TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film review: Kalki 2898 AD

A clash of past against future, tyrants against gods, ambition against destiny

The latest blockbuster to come from epic Indian cinema, Kalki 2989 AD is India's most expensive film so far. Set in a far future beset by hunger, despotism and hopelessness, it follows a handful of improbable heroes struggling to bring about a new era of peace.

The background context for this film is the Kurukshetra War, a pivotal moment in epic Indian literature. According to the Sanskrit poem Mahabharata, two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fought each other brutally for eighteen days over control of the Kingdom of Hastinapura. Toward the end of the war, one formidable soldier allied with the Kauravas, Ashwatthama, upon seeing that his side was losing, hurled a weapon of divine might against princess Uttara, who was pregnant with the last surviving heir of the Pandavas. The hero Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, stopped the attack and cursed Ashwatthama to walk the earth for centuries.

The film takes these events and gives them a continuation in our far future. The opening credits, which consist of a digital animation of scenes from the Kurukshetra War, end in a close-up of a CGI shoot of grass that blends into an identical-looking, real shoot of grass. The meaning is clear: the realm of myth extends into the real world. In this future setting, the Kali Yuga, the cosmic era ruled by sin and perversion, is nearing its end, and the hero Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu, who will restore the world and put an end to evil, is about to be born. Unfortunately, the tyrant who controls the last surviving human city has a habit of kidnapping fertile women for horrific experiments to try and extend his own lifespan. It is one of those women who is carrying the foretold savior of humankind.

Kalki 2898 AD does a good job of explaining the basics of its massive lore, but for Western viewers it wouldn't hurt to brush up on their Hindu mythology. Much of the emotional impact of the plot (especially the return of Ashwatthama as an eight-foot-tall badass immortal) relies on the audience's assumed familiarity with and personal investment in Hindu eschatology. This is not like watching a movie about Hercules or Achilles, where we know the relevant myths but don't take them as historical fact. Rather, imagine if the plot of Left Behind happened in the setting of Mad Max, and, more importantly, imagine that you're a devoted believer. The tacit position of the film, and of its intended audience, is that the Mahabaratha narrates actual events that happened in real life. Whereas Western scriptwriters and directors will probably not feel any reverence for the Olympian gods, to a huge portion of the Indian population the Hindu gods are very real. Keep that in mind as you sit to watch.

Once the stakes are defined, the film becomes a series of frantic chase scenes between bad guys and good guys trying to snatch this desperate pregnant woman who never asked to occupy such an important position. Combat scenes are a mixed bag: while Ashwatthama (now tasked with protecting Kalki's mother until he can be born) commands every scene he appears in with his imposing presence and impeccable acting (no surprise there, since he's played by cinema legend Amitabh Bachchan), his sometimes rival, a bounty hunter named Bhairava, is comparably strong, but the visual effects used in his fighting moves are too obviously fake. Nameless mooks get smashed against the walls like bowling pins, making Bhairava's battles (even the all-important one at the end) look more comical than awesome.

Visual effects in general are a problem with this film. Landscape shots look impressive, but the objects moving in the foreground seem copied and pasted from a stock photo archive. Together with the Zack Snyder-style yellowish tint that was applied all over the film, the disorienting editing between sequences and even within the same scene, the ill-advised use of fast motion for dramatic effect, and the cringeworthy sense of humor, these moviemaking choices rob Kalki 2898 AD of the majestic aura it wants to claim.

Your enjoyment of the protagonist, bounty hunter Bhairava, will depend on how much patience you have for the lovable rogue archetype. Take Han Solo, but replace Chewbacca with KITT from Knight Rider, and you'll get the idea. It's interesting that Bhairava starts the movie in opposition to the aims of divine prophecy, but gradually becomes an antiheroic figure who fights the villains for selfish reasons. Alas, the rest of the cast isn't fleshed out at all. The expectant mother of the god Vishnu is treated as a standard-issue damsel in distress; the generic mid-level commander who persecutes our heroes is stuck in the role of generic mid-level commander; the supporting heroes are an interchangeable collection of cool gadgets and catchphrases; and the minor villains are disposable meat. That's a common problem with plots built on prophecy: characters don't need to grow, because victory is already written in stone.

This film is the first entry in a planned Kalki Cinematic Universe that has already produced a prequel series. Accordingly, Kalki 2898 AD ends in a cliffhanger that renders much of its plot moot. In a discouraging imitation of Hollywood's worst habits, the film even has a post-credits scene that teases a bigger battle with the final boss. It's clear that the producers want to go big with this, but the studio needs to hire better scriptwriters, and the visual effects aren't yet at a level capable of delivering a spectacle deserving of awe.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

In Pluto, the quest for humanlike AI reveals our worst side

Can we build machines that think like us without teaching them to hate like us?

Someone is killing the world's most advanced robots one by one. The same perpetrator seems to also be targeting robot rights advocates. Since robots are programmed to not kill humans, why can't the police find any evidence of a human murderer? What does it mean that every crime scene is found staged with huge ominous horns? How does the obscure past of Europe's top artificial detective fit into this mystery? And is it a coincidence that the killed robots were veterans of a ruinous preemptive war that was declared for fictitious reasons?

