I doubt they’ll be as kind to us
She was caught trying to blow up a computer factory, and then they found out she was running guns from Mexico with a boy she was raising to be the messiah. With the information they had, they made the right call.
The asylum in Terminator is so goddamn well done. I think it is possibly the Girl Bossiest of Girl Boss scenes ever, because it shows that, despite all her dedication to training, she is still at a physical disadvantage with the guards and has to be both vicious and cunning to escape. Then when she finally sees Arnold again, she collapses in terror. That is some amazing world and character building.
Nowadays, I feel like she would just one-punch all the guards, maybe lift one up over her head and throw him at another last guard, finally kicking Arnold in the nuts before realizing he’s a good guy now.
I always loved her character, progressive for it’s time imo
Now that you mention it, the fight choreography in T2 really is something that helps the story feel more grounded. Connor vs T1000 is certainly a good example, but the T800 vs T1000 fights are all the right kinds of klunky vs fluid, respectively. There are probably other subtle examples in this film.
Not only is there the contrast, but there’s development. You can see them using their initial strategies and adapting over time. I swear on the grave of my murdered father: I love it when fights develop character!
That’s a really good point. I bet a lot of that has to do with the original being a slasher flick rather than an action blockbuster. There’s some residual final-girl, “just because I survived doesn’t mean I’m not terrified,” energy to her character.
One of the joys of being unemployed is that I can make my day’s plans from random lemmy convos. Today: Terminator and Terminator 2.
Edit: Also Cameron wants the audience to be afraid of Arniebot and not Mercurybot, it also gives the character an arc to travel with regards to Arniebot. The reveal of Arnold as the Good Guy in T2 is really masterfully done, perhaps lost on audiences who grew up with it.
Yeah, I think people go into the movies today knowing that Arnie is the “good terminator”. But, when the movie came out he was the bad guy, and there was no reason to think that the liquid metal one was the bad guy…
Robert Patrick did an amazing job of appearing to have emotions, making him seem like the good guy, only to make it clear over time that he was only mimicking emotions to blend in and accomplish his mission.
Fun fact the marketing for T2 actually spoiled the reveal before release so plenty of people went in knowing that Arnie was the good guy but not necessarily why which is why I hate marketing for movies and tv most of the time. Though to a degree it still works to build tension regardless since it uses the whole Hitchcock bomb under the table method of building tension.
Too bad even Robert Patrick’s amazing performance can’t quite overcome him being a cop. What was once a credible disguise for being a good guy has become a dead giveaway for being a bastard.
But it’s still fun to watch because even if we know, the characters don’t, and they act like they don’t and it’s filmed from their emotional perspective.
The disguise was really just about being human. The cop disguise was because it was a cop who had first discovered him after the time travel, and it was a useful disguise. It worked because we knew that Arnie was the terminator, and this guy looked like a regular human. He came through the time portal “nude”, looking like a human. Until then, the only terminators we’d seen were either obviously robots, or were these massive T-800s that, even when naked, don’t really look like normal humans.
In those early scenes before we know that the T-1000 is evil and the T-800 is good, the T-1000 plausibly acts like a human sent back in time trying to locate John Connor before the T-800 does. We don’t know that he’s a terminator, but we do know he’s not a cop – we saw him steal the cop’s uniform, gun and car. When he talks to the foster parents in disguise, he shows emotion, something that the T-800 model doesn’t really do.
The only person we know to actually be a cop up until that point in the movie is the dude who goes out to investigate an “electrical disturbance” before having a run-in with the T-1000.
ACAB motherfuckers!
The depth of the implications of that moment though… the horror, the reality of it all, the scale of it… all encapsulated in that one confirmation, a terminator. So we didn’t stop it again yet. >:,-I What a gut punch, like seeing the whole world destroyed in an instant.
“Mom! Mom! Wait! He’s here to help!”
Sure.
Cameron knows how to do a heroine.
In “Aleins”, he even does both “generes”. You have Vasquez as the stereotypical action hero badass marine woman, who has adopted a “man’s” role. But you also have Ripley, who is a badass action hero, but is entirely feminine.
Her “Get away from her, you bitch!” line is so iconic because it’s the action climax of the film in which she’s being her most badass, but also being entirely feminine. She’s a mother battling grief over the death of her child whose maternal instincts are fueling her to protect the remaining people she loves, and it driver her to take on a monster.
