollywood. "I wish I'd had $100
million," Cameron says with the wistfulness of a teenager who
got a Porsche for Christmas, but without the air bag.

    Amid all the rumpus about T2's presumed profligacy, four
movie rules should be remembered. First: the cost of the product
is not passed on to the consumer. Moviegoers pay as much for a
ticket to a no-budget documentary like Paris Is Burning as they
do for admission to any superspectacle. Second: Carolco has
nearly made back its T2 investment by selling off theatrical,
video cassette and pay-TV rights around the world. Third: the
idea is to put the money on the screen. T2, with its mercurial
visual wizardry that leaves audiences oohing, does that and then
some. And finally: Cameron's previous trio of popular, dazzling
fantasies (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss) reveal him as an
artist-entertainer whose pictures deserve to be judged not on
their budgets but on their merits. That is the only bottom line
that audiences need care about.

    So what have Cameron and his crew of thousands come up
with? A humongous, visionary parable that intermittently
enthralls and ultimately disappoints. T2 is half of a terrific
movie -- the wrong half. For a breathless first hour, the film
zips along in a textbook display of plot planting and
showmanship. But then it stumbles over its own ambitions before
settling for a conventional climax with a long fuse. It's a
truism, and a true one, that people remember the first lines of
novels and the last scenes of movies. The best films accelerate,
accumulate, pay off. But Cameron can't quite deliver on the
promise of his premise.

    The premise is a double what-if. What if sophisticated
computers conspired to trigger Armageddon (you know when) and
in the process created a humanoid terminator (you know who) to
patrol the nuked-out landscape? Then again, what if a renegade
from the future could vault back in time to keep the killer
computers from being invented?

    The first Terminator, a model of clean craft and violent
wit, was a retelling of the New Testament's Annunciation story:
the Archangel Gabriel (a rebel from the 21st century) visits
the Virgin Mary (a Los Angeles waitress named Sarah Connor) to
tell her she is to be the mother of a political messiah -- and
that if she wants to give birth to this redeemer, she must stay
out of the terminator's steely grasp. In T2, 10 years later,
the T-man is back, but on the side of the angels. His mission
is to protect Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and her young son (Edward
Furlong) from an even more efficiently psychopathic cyborg, the
T-1000 (Robert Patrick). The movie is a 135-minute chase that
re-enacts the Holy Family's flight into Egypt. You can imagine
the biblical potential for further sequels, but Cameron would
rather not. His motto during this arduous shoot, he says, was
"T3 without me."

    An ultra-violent Bible story? This is only one of the
movie's complex, even contradictory, vectors. T2 is also a macho
movie that scorns the male-stud ego: the picture believes that
the only good man is a mechanical man. And it parades its
fabulous film technology while predicting that the world could
end when military technology -- the Strategic Defense
Initiative, here called Skynet -- runs amuck. It's a Star Wars
movie that is anti-Star Wars. All these colliding metaphors feed
nicely off Cameron's belief in the duality of human nature.
"Within us," he says, "we have both a compassionate sensitivity
and a violent beast. That beast, coupled with technology, got
us to where we are today and enabled us to dominate the planet."

    For a good while, T2 operates persuasively on the gut
level where most moviegoers live. It establishes Schwarzenegger
as a stolid icon with a sense of humor, swatting down some
bikers like a bad-to-the-bone good ole boy, reloading one of the
movie's zillion firearms with a fancy twirl of the wrist --
proving he has become, in Schwarzenegger's words, "a kinder,
gentler terminator" by forswearing murder: he merely shoots off
a record number of kneecaps. And T-1000 seems an ideal villain.
It can replicate any person it touches and annihilate its victim
with a slash of its rapier limbs: Cyborg Scissorarms. We
eagerly await the moment when the T-1000 touches Arnold and puts
into play two of the movies' oldest, most effective tricks.
Mistaken identity! Evil twins!

    But the moment never comes. T2 dithers off to transform
Schwarzenegger into a mixture of E.T. and Shane. As for
Hamilton, who in The Terminator had been a precursor for all the
tough-as-kryptonite women in Cameron's later films, she
degenerates into a radical ranter, like Patty Hearst in her
S.L.A. phase. Is this worth $100 million? Who cares? Ask
instead: Is it worthy of our expectations for this Sequel of
Sequels? The answer is: not quite. Terminator 2 had to be more
than just the summer's best action movie.