The new Netflix series Pluto weaves these parallel plotlines with admirable skill, closely following the structure of Naoki Urasawa's sweepingly applauded, Astro Boy-inspired manga series. What begins as a bizarre police case gradually morphs into an international conspiracy of technological espionage and postwar malaise, which culminates in a world-shattering clash of philosophies about the purpose of hatred and the possibility of escaping cycles of violence. Although the manga was originally written during the Iraq War, in the two decades since its publication, the relevance of its themes hasn't changed: from Mosul to Grozny to Aleppo to Khartoum to Aden to Bamenda to Maiduguri to Donetsk to Imphal to Mekelle to Stepanakert to Gaza, every war reenacts and reproduces the same basic defect of humanity.

Pluto is set in a future world where robots have achieved legal equality, but anti-robot prejudice is still common, to the point that the mere unfounded suspicion of a robot army can spark a world war. The cascading consequences of that conflict still haunt the characters in this story: the robots who were ordered to kill fellow robots now carry the same trauma and regrets that would be expected in human soldiers. One of them has become an environmentalist, another is an aspiring musician, and another flat-out refused to fight and opened a foster home for war orphans. Even far from the battlefield, in the prosperous cities of the European Federation, casual disregard for the dignity of robot life still leads to daily microaggressions that from time to time snowball into self-perpetuating rounds of revenge.

One of the many fascinating arguments implied in Pluto is the robots' counterintuitively enhanced capacity for hostility. They're forbidden, both legally and electronically, from attacking humans, but in a society where robots are supposed to have the same rights as humans, that restriction is egregiously one-sided, not to mention fated to fail. A convenient counterweight to human belligerence is that we have the luxury of forgetting, whereas a digital brain with a grudge will always carry a perfect memory of it. Let that emotion fester long enough, and any machine will snap. If human hatred has already proved harmful, a robotic form of hatred could be cataclysmic. In several scenes, characters who are experts on the matter claim that AI is unable to hate, but the story goes on to demonstrate that it wasn't even necessary to program hate in its code. All it took was interaction with human insensitivity.

Despite this easy recipe for disaster, each time a piece of the puzzle is solved, hatred is exposed in its pointlessness. One character schemes to avenge his dead brother and puts his entire family at risk. Another wants to hunt down the invaders that bombed his homeland and loses all sense of who he is. Another makes the moral calculation that the lives of his country are worth endangering all the rest, and is easily manipulated into almost blowing up the world. In most of these cases, the wasteful effort of hatred is spent in response to a similar act of hatred that was sparked by a previous one. You can't summon the god of death into your service without then becoming his servant. So the script is careful to represent the opponents' motives as understandable without once taking their side. Its plea for empathy is not a defense of retaliation.

Taking advantage of its mutually mirroring subplots, Pluto contains copious internal references. Often, a scene will literalize the point made more symbolically in another. A beautiful instance of this technique is noticeable in a character who researches agronomy. He's quoted as having remarked that flowering plants typically die after producing seeds, and then he discovers a flower that stays perpetually in bloom, intact for years, never giving seeds. However, to produce that flower, an entire field around it had to die. The implied theme, developed more explicitly over the rest of the plot, is that the pursuit of survival at the cost of other lives results in fruitless stasis.

Here Pluto finds a space to address the horror hidden just under the surface of the manga series that inspired it: as you'll recall, the whole reason for Astro Boy's existence is as a replacement for a dead son. This backstory is transformed in Pluto into an exploration of the risks of trying to bypass the reality of death. For one of the villains, the goal is many deaths at the acceptable cost of an aberrant life. For the secret mastermind villain, the goal is an aberrant life at the acceptable cost of many deaths. Atom, this story's version of Astro Boy, is the first to transcend this poisoned bargain. His second chance at life is fueled by extreme hatred, but he avoids becoming a perpetuator of death by realizing the true nature of hatred: there is pure emptiness inside of it.

The show restates this argument in the form of a thought experiment. Suppose that a human programmer wanted to design the smartest AI possible. Having only human tools at hand, one solution is to feed the program with the intelligence of every human being, a balanced whole containing all our wishes, personalities and inclinations. However, to simulate all of humanity would paralyze the digital brain. It would never decide anything. In Pluto, one character theorizes that the way out of this problem is to give the balanced whole a good shake. To unbalance it with our worst primal impulses.

What makes this scenario even more interesting is that a set containing every human being is a not very veiled metaphor for the world. The character who cynically suggests pushing the simulated collective of humanity with hatred represents the philosophical position according to which violence is the driving force that moves the world. Atom's success at integrating his rebuilt self represents the refutation of that position.

