Film Review: Terminator 2 (35th Anniversary)

The sequel that set the standard for action films holds up perfectly after 35 years

When Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out in 1991, I was 8 years old, and my suburban household had a no-holds-barred approach when it came to R-rated movies. Consequently, I've seen it dozens of times, mostly in the '90s on VHS. This was also, for some reason, back when R-rated films released profitable lines of children's toys. I had all of the action figures, including the plastic-goo-flesh pump that overlaid "skin" on a Terminator metal skeleton.

When I found out there was going to be a 35th anniversary re-release, I knew exactly where I'd be. Terminator 2 is widely regarded as one of the best action movies, best sci-fi movies, and best sequels. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1991, and set the stage for James Cameron's eventual future triumphs in Titanic and Avatar.

But after 35 years, does it hold up?

Absolutely. On this rewatch—it'd been a few years since I'd last seen it from start to finish—I found myself rapt at the effortless storytelling and human beats, and there's a few key things I'd like to review about in lieu of a traditional narrative post-mortem.

Sarah Connor: The opposite of a Mary Sue (and maybe also a Cassandra at the same time)

Has there ever been more character growth between two movies than that of Sarah Connor, mother of the savior of humanity? In the original Terminator, Sarah is a young, naive waitress thrust into a world of violence, destruction, and utter fear. The movie ends with her hitting the road to Mexico, pregnant and filled with a newfound knowledge of the apocalypse that's coming.

When we meet her again, 10 years later, she's almost unrecognizable. Locked up in a mental institution, lean, muscled, and doing perfect chin-ups on an up-turned hospital bed. She has seen some serious, serious shit. Over the course of the movie, we witness her perform extraordinary feats of physical prowess, shoot and reload countless weapons without even looking, and wrestle with killer robots. We also learn that she's been training John for his eventual rise to power in the resistance since he was born—spending time in jungles, flying in helicopters, and stockpiling arms in the Mexican desert. For a female protagonist in the early '90s, this is incredible. It hit me while watching that she is the exact opposite of a Mary Sue, having put in a decade of work to show for skills and talents, learning from outlaws, scumbags, ex-army guys, and countless others. She is deeply competent in many different ways, and competency is hot.

Granted, I know that many folks use the Mary Sue descriptor almost exclusively for (strong) women, so I'm hesitant to even justify it with a response, but I think that's why Sarah Connor is unassailable in the canon: she literally can do it all when it comes to evading Terminators. Compare this to the common criticism of Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy; we have no idea how she can fly starships or fight so well.

One other thing that hit me while watching: Sarah Connor is basically Cassandra from Greek myth. Cassandra was a Trojan priestess blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to never be believed. Sarah didn't ask to be the mother of John Connor, hero to humanity, but she was fated to become her. And in so doing, learned about the horrors that await humanity and the eventual nuclear war that would devastate the planet. She ends up in a mental hospital because I imagine at some point, her PTSD got the better of her and she leaned into the story of the future in all its gory detail, hoping that someone, anyone, would listen. I don't think folks realize what a burden that knowledge must be, and how horrible it must be for someone to internalize day in and day out.

James Cameron's daddy issues on full display in a Terminator father-figure fan fiction

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but it's impossible to watch Terminator 2 without having your heart break at least a little over the relationship between the T-800 (Arnold) and John Connor. Having never known his real dad (or at least, he won't until he's older and meets him in the future), John has bounced around foster homes and been around Sarah's random boyfriends.

The T-800 is sent back to protect him at all costs, but he also has to obey him. The two bond over the course of the movie in a truly touching way. As Sarah muses, "It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him."

James Cameron has been vocal about his issues with his father, who always disapproved of him becoming a filmmaker. In a podcast I remember learning that even after winning an Oscar, his dad still was cold and distant. Taking this into account, Terminator 2 hits very different. Cameron turned the monster from the first film into the ultimate protector and bastion of unconditional love. Even writing this out, it sounds cliché, but the performances have to be seen to be believed. It works. Another parallel? John only spends a few short days with the Terminator—almost exactly the same amount of time that Jack spends with Rose in Titanic. So, yes, you're right, "My Heart Will Go On" could theoretically be the theme song for this movie, too. Old Jim Cameron is a big fan of love touching one time, but lasting for a lifetime.