I remember as a child (probably 2 or 4) having a crazed bull charge me in a field, and my otherwise timid, traditionally-obedient WASP mother ran between the charging longhorn and me, stood her ground, and stared it down while shouting at it. The bull veered off and stayed clear of me from then on.
That was my mother’s action hero moment.
You got a WASP mother pero me estás hablando de generes? What’s your linguistic background? I think the English word would be “types,” or maybe, if you want to get fancy, "“archetypes.”
I’ve got mixed feelings about the Mary Sue thing–that is to say female characters that are automatically good at everythig. On the one hand, people say that it isn’t sexist because there are “Marty Stu’s”, the male version of it. But the reality is that the Mary Sue was the start of the trope because it is so offensive to people that a WOMAN could just be good at EVERYTHING that people had to come up with a word for it. Looking back, it’s trivial to find a plethora of Marty Stus that escaped public notice for years (James T Kirk, James Bond).
I think it’s really a question if we’re going to allow girls the same access to infantile power fantasies that we do boys, and that I guess I do not have a problem with, though as I grow older I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the wish fulfillment aspect of media.
That said, I think Sue/Stu does rob your character of potential avenues to demonstrate development and it makes the narrative less interesting, so you have to make up for it somehow; unless it’s just a stupid show for stupid children, something Disney has decided it is making exclusively these days.
And I agree with 100%. Cameron’s women are amazing examples of how to make women action heroes WITHOUT turning them into stereotypical men.
“Genereas” was a typo of “genres”. I’m very, very white. I grew up in Texas, took 4 years of Latin, and briefly studied linguistics in college, but like a proper white Texan I barely have enough Spanish to order Mexican food for some reason.
Ah. “Genres” didn’t make sense to me, because that’s a broad category: like SF, thriller, fantasy, romance, etc…
Your resistance to learning other languages is quite impressive! I also took four years of Latin. I kept failing or almost failing but they kept pushing me to the next class hoping I’d catch up. You can get surprisingly far just guessing a translation based on vocabulary.
Myb4 years were kinda weird. I had 1 really solid year the first year it was taught at my school. Then the teacher got a better job offer elsewhere, so they brought in a new teacher that sounded like he would be awesome, because he used to teach Latin on TV! Turns out he had scripts then and didn’t know shit about Latin, and we didn’t actually study Latin at all my second year. Like: we had the class in a computer lab that was used by the language classes because of the software for the Spanish and French classes, and we spent a year playing Starcraft instead of studying Latin.
They fired that idiot, and brought in a new teacher that was excellent, but so many people had dropped out after the insanity of the second teacher they ended up combining the Latin II and III students into a single class. And since the Latin II students hadn’t actually been taught anything, so my Latin III AP class was just intro Latin I again.
So in 4 years of classes I studied 2 years of Latin.
Yikes! What were you doing learning latin at all? I went to a snooty private school that still had it on its menu. I took it in 7th and 8th grade, then fucking refused to take it in High School despite being on the “smart kid” track intended for doctors and lawyers, taking French instead. In college, I had another shot at it because I needed it for my major, but my learning block for Latin was already well established by that point. I remember the final final exam was on Cicero and that he was big into long sentences with lots of grammar and that my attempts to imagine the meaning based on vocabulary failed at that point.
I might re-visit Latin, maybe if I ever get through Italian.
Starcraft is also pretty cool though. I used to shut my brain off for hours at a time and just Zerg rush every level in the game. I think there was only one level where you had to plan very carefully.
It’s ironic that the first two things you put in quotation marks are the first two things you spell wrong.
My thumbs are dumber than the rest of me. And I’m pretty dumb.
The stakes are always so much higher when the things that can be realistic are realistic.
It was what made the John Wick movies so good too. Sure, it’s unrealistic that there’s this man who can single-handedly take on hundreds of other trained killers and only suffer minor injuries. But, they made sure that each moment in each fight itself is as realistic as possible. Keanu Reeves trained hard on weapon handling so that everything he does looks like it’s being done by a weapons expert.
I’d love to see a gritty, realistic action movie where silencers weren’t silent, bullets didn’t make people fly backwards, fighting was visibly exhausting, punches and kicks don’t make “slap” or “crack” sounds, women were at a clear disadvantage to men, weight class really matters, handguns were hard to aim well, people had adrenaline crashes, a concussion was a serious event…
And, while we’re at it, I wish people in the movies would wash the blood off. Far too often someone gets injured and spends the rest of the movie with their face caked with blood. Even if you don’t care how you look, having blood on your skin is itchy and uncomfortable.
