kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Terminator Three I just rented Terminator 3 this past week, and found it...hollow. I don't want to imply here that I think that all series are bad--in fact, sometimes action series just get better with time. I am a diehard Die Hard fan, for instance, and three was perhaps the best. I love the Terminator movies, for the rollercoaster ride, the extreme explosions, the runaway pace, the sense of humor--for the attitude they take towards presenting what is basically a sci-fi movie--so real and plain and down to earth that you can't help but believe it. I am an Action Movie Fan, and I worship at the altar of the pyro kids. But I'll tell you what's missing in Terminator 3--and it's none of the things I listed above. It's Sarah Connor. We were watching television the other night, and they were promoting Terminator 2 on the Sci-Fi channel, and said, in that deep broadcaster voice... "the ultimate...man vs. machine." I giggled and said, "No, that's wrong." The Darling Husband looked at me. "No," I said, "it's actually mother vs. machine." And then I stopped and thought. And you know what? It really is. The first two movies, for all they're ostensibly about a murderous robot, are actually about a woman. A woman who, in the first movie, is dumped into a situation beyond belief, and in the scramble for survival, achieves the ultimate aim--she survives. The second movie, for all it follows the perspective of her son, is actually focussed on Sarah--everything revolves around her. Her son refuses to leave her, and their first encounter with the T-1000 is in the mental hospital breaking her out. While Sarah is sometimes portrayed as warrior, sometimes as punch-drunk post-traumatic-stress-syndrome whacko, she is the lynch pin upon which the tale revolves. She is the heart and the focus of both movies, and the victory in the end is hers--not the machine's, not her son's, hers--because she survives, and her son survives, and that was her only goal. Most of my favorite female sci-fi characters are simply survivors. There is something in my rock-ribbed New England practicality that responds to the bottom-line mentality of these women; surprisingly, because I'm a rather fanciful and daydreamy woman myself, all things considered. But all of the women that I most adore in the movies are soldiers, warriors, survivors-- Ellen Ripley from the Alien movies is magnificent in her survival, Dyl from The Crying Game is damaged, but survives in her own way and keeps on living and loving, Aerin Sung from Farscape is a soldier, plain and simple. There is something magnificent in these women to which anyone can cop an admiration--as a woman, I find them both fascinating and inspiring. This is not to say that I don't admire male characters as well. One of my favorite moments in the movies of all time is when Bill Putnam's character in Malice, a mild-mannered college professor, is sitting in the police station after beating the crap out of a rapist (and taking the beating of his life) and looks up at Bebe Neuwirth and says "Well dammit, if you want something done right, call a teacher". I particularly love the people in movies who aren't all that spiffy--are not big tough heroes, not muscle men, not magical kings of creation--beat the heck out of the bad guys and win, even if it's at the cost of their own skin, or heart, or peace of mind. It is fair to say for many years that sci-fi was a boy's playground. Most of the writers were men; most of the consumers were men; most of the portrayals of women were downright dreadful. And it's easy to look at even modern movies and dismiss them as another example of the boy's game, movies made for little boys to play with rata-tat-tat guns and big bad booms. But I don't think that's entirely fair. Because in watching T3, I realized that there is one big hole in that movie. A Sarah-Connor-sized, woman-sized, mother-sized hole. It is her shadow that her son cannot escape, it is her legacy that he must take up. It is she who overshadows every moment of that film, and her abscence absolutely guts it. And it's really nice to know that we've come far enough, in sci-fi and in books and in movies, that the truth that always existed in the world is visible to see on film as well--that without a mother, without a woman, without that unique, survivor's insight...we have a hollow tale, a hollow world, and a hollow machine. And all the explosions in the world can't fire that up warm again. 8:59 p.m. - 2003-12-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||