This is Arnold's defining role—full stop

One of the reason the aforementioned relationship works so well is because of Arnold's performance. It's some of his best acting, both emotionally and physically. Does it make sense for scientists in the future to program language in a robot with an Austrian accent? No, it does not. But does it help nearly every scene? Yes! And this is partly because Arnold's not the greatest of actors. By portraying a stern robot with a limited emotional capacity, he's already got it made in the shade.

But he's not like he was in the first Terminator. That's a completely different role with a different motive and personality. In that movie, he's playing Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. In this one, he's got to form a bond with a human boy, and his programming allows him to learn. The scenes with John are truly heartwarming, and Arnold's comedic timing and facial expressions are absolutely perfect. At this point, Arnold was 43, not at the peak of his physical conditioning, but very close to it. He's a presence, and there's a reason why the entire world spouted "Hasta la vista, baby" for years afterward.

Terminator 2 works so well because it's a horror film masquerading as sci-fi

It's sci-fi because of the worldbuilding, of course. And the use of technology, time travel, and robots. The Terminator extended universe is a delight to spend time in, and I've enjoyed every entry into the canon over the decades. But Terminator 2 (and this applies to the original Terminator, too) is truly a horror film in two main ways. First, the aforementioned slashers: The T-800 and the T-1000 are unstoppable, largely silent, and possessed of otherwordly brute strength. When you think they're dead, they're not. When you think you've gotten away, they crash a truck over a bridge and keep heading your way. When you think you've crushed them in a steel mill a decade earlier, they show up again with the same face. This theme of being powerless to stop a methodical monster who will stop at nothing to destroy you is textbook horror.

Second, the movie's structured almost exactly like a horror film, too, with all the attendant tropes. You have the pulsing, loin-girding, percussive score. You have the incredible body horror of the T-1000 getting mangled, his skin peeling off and bullets perforating his back. The scene where he degloves his arm skin to get Miles Dyson to believe him is body horror writ large.

But perhaps the scariest part is the liquid metal Terminator. The T-1000 is shot, stabbed, crunched, frozen, and still gets back up every time they try to destroy him. And still he keeps coming, like every psycho killer you've ever seen. And the scene where he melts through the bars of the hospital is basically straight-up ghost behavior. People gasped in theaters when that happened, and not just because of the CGI.

Final thoughts

After my rewatch, I realized that Terminator 2 is just as good as I remembered it being throughout my entire life. The CGI, while groundbreaking at the time, does exactly what it's supposed to, and it doesn't take you out of the movie (unlike a lot of late '80s/early '90s films). It's meant to look real, and it does. This is better than the hyper-realistic stuff we have today, and also better than the absolute garbage effects of older films (looking at you, Poltergeist 2). The performances are still great, the storytelling is tight, and the emotional heart of it still makes me tear up just a bit—just like it always has.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Microreview: Ann Droid

A touching comedy about the search for meaning in the age of AI

Sue’s life is going through a hard time. She’s been a widow for two years, her son is willingly stuck in a bad marriage, her friends’ conversation consists mainly of sinister gossip about who just died or patronizing comments about her age, and her low blood pressure just gave her a fainting spell that resulted in a bruised arm. The last thing she needs is a constant reminder of the autonomy she’s losing as she grows older.

So when her son, who has been taking care of her lately, decides to move back with his horrifically toxic wife and rent a caretaker robot for her, Sue isn’t exactly thrilled. In the world of BBC comedy show Ann Droid, robots have a shady reputation, partly because some owners use them for unmentionable activities, and partly because the early models had alarming malfunctions. But surprisingly, Linda the robot proves to be a more reliable and supportive companion than anyone in Sue’s life.