Um, huh??!
One of the dumbest, immersion-breaking moments in the John Wick series was precisely when he and an assassin were nonchalantly strolling through a crowded building, firing silenced pistols at each other with dozens of people right next to them not noticing. I’m sorry, but JW is not exactly the paradigm of realism here. I never forgot how ridiculous that scene was. Try an actual documentary like Hornet’s Nest or something else.
I’d love to see a gritty, realistic action movie where silencers weren’t silent, bullets didn’t make people fly backwards, fighting was visibly exhausting,
One if the reasons I really enjoyed the original Blade Runner is the “hero” is always getting his ass kicked. He’s supposed to be the best, but the first Replicant we see him encounter in the field would have killed him. The only reason he lived is she got spooked by people coming in the room and ran off. Moments later Leon slaps the gun from his hand and beats the living fuck out of him in the street. Deckard would have died if it were not for Rachael.
He also misses a lot of shots when he isn’t dropping his gun.
As far as I can remember, datacenters aren’t mentioned in the Terminator movies at all. They did have an idea of a computer system gaining sentience, but it wasn’t a word-guessing program running in a datacenter. Their idea was that it was an advanced chip that gave the computers intelligence.
The story has a fun time loop in it. A terminator went back in time to kill Sarah Connor, who was the mother of the leader of the resistance. The terminator was crushed by a hydraulic press in the Cyberdine Systems factory. This left behind a computer chip from the future. Cyberdine Systems used that to create Skynet, which became self-aware, which eventually resulted in the creation of the Terminators, one of which was sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Loop again. (Of course, that’s one of a number of origin stories for Skynet, it seems like each new movie, TV series, RPG or comic book comes up with its own story.)
Anyhow, the point being, the focus of “AI” in the series isn’t datacenters that magically become self-aware. It’s a magic computer chip that has properties allowing something to become self-aware. And, at least in one of the interpretations, it requires a time loop.
Yeah, crazy lady, figures out it’s not a data center needing taken out, but upstream, or they just make more data centers… so takes out a computer factory… crazy lady, didn’t go far enough up stream. ;D
She didn’t exactly have all the resources or support to go that high.
The last decade or two proved all the “crazy” people of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s correct.
There was, in fact, a shadow cabal of pedophiles attempting to take control of the US government.
They’re now in power, and there isn’t much we can do now but hope they get bored of it, because America has shown there isn’t much we won’t forgive, as long as you give a wink and a nod to the racists.
The problem being that a lot of those “crazy” people that spoke about an evil cabal are the ones supporting it now and somehow don’t see it.
They’ve been in power since the 50s. 1850s.
No, and by saying that you’re giving credence to crazy conspiracy theories instead of what actually happened.
There’s no “cabal”. There are people trying to amass power and get the government to change in ways that benefits them, but they’re hardly acting in secret. Elon Musk got up on stage and did a Nazi salute! Other people like Timothy Mellon, the Adelsons, the Uihleins, etc. are openly funding political groups. They’re so open about it that they are happy to sit for an interview and tell you exactly why the world should be the way they’re trying to make it.
In addition, there isn’t even a conspiracy. Not only are they not acting secretly in the shadows, they can’t even agree on anything but a few basics like cut taxes for the rich and lower benefits for the rest. They fight about almost everything else. The ones who own businesses that are based on intellectual property want LLMs to have to license everything they ingest. The ones who are rich from the AI grift want the opposite. The ones who are rich from fossil fuels want alternative energy slowed and banned to keep energy prices high. The ones who run AI companies want their energy to be as cheap as possible.
As for their being pedophiles, maybe some of them were or are. Many aren’t. Epstein got ultra rich by being the guy who could introduce people to other people. Most of them weren’t pedophiles, but they were willing to not look too closely at Epstein’s “girls” because he was useful to them and they didn’t want to make him an enemy.
I’m generally fine with the ultra-rich being called the Epstein class, and being connected with pedophelia. For some reason, people didn’t hate these people for merely being ultra rich and using that wealth to warp the justice system and the government. If believing they’re pedophiles changes things, well at least they hate them, even if it’s based on a silly conspiracy.
