Sarah Connor Chronicles
Mar. 13th, 2009 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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trinityvixen a rant on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and since I am stuck in an airport, now seems as good a time as any to type it up.
Let me start out by saying that I am a huge fan of Terminator 2. It is, in fact, one of my favorite movies of all time, in my top 5, alongside Die Hard, Matrix, Sixth Sense, and The Hunt for Red October. This is probably one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of the show. Every time they draw a parallel back to the movie, they come up short. I don’t mind Lena Headey playing Sarah Connor, and I kind of get behind her decision to never watch T2 so she’s not imitating Linda Hamilton. However, when they flash back to Sarah Connor’s days in the psych ward, Headey does not even hold a candle to Hamilton. It was actually painful for me to watch. In the movie, Hamilton’s progression from calm and subdued, trying to convince the psychiatrist she’s well, to fear-fueled rage, is completely organic. In the show, it seemed bizarrely forced. Her flipping out came from nowhere.
Then you have the action sequences. The Terminators fighting each other on the show is just people whacking each other around with a lot of wire work. It’s completely boring. In T2, by matching such different physical types--Arnold’s massiveness and daunting relentlessness against Robert Patrick’s speed, agility, and versatility--each confrontation was interesting and dynamic. Both Terminators were terrifying, and it was not clear who would win in each confrontation. On the show, it’s always equal versus equal. Summer Glau goes and whacks people and they stand and whack back and...boring.
Which leads me to my biggest problem with the show. Sad to say, it’s Summer Glau. Because she’s basically playing River, which is not at all right for a Terminator. She’s playing a child-like innocence and inexperience combined with deadly abilities and a lack of compassion, and aside from that last bit, that’s pretty much exactly River. And I loved River. But here it makes no sense--not least of which because in the first episode she manages to completely convince John she’s a real girl, though in later episodes she can barely carry a conversation without coming off as bizarre and creepy.
In Terminator 2, both Terminators were machines. There was never any doubt about it. They had no souls--they had programming. It’s one of the most compelling things about the movie. At the beginning, when John is first interrogating the T-200, when he stops the bike, he immediately starts cleaning his gun because he can’t not. When John orders him to attack the two thugs, he goes for the kill because that is all he knows how to do. There is no thought--just fantastically complicated programming. So in novel situations, he reacts as he was trained to do, by reverting to battlefield reactions.
The T-1000 is an even better example. Look at his conversation with John’s foster parents. He comes off as completely normal. It’s clear he’s been programmed to mimic human conversation. With each statement from them, he pauses with a blank expression on his face, and you can see him running through an internal decision tree, picking the right answer from hundreds of thousands of preprogrammed responses. This is not sentience--it never betrays a hint of it. If he got the same answers, it seems fairly clear he would react the same way.
Ultimately, that’s what makes the Terminators frightening. They are unrelenting killing machines that have no capacity, not just for emotion, but for independent thought. They are frightening because they fall into the uncanny valley--they look human, and act human on the surface, but you don’t have to dig too far to realize there’s nothing underneath. Which, in the movie, is what is being explored when Sarah talks about why John latches onto the T-200 as a father figure.
Then you get Summer Glau’s performance of a Terminator--one that dances and experiments with lipstick, not as part of a mission objective but because she’s curious. And I don’t buy it. Terminators don’t exist outside of mission objectives. And they are excellently trained at mimicking human behavior. She should have no problem fooling people that she is human, which should be a source of great tension in the show--watching people buy her humanity when you, and the main characters, know it is an illusiion.
I found the extension of the movie universe’s story to be quite well done, the music is excellent and integrates Brad Fiedel's themes from the movie expertly (I love the soundtrack), they managed to transition from a chase movie into a more episodic type of story-telling, they have an interesting cast of characters, but ultimately this unfavorable comparison to the movies and Summer Glau’s complete inability to sell me on her being a Terminator means that I won’t be going back for season two.
trinityvixen a rant on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and since I am stuck in an airport, now seems as good a time as any to type it up.Let me start out by saying that I am a huge fan of Terminator 2. It is, in fact, one of my favorite movies of all time, in my top 5, alongside Die Hard, Matrix, Sixth Sense, and The Hunt for Red October. This is probably one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of the show. Every time they draw a parallel back to the movie, they come up short. I don’t mind Lena Headey playing Sarah Connor, and I kind of get behind her decision to never watch T2 so she’s not imitating Linda Hamilton. However, when they flash back to Sarah Connor’s days in the psych ward, Headey does not even hold a candle to Hamilton. It was actually painful for me to watch. In the movie, Hamilton’s progression from calm and subdued, trying to convince the psychiatrist she’s well, to fear-fueled rage, is completely organic. In the show, it seemed bizarrely forced. Her flipping out came from nowhere.