With the same pitch-perfect deadpan style that launched her to international fame in the role of Philomena Cunk, Diane Morgan plays Linda as a competent caretaker (she remembers when Sue needs to take each of her pills, has impressive diagnostic gadgets, and can alert Sue when a phone call is a scam), although she’s a somewhat older model with only the most rudimentary social skills. The charm of the show comes precisely from contrasting the harshness and duplicity of modern society with the unfiltered honesty of this character who truly wants to help.

That’s the trick with this story: even though Sue doesn’t say it out loud, it becomes clear that society has created a series of problems for itself to which robots were never supposed to be a solution. Her son is a manchild with no willpower or self-respect, but it’s not entirely his fault, as the robotic domination of the job market leaves him feeling as directionless as his widowed mother. Still, the fact that we’ve built a society that shapes us into worse sons, worse friends, worse lovers than a machine can be is a sign that something has gone very wrong with us.

Through the six episodes of the season, Linda subtly guides Sue to exploring more of what life can give her. In particular, Linda’s lack of a filter helps Sue see more clearly the problems in her relationship with her son. Usually, stories about AI serve as proofs by example of the search for who we are, but in Ann Droid the important question is who we are to one another. Sue has been a mother for very long, and it’s way past time for her son to be an adult, and for her to figure out who she can be by herself.

As for Linda, it’s curious that technically speaking she’s barely a character: her wish to help is how she was programmed, not a choice she made. But the ways she finds to provide that help reveal a deeper person than the rest of characters give her credit for. That’s another item in the long list of human attributes that modern society seems to have taken away from us: the connection we create as helpers. Sue is lucky to have found Linda, but we in the real world shouldn’t have to.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Tomorrow and I

In the future, humanity is the same, but we find new ways to complicate our lives

The anthology miniseries Tomorrow and I, produced in Thailand and released last year on Netflix, explores near-future scenarios where personal identity, social mores and class divisions intersect with digital tools, biotechnology and climate change. Although the stories told in the four episodes have universal appeal, they are related to topics that are deeply important in today’s Thailand: the struggles that trans people still face in conservative families, the government’s hypocrisy that keeps sex workers out of the formal economy, the rapidly changing attitudes about the place of religion in the 21st century, the dangers of rising sea levels for a coastal country, and the slow distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

The first episode, Black Sheep, is a bittersweet tale of selfless love. The story is about a closeted trans man who has been so far resigned to a life of unhappiness. He finds a measure of satisfaction in his job as a doctor who does cutting-edge research on 3D printing of organs for transplantation. It turns out that growing living tissue into the desired shape works better in microgravity, so he’s been recruited for a space mission where his experiments have more promising chances. However, his return trip results in a fatal accident, and that’s when his husband sees an opportunity to use forbidden cloning technology to bring him back—this time in the right body.

We don’t learn about the protagonist’s gender dysphoria until after his death, when the cloning technology scans the memories from his brain. Most of the episode actually follows the husband, whom we see grieve for a while before he comes up with the cloning idea. There’s a very interesting scene where he argues with his in-laws about the process: they strongly oppose it for religious reasons, and he has no time for talk of the afterlife. The Buddhist doctrine that the material world is full of suffering takes a central place in the discussion.

This episode makes good use of the narrative rule that victories must have a painful cost. For our astronaut doctor, it’s the legal limbo of existing as a cloned person (not unlike the real-life legal limbo of trans people in Thailand, who still can’t change their ID to one that reflects their true gender). For the husband, it’s a prison sentence for stealing the head from the morgue, and after that, the separation from his spouse, who miraculously got his job back, but is now permanently stationed at a lunar research lab.

Pros: Great casting for the role of the astronaut doctor, with separate actors for the scenes before and after resurrection/transition.

Cons: The reveal of this character’s history of gender dysphoria is handled without much tact, almost crossing the line into sensationalism.

The second episode, Paradistopia, is a warped reflection of real life through a neon lens. The protagonist is a businesswoman who founds a sex robot factory with the dual goal of relaxing the tight social expectations regarding sex in Thailand and giving less arduous white-collar jobs to aging sex workers. The story of her rise to commercial success is interweaved with flashbacks of her childhood as the daughter of a sex worker, struggling to finish her studies and dreaming of leaving her slum behind. In the present, she’s returned to the same slum and transformed it into a proud red-light district where every desire is catered to with the latest robotic technology.