In any case, these people have always been in power. The US founding fathers were rich 20 year olds who owned a lot of land (and most of them owned slaves). In other words, the US was founded by oligarchs. They’ve been the ones with most of the power since the beginning. It’s not like there was some coup under Trump. It’s just that some of them are expressing their power more openly rather than using it behind the scenes so that the democratic system seemed more honest to the average voter.
Yeah, and basically we’re in the midst of their crossfire shit.
There was a Robert Redford movie from the 70s, can’t remember the title, but it was a convoluted spy thriller with a line like, “It’s the oil companies! Of course! Why didn’t I see it!”
We’ve been sleeping-walking into oligarchic fascism for decades.
I mean, it’s realistic. I know people who were at protests, and got arrested, and when they couldn’t find a way to charge them with crimes, they put them in psych hold for a minimum of 72 hours, and there are known instances of people having this done that ended up in for long times.
NYPD got caught doing it to a cop who was whistle blowing in the late 00s.
I thought they got caught doing it more than once. But yeah, super shitty abuse of power.
Honestly wouldn’t surprise me, I’m just familiar with the one case.
Fun fact: There was a group of psychologists who were doing a study on how difficult it is to prove your sanity and get out of a psych ward, and checked themselves in to then see how long it took to prove that they were actually psychologists and get out. The longest one took 10 years before he was released.
Another fun fact: The terminator in the second movie is a cop because Cameron believes cops are humans who should have empathy for others but don’t - like a machine. When asked why he made the villain a cop, James Cameron said ACAB.
I would not be surprised if he researched the use and abuse of psych wards and the abuse that patients in psych wards commonly experience, or knew somebody who suffered similar circumstances.
Do you have a source? I tried to find one and only came across the Rosenhan Experiment, which states the longest stay was 52 days, and it was an experiment about diagnoses, not sanity provability.
Hey can we stop posting this image made by someone who clearly never saw the movie? That’s not why she gets locked up
There is also a scene where she mirrors a Terminator.
Media literacy is lost to a lot of people it seems.
I need to see this again.
Just heard there was a student of Joseph Campbell’s on women-specific Hero’'s journey. Campbell unhelpfully told her that the role of the woman was to be the prize and that she should shut up and blow him.
Part of the heroine’s journey is abandoning her femininity for patriarchal masculinity and the end is her reincorporating masculine values of strength and independence while maintaining a feminine identity… mimicing the Terminator definitely sounds like early stages of this journey.
She would have been a lot more effective if she had just slept with all the top people and blackmailed them.
Yeah, and if they don’t play ball, she could put all the evidence in a big folder called The Epstein Files and send it to the white house. That’ll show em.
She was a total badass. If they don’t play ball she has other methods of making them stop.
Like putting her cigarettes in their urethras.
I’d pay to watch that movie.
I’d pay to not.
I know a guy who changed his name to Al Datacenter.
Does he get free electricity in return for kickbacks & bribes?
No, but he did score 4 touchdowns in one game for Polk High!
??? Paying an electricity bills with bribes (money)??
One of my favorite running gags on reddit: every time someone failed to assassinate Sam Altman someone would comment that it would keep happening until the timeline changed.
It won’t matter anyway, he is the money man, not the brains behind AI. Someone else would take over, nothing would change.
He’s the salesman. His ability to lie convincingly is a big reason for the bubble. If it weren’t for him, the regular boom/bust cycle of AI that has happened regularly since the 1960s would have hit bust already.
Yup, that’s my view of history, too–a vast sea of inevitabilities. Makes history-changing time travel narratives kinda meh.
Just to be clear, I’m all in favor of killing him, I just don’t think it actually achieve anything useful. But you at it
There was a noticeable but temporary blip in United Health Care medical claim approval rates.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
People who don’t ash their cigarettes drive me nuts.
We used to put sewing pins in cigarettes so the ash wouldn’t fall off.
Burning the chrome was probably very toxic, but hey, they were cigarettes and we were also breathing in Tetraethyl Lead fumes and lead paint particles in the 1980s.
That reminds me of seeing this “neat trick” but with a bent paper clip instead of needle.
It was printed in a children’s comic book
I remember it as toothpicks. Not sure if it worked, though. I never saw the end result.
The choice was intentional.
“AL data centers”?
If you leave the pasta in water for too long they become al data.
Yes. All of them.
Is that the kid from home alone?
No.