By refraining from a straightforward portrayal of war and focusing instead on its painful aftermath and the passions that feed it, Pluto squares the circle of telling a story about war that doesn't inadvertently glorify it. In addition to boasting formidable complexity in the way its structure effortlessly juggles numerous flashbacks set at different points in the timeline, as well as featuring a cast of the most compellingly human robots this side of Blade Runner, Pluto is a profoundly moral story where grievous destruction follows naturally from the ancient, unrelenting sin of counting any life as expendable.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade steps lively into the tradition of Starship Troopers and The Forever War to provide a compelling look at a future conflict.

A future world where Corporations dominate the globe, have in effect become the superpowers that rule a rather tired Earth. For the lower classes, those who are not citizens, it’s a rather rough and precarious life. Dietz (who never gets a first name, and in a bit of ledgerdemain their gender is kept relatively unstated and understated) goes from a future and poor Sao Paulo, to fighting Martians on Mars, in what was once Canada, and far beyond. There’s just one problem: The lightspeed technology to move soldiers around has a strange effect on Dietz, and in short order starts to learn they are experiencing her future all out of order. Worse, thar futuie is a dark one in which the war they signed up for is far more terrible than they can imagine.

Dietz’s story is the central pole upon the twisting time travel story of Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade.

When I interviewed Hurley about the novel (read it here at NOAF), I wanted to be careful about being too spoilery about events when I asked her questions about the novel. I may have been overly cautious with my questions, for fear of revealing too much of the interesting things she does, plot and character wise with her protagonist. But if you took Starship Troopers, with its “Service means citizenship”, add in a large amount of The Forever War with its temporal displacement of its main character, stir in Slaughterhouse Five, with its meditations on the cost, and even the futility of war with a main character not sure when or where they are at any given time, and marry that to Hurley’s style and prose, you get The Light Brigade.

There is talk in some SF circles of “The Genre Conversation”, where a book can be said to be a reaction to, or a response to, a previous novel or a type of novel. It’s a slow and patient process, given the speeds of publishing, so you wind up seeing it in waves and changing battlefields. Tolkien’s reissue leads to Tolkien imitators, leading to Portal fantasy, turning around into the reaction of Grimdark to the greenshoots of Hopepunk, and Genre Beyond the Great Wall of Euripe. The New Wave gets the 70’s Ecological and feminism followup, which is reacted to and extended by Cyberpunk, which then leads into the New Space Opera, The Consolidation of the 90’s, and to the current era marked by concerns of freedom, endless war, surveillance, distrust, a more global perspective, and Climatepunk.

Hurley’s novel takes from Starship Troopers and The Forever War, as mentioned above, but is firmly in this new era as well. None of the action in the novel takes place in the United States at all, something that might have been nigh unthinkable 10 years ago, but now is much more in the light of the times. The corporate as opposed to governmental directed wars seems to harken from the days of Cyberpunk as well as current concerns. Dietz’ uncertain identity (which becomes a theme of the novel on a couple of levels) also feels rather contemporary, Rather than being explicitly trying to respond to any of these works, they are instead grist for Hurley’s mill to tell Dietz’s story The themes that emerge from The Light Brigade are the ones that come from the military side of Hurley’s oeuvre (going all the way back to God’s War)--war is brutal, uncaring, terrible things are done even by people trying to do right, escaping the cycle of violence once started is harder than it sounds. And perhaps even more resonant now than when God’s War first came out, in this age of “Fake news:”-- the first casualty of battle is always, always the truth. That comes to dominate the back end of the novel in a palpable and reasl way.

Hurley's writing in the novel is at its absolutely best with the camaraderie, often strained, between Dietz and those they serve with. The time out of joint problem puts an interesting inflection and strain on the relationships, giving them an extra bit of complexity. Especially, for example, when Dietz is dealing with someone they have already seen die. The combat scenes, too, are top notch, showing in vivid and brain-burning detail just what war is, and what it can do.

I’ve noticed, though, in some of Hurley’s works a, for me, not quite satisfactory sticking of the landing. The journey, the process, the getting there of her novels is sometimes stronger than the actual endgame. It is something that I found in this novel, disappointing given the twisty time travel plotting that works up to the point where the tangle of timelines and plotting becomes clear and explicated, but what comes thereafter was not for me quite as strong. It’s a heck of a journey to get to that endgame, though, a page-turning extravaganza that at it’s best, hits the notes and beats that Hurley’s fiction has in spade ever since God’s War:. Blood, battle, and brutal women

Best of all, for readers who do not want to get invested in another series and the concordant issues in the writing and reading of same, The Light Brigade is a one-volume complete story. This makes it a really good way to get a sense of Hurley as a writer in a single and self-sufficient volume. It’s a valuable thing in this day and age to take the measure of a writer at one go. The Light Brigade gives a comprehensive look at the strengths and talents of one of the most interesting writers in SF today.


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The Math

Baseline Assessment 7/10

Bonuses : +1 for a strong thematic story of war and its costs, personal and otherwise
+1 for a contained and complete story

Penalties : -1 for a bit of wavering in the endgame of the plot

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention

***

Reference:  Hurley, Kameron:  The Light Brigade [Saga Press, 2019]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.