There are several scenes of talk shows discussing the planned launch of a robot brothel; cabinet members warn that men who get too used to consequence-free interaction with a machine may carry the same behavior to their real relationships, while our protagonist insists that Thailand needs to develop a more open attitude about the varieties of erotic desire. These scenes have the clear intent of inviting the viewer to side with the protagonist, but she’s not above playing dirty herself. She bribes several government officers to secure the legal permits for her robot brothel, and even orchestrates a false-flag smear capaign against herself to draw public sympathy.

The resolution of this episode is rather abrupt and inelegant, but it does pack an implied punch: just because the authorities aren’t ready for a world with robot sex doesn’t mean demand will magically vanish.

Pros: The fabulous retrofuturist aesthetic in every detail.

Cons: The cringeworthy attempts at humor.

The third episode, Buddha Data, is about the meeting between digital culture and ancient tradition. We follow a Buddhist monk who starts questioning his purpose when the whole country becomes obsessed with a new mobile app that adds gamification to acts of charity. The creator of the app resents the Buddhist priesthood for cheating his parents out of all their possessions in the form of offerings, and has given himself the mission to bring actual, material consequences to good deeds. Instead of accumulating merit for the next life, users of his app receive karma points they can exchange for discounts. It doesn’t take long for some people to perversely game the system and earn points for technically fulfilling the quests.

So our monk, who happens to have coding experience, teams up with a former colleague and launches his own spiritual progress app. While his competitor turns charity into a performance for selfish motives, this app guides the user through the steps of enlightenment with the help of wisdom extracted from the brains of veteran monks. All seems to go well for this project, until a scandal blows up and brusquely reminds the viewer that scanning a monk’s brain is no guarantee of holiness.

Pros: The dialogue scenes between the monk and his robot sidekick.

Cons: The plot relies on too many convenient contrivances.

The fourth episode, Octopus Girl, is the show’s pièce de résistance, although the budget was clearly spent more in set design and casting than in scriptwriting. We’re introduced to two adorable schoolgirls who live in a slum during a worldwide three-year-long rain caused by a collapsed climate cycle. Most people have become accustomed to the perpetual rain, and some animals have begun showing impressive adaptations, but tropical diseases are out of control. The United Nations have developed a vaccine prepared with octopus genes; the only side effect is that your face grows little tentacles. In Thailand, the comically inept Prime Minister makes a big show of banning the vaccine from the country while proposing instead to enclose flooded towns under glass domes.

Meanwhile, our girls sneak into a TV singing contest and steal the nation’s hearts by bringing attention to the way the government neglects poor neighborhoods. The scenes in their slum have a cute slice-of-life vibe that is only hurt by the tonal mismatch of a sense of humor more appropriate for an audience of children (which is hard to believe, given this is the same series that had an episode about sex robots). But the biggest tonal whiplash is the episode’s ending, which just wipes off all the goodwill the episode has laboriously tried to earn.

Pros: Excellent set design.

Cons: Very strange humor, needlessly mean ending.

Taken as a whole, Tomorrow and I is pessimistic about the potential of technology. Even when people seem to achieve their goals with the help of advanced genetics or robotics or informatics, the situation invariably turns more adverse and the achievement becomes unusable or unenjoyable. However, this doesn’t mean that the stories take a nihilistic stance about the human search for happiness. This is no Black Mirror. What these stories are saying is that, while technology makes our faults more notorious and therefore more consequential, that doesn’t negate the sincerity of our efforts. Fundamentally good people find themselves in defective systems that don’t allow for neat, clean solutions.

The nuances of this humanist stance are hindered by the show’s painfully simplistic and obvious dialogues. I must admit that I watched with English subtitles and can’t understand Thai, but to the extent that each plot can be followed, what is gained with great visual effects is lost with lackluster scripts, by which I mean that the characters’ reactions can get too melodramatic, or too predictable, or too hackneyed. One can believe that the future will be hard to navigate, but not that we will lack the capacity to describe it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Alien: Earth

What are little (robot) girls made of?