Then you have the action sequences. The Terminators fighting each other on the show is just people whacking each other around with a lot of wire work. It’s completely boring. In T2, by matching such different physical types--Arnold’s massiveness and daunting relentlessness against Robert Patrick’s speed, agility, and versatility--each confrontation was interesting and dynamic. Both Terminators were terrifying, and it was not clear who would win in each confrontation. On the show, it’s always equal versus equal. Summer Glau goes and whacks people and they stand and whack back and...boring.
Which leads me to my biggest problem with the show. Sad to say, it’s Summer Glau. Because she’s basically playing River, which is not at all right for a Terminator. She’s playing a child-like innocence and inexperience combined with deadly abilities and a lack of compassion, and aside from that last bit, that’s pretty much exactly River. And I loved River. But here it makes no sense--not least of which because in the first episode she manages to completely convince John she’s a real girl, though in later episodes she can barely carry a conversation without coming off as bizarre and creepy.
In Terminator 2, both Terminators were machines. There was never any doubt about it. They had no souls--they had programming. It’s one of the most compelling things about the movie. At the beginning, when John is first interrogating the T-200, when he stops the bike, he immediately starts cleaning his gun because he can’t not. When John orders him to attack the two thugs, he goes for the kill because that is all he knows how to do. There is no thought--just fantastically complicated programming. So in novel situations, he reacts as he was trained to do, by reverting to battlefield reactions.
The T-1000 is an even better example. Look at his conversation with John’s foster parents. He comes off as completely normal. It’s clear he’s been programmed to mimic human conversation. With each statement from them, he pauses with a blank expression on his face, and you can see him running through an internal decision tree, picking the right answer from hundreds of thousands of preprogrammed responses. This is not sentience--it never betrays a hint of it. If he got the same answers, it seems fairly clear he would react the same way.
Ultimately, that’s what makes the Terminators frightening. They are unrelenting killing machines that have no capacity, not just for emotion, but for independent thought. They are frightening because they fall into the uncanny valley--they look human, and act human on the surface, but you don’t have to dig too far to realize there’s nothing underneath. Which, in the movie, is what is being explored when Sarah talks about why John latches onto the T-200 as a father figure.
Then you get Summer Glau’s performance of a Terminator--one that dances and experiments with lipstick, not as part of a mission objective but because she’s curious. And I don’t buy it. Terminators don’t exist outside of mission objectives. And they are excellently trained at mimicking human behavior. She should have no problem fooling people that she is human, which should be a source of great tension in the show--watching people buy her humanity when you, and the main characters, know it is an illusiion.
I found the extension of the movie universe’s story to be quite well done, the music is excellent and integrates Brad Fiedel's themes from the movie expertly (I love the soundtrack), they managed to transition from a chase movie into a more episodic type of story-telling, they have an interesting cast of characters, but ultimately this unfavorable comparison to the movies and Summer Glau’s complete inability to sell me on her being a Terminator means that I won’t be going back for season two.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 04:41 am (UTC)Ultimately, that’s what makes the Terminators frightening. They are unrelenting killing machines that have no capacity, not just for emotion, but for independent thought.
I think that's wrong, given what we think of when we consider artificial intelligence. Skynet became a threat when it became self-aware. Generally, we don't consider the ability to run a million subroutines approximating the responses the questioner wants to be self-awareness. It requires independent thought. I'm not saying it requires emotion, but an ability to question and act on one's own. I'd say the point of T2 was that Arnie-bot was able to be more underneath than just a machine defaulting to killing.
Besides which, disabling Terminators' ability to act independently, even with a host of subroutines would prevent them from being able to adapt to situations outside of their study. The T-1000 was a highly adaptive entity. I just have a hard time believing it could not do so consciously.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 06:35 pm (UTC)I think it's a lot more terrifying to have a machine that can outsmart and outstrategize you, anticipate all your moves, but has nothing remotely like a human spirit--nothing going on in that head that you could connect to to make them stop. Skynet is self-aware, yes, but the extent of its independent thought seems to be "humans are a threat, wipe them out." It's not having megalomaniacal dreams of domination. It's just eliminating humans as efficiently as possible. And it is that sterility of motivation that I think makes the terminators so compelling, and is utterly lacking in Summer Glau's performance.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 06:41 pm (UTC)There's also a question of robots being able to imitate people as a new feature to the series. It was introduced with Cameron's character, but I can't remember in which season. Her personality was patterned on a human's. In the new movie coming up, there seems to be something quite like that. So maybe the real issue here isn't that Terminators don't do learning/individuality, just that they haven't done it before but are learning to do it now? If Skynet is self-aware, it would probably recognize the need to adapt in that direction at some point. Doing it in individual robots rather than rewriting itself. I think it would have to since exterminating humans is proving more troublesome than it should be given the relative advantages of metal versus man.