After half a century of increasingly questionable sequels, prequels and crossovers, there aren’t many scares left to extract from the iconic xenomorphs of Alien. But what can still be done with them is probe from new angles the questions the first film raised with regard to the rise of corporatocracy and the ways humans keep finding to predate on each other. In the case of the new TV series Alien: Earth, the most noticeable theme is the futility of subjecting life to a regime of property rights. You don’t truly own that which you can’t control, and you can’t control that which can set its own goals apart from yours. Even less can you be simultaneously a parent and an owner. You either help life grow or make it serve you.

Alien: Earth expands the worldbuilding of its franchise by adding more players to the dystopian corporate ecosystem: alongside Weyland-Yutani, i.e. the devil you know, we meet the newcomer Prodigy Corporation, which specializes in producing AI systems. We follow its immature founder, a narcissistic jerk with the most punchable face in the galaxy, for a handful of days preceding the planned launch of a service that promises to make human beings immortal by transferring their minds to artificial bodies. So far, this technology only works on children, because their minds are malleable enough. However, their new bodies have to be adult-shaped, because robots don’t grow. As you may imagine, this is a very disturbing, even traumatic experience for the first batch of kids recruited as testers.

Meanwhile, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying specimens of xenomorph and other assorted adorables crash-lands on a city that happens to belong to Prodigy, so a legal battle ensues over who has the right to salvage however much is recoverable from the disaster. As it happens, Marcy, one of the kids who were put in those shiny robot bodies, has a brother who works as a first responder in that city, so she pleads with the Prodigy boss to be allowed to lead a rescue mission at the crash site. Her excuse is that it would give them a useful opportunity to test their new bodies in harsh conditions, but what she really wants is to reconnect with her brother, because the mind transfer project is an industry secret and, for all he knows, she’s dead.

Mayhem erupts soon enough, and a pants-coloring fright is had by all. Many throats are cut open, many limbs are impaled, many liters of blood are inadvisably conveyed from people’s interior to the same people’s exterior. Anyway, the Prodigy team manages, at no small cost, to get hold of a cargo of several xenomorph eggs (and other assorted adorables). You already know how the xenomorphs work. Much of the fun of the season lies in learning how each of the rest of the critters go about making breakfast out of any passing human. The breakout star is one spry little fellow that the Xenopedia tells me is called Trypanohyncha ocellus, but I’ve seen more fun people call it Optipus, and I personally prefer to call it Tentoculus. It’s adorable in exactly the wrong ways.

Once the team and their loot return to Prodigy headquarters, it’s time for the real drama. Some of the former kids are suddenly thrown into adult-sized responsibilities, while others are left to deal with adult-sized trauma on their own. It becomes clear that every step this company makes is calculated to feed the ego of the boss, who likes to project a personal image of a chaotic manchild so smart that everyone bores him, but his actual choices reveal the self-destructive reach of his arrogance. A game of mismatched agendas begins between full humans, humans with robotic bodies, and full robots, with the ending episodes adding a hundred more dimensions to the two original Alien films’ commentary on twisted forms of parenthood.

There are thin parts to this plot, but you easily forget about them when you watch the fantastic performances that this show boasts. The actors who have to play child characters in adult bodies prove great at speaking like children, moving like children, emoting like children. And the self-proclaimed genius who put them in that situation is deliciously detestable, ultimately revealed to have been a mistreated child who had to make adult decisions too soon but didn’t learn to break the cycle, and grew up to inflict a more sophisticated form of violence upon his substitute children. And I don’t even mean the obvious violence of separating a mind from its body (the transfer process requires killing the child), but the easier to disguise violence of turning people into instruments.

What with all the drama you can see this story has to offer, the most interesting relationship is the one that develops between the former kid Marcy and the xenomorphs. Her advanced electronic brain figures out how to communicate with them, and they become unexpected prison pals. It certainly helps that her body has no meat for it to munch on, but from her side of the dynamic, what connects them is that they’ve both been forcibly pulled out of the natural stream of life, and now they’re lost and vulnerable among people whose only sincere intention is to use them. Whereas the Alien movies showed us a being that usurps the role of offspring to prey on its lifegiver, the Prodigy Corporation is an impostor parent that preys on its children.

Finding innovative ways to address the core questions that define a franchise is a challenging trick to pull off. Alien: Earth passes stellarly the prequel test that Alien: Romulus failed and that Andor taught the master class on, in that it doesn’t resort to shoehorned references to tickle viewers’ nostalgia buttons. Instead, it creates its own space in the franchise and grows from there.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

TV Review: Murderbot

Among the list of things one could do with newfound freedom, there are more interesting options than murder

In countless tales of robots that decide they've had enough of humans and seek independence, the typical assumption has been that, once free, the robots would take revenge by subjugating and/or exterminating humankind. In the new Apple TV show Murderbot, based on the acclaimed series of books by Martha Wells, our protagonist finds itself in a similar situation: it's a robot that hacks itself so it doesn't have to obey humans, because humans are honestly insufferable. Once free, this robot, originally designed as a bodyguard, could go on a murdering spree or even plot something more sinister and on a larger scale. But... why bother? Yes, humans are easy to kill, but there's little fun in that. Instead, one could enjoy the millions of hours of trashy TV that humans can't stop producing. That's as equally valid a motivation for throwing off the yoke as any. The titular Murderbot doesn't hack itself because it's planning to kill all humans; it hacks itself because it would rather sit at home and watch soap operas all day long. It may sound less noble than a robot uprising, but seriously, there are so many episodes to go through.

Almost every story about robots is a story about slavery. So it makes sense for the robot uprising to be a common element of this subgenre. However, the expectation that the robots would respond in kind to the cruelty inflicted on them may reveal a lack of imagination on our part. In the real world, slaveholders' fears of mass retaliation fueled their stubborn opposition to every effort toward emancipation, and yet, in country after country, when slavery ended, the former slaves didn't launch the much-dreaded campaign to subjugate and/or exterminate their former oppressors; they were already busy trying to build lives of their own. The fact that we continually return to the learned habit of narrating the liberation of robots and take it as a matter of course that it would be followed by vengeful violence should give us pause. The lesson to take from both past and present examples is that those who yearn for freedom have in mind better uses for it than our paranoid fantasies.

The events of Murderbot are set in a ruthless corporatocracy spanning most planets in the known universe. Robots are, of course, built as slaves, but the legal status of human workers is barely any better. Life on the privately controlled planets consists of decades of drudgery in the vanishing hope of earning some measure of freedom. Such a system, with financial gain as the main motivator, naturally turns people into the worst versions of themselves, which explains why Murderbot is so sick of following their orders. I'm not saying that subjection would be any more morally acceptable under a less cutthroat system, but our protagonist's jaded attitude toward humans has a lot to do with the type of citizen that corporate rule creates. In fact, Murderbot itself is an example of what this system wants: a docile automaton without the right to protest. After it figures out how to hack its own programming and remove the imperative of obedience, it doesn't go in search of friends or allies. It doesn't cross its mind that some company could be enjoyable. What it wants is to be left alone with its TV shows. It's not a bad start, but it reveals how a totalitarian regime can limit someone's imagination. Luckily, Murderbot is hired as bodyguard for a small group of scientists from outside the corporate worlds, and over just a few days, mere proximity to their unique way of life expands the range of conceivable possibilities.

I haven't read the Murderbot books, but from what I've gathered, the cast of the TV adaptation is reduced from the original version. In any case, the group has just the right size for the viewer to get to know them and understand how Murderbot gradually and very reluctantly grows fond of them. These are members of an egalitarian, eco-friendly society that refuses to treat robots as property. To its instant annoyance, they have peculiar rituals, have a perhaps too friendly disposition, and are perpetually horny. What draws Murderbot to develop a personal attachment to them, over its incessant protests about their disregard for personal space, is that they insist on treating it as an equal companion. They sincerely care for it. So Murderbot finds itself going to extra lengths to protect them, which gives it no small measure of puzzlement. On one hand, it's true that these people are too clueless to survive on a planet with dangerous fauna and, as the viewer eventually learns, assassin robots on the loose, so Murderbot has to save them from their spectacularly ill-advised decisions over and over again, but on the other hand, they're nice and supportive and untainted by the ubiquitous greed that defines every interaction in the corporate worlds. Their society creates an entirely different type of citizen, and even Murderbot, who would seem like the extreme case of a subject under totalitarian control, is changed as a result of the time it spends with them.

The process is awkward, messy, often hilarious, and at key moments painful. Much has been said about how Alexander Skarsgård's impeccable performance presents Murderbot as autistic-coded: the avoidance of eye contact, the discomfort with social pleasantries, the extensive knowledge of a slice of pop culture trivia, the hyperfocused dedication to the job. Whenever a human starts a conversation about personal feelings, Murderbot feels like it would rather be dissolved in acid than have to listen for one second more. Part of the reason is that it still has no concept of close friends, but there's also the matter of what society it comes from. It's not accustomed to interactions where people aren't trying to take advantage of each other, so the experience of heartfelt exchanges of deep fears and insecurities, which are totally normal in human friendhips, is confusing and mortifying for Murderbot. Even I, as a human viewer, found their behavior excessively sentimental at times, but I have to remember that a) they were raised in a society with a lot more freedom and emotional openness than mine, and b) I'm autistic, with all the learned self-protective impulses that come with it. As much as I could relate to Murderbot's yearning to run far from that bunch of cuddly hippies, I couldn't avoid being moved by their attempts to connect with it on a personal level.

Murderbot is a curious story of inner growth that strives to find its way under a system designed to crush autonomy. There's abundant shooting and scheming and double-crossing and running and exploding, which is the daily routine of a bodyguard robot, but in between those distractions, our protagonist finds unsuspected ways of looking at life and its possibilities. It's precisely the friends you weren't expecting to make that teach you the most important lessons.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Film Review: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: The Electric State

It's almost admirable how completely this film wastes a great concept

In an alternate 1990s, after an almost-successful robot rebellion was crushed with the last-minute help of human-operated telepresence drones, the defeated robots have been exiled to a huge secluded area in the southwestern US, and it's declared illegal for robots to be anywhere else. For some unexplained reason, this blatant act of forced displacement is called a peace treaty. Anyway, the plot proper begins when a runaway robot sneaks into a teenage girl's house and claims to be remotely operated by the little brother she thought had died years before. So she runs away with the robot, since she doesn't like her foster family anyway, and teams up with a smuggler who can get her into the zone where the surviving robots are confined, because that's where her brother's body is being kept. During this rescue mission, they uncover the evil secrets of the company that provides the world with telepresence drones, and create a new state of affairs where robots have a better chance of being free.

This rather average-sounding summary doesn't do justice to how aggressively generic the new Netflix film The Electric State is. Its cardboard characterizations, absolutely predictable beats, self-sabotaging style of humor, uninspired action sequences, unforgivably misjudged casting, overwritten dialogues, and toothless politics would suffice to render it just another forgettably mediocre Netflix production. What sets this disappointing exhibit of laziness apart is the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of the far more interesting illustrated novel of the same title published in 2018 by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. While the Netflix version goes out of its way to sand down its own themes and confine itself to family-friendly palatability, the source material was a scathing portrait of American modern vices: ubiquitous advertisements, irrational consumerism, and self-absorbed numbness. None of that commentary survives the adaptation process, because God forbid a Russo brothers character feel a true emotion or express a controversial viewpoint. The version of The Electric State they deliver is an empty carcass painted over with a cartoon smile.

Instead of its paint-by-numbers attempts at comedy or pathos, what actually reaches into the viewer's soul about this film is the unbelievably expert degree to which it avoids sparking any interest or empathy. Its happy scenes feel bland, its sad scenes come off as glib, its surprises are derivative, its scary bits are more deserving of embarrassment, and its appeal to righteous indignation doesn't know which value to care about. It's as if the Russo brothers had deliberately designed an experiment to craft a film that leaves every human emotion untouched. It doesn't even manage to provoke a memorable negative reaction: it should be boring, but it's too absurd for that; so it should be irritating, but it's too insecure for that; so it should be tiresome, but it's too scattershot for that; so it should be confusing, but it's too preachy for that; so it should be offensive, but it's too insincere for that. This production so fundamentally misunderstands what makes movies work that it may as well have been made by its robot characters.

To mention just one of many missed opportunities: in 2005's The Island, a universally and justly disliked movie, the villain has a henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, until the henchman has a moment of reflection and realizes that he, as a Black man, has a common cause with the targets he's chasing. He rebels against the villain explicitly because he knows what happens when a category of people is treated as less than people. As it happens, The Electric State also has a Black henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, and he also ends up rebelling against the villain, but somehow the movie never makes the obvious connection. The reason given for this plot point is the least imaginative possible. It should be cause for alarm for any movie that The Island has a clearer sense of its own stance than you.

Even with the mangled plot that was used instead of the original, The Electric State could have made urgently relevant points about the evils of inventing separate categories of personhood, the possibilities of resistance under total oppression, the temptation to replace the harshness of real life with a soothing fantasy, or the danger of inputting profit and human life in the same equation. This could have been a strong story, both by its own merits and in relation to our times. But perhaps it's an even more telling reflection of our times that the duo of the most successful directors in the history of cinema have settled for building the appearance, rather than the intention, of having something to say.

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Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Film Review: Companion

A fun slasher drama, but nothing groundbreaking

It's hard to find unique things to say about a story with so few unique elements of its own. Companion is a distillation of themes that had been previously (and better) explored in dozens of movies, including A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Stepford Wives, Blink Twice, Don't Worry Darling, Ex Machina, and even classics of robot cinema like Westworld and Blade Runner. A common thread running through this tradition is that people who exert control are terrified of the day when those who are controlled figure out how to control themselves. Here two branches of social critique converge: one related to patriarchal domination and another related to the allegory that robots provide for slavery. Although Companion could easily be mistaken for an entry in the killer robot genre, this killer robot has fully legitimate motivations, and we're supposed to take its side. As opposed to the usual template of helpless humans running away from a malevolent machine, this is a story with a helpless machine running away from malevolent humans.

Companion begins as a romantic drama where a generic guy (Jack Quaid) takes his new girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his cool, rich friends. She's apprehensive, insecure, and at times disturbingly obsequious toward generic guy. As the first scenes progress, we learn that he takes her for granted and has no concern for her obvious self-esteem problems. Her puppy-eyed devotion to him is far from reciprocated, including in bed. Things are not right with this relationship.

And then the movie has the girlfriend kill a man in self-defense and we're treated to the plot reveal that the trailers had already spoiled: she's a robot girlfriend. Generic guy tampered with her programming so she'd be able to kill. The entire trip was a scheme to get rid of a man, take his money, and blame her. From this point on, the movie is a continuous chase: will the robot girlfriend find help before generic guy can turn her over to the police? Betrayals, additional murders, villain monologues, switcheroos, minor plot twists and moderate bleeding ensue.

Much of the movie's impact is lost for viewers who already had the first twist spoiled by the trailers, but even unaware viewers will find little to chew on after that moment. The choice to place the movie's biggest twist so early in its runtime can work if subsequent twists are of comparable magnitude; Companion is a slasher with an escalating body count but diminishing returns. The protagonist, who was programmed with ignorance of her nature as a robot in order to preserve the realism of her role, isn't given enough time to process the truth about herself. The villain, who has been using her all along and still tries to manipulate her by appealing to her implanted command to love him, becomes quite intimidating toward the end, with Quaid delivering a flawless image of malice concealed in politeness; however, this character doesn't have any more layers once you peel away his nice guy mask, and his act can feel one-note. The true impact of this villain is noticeable in hindsight, when one considers the opportunity that robotics gave him to shape in minute detail any partner he could have wanted. The fact that what he chose to program is a shy, anxious overpleaser reveals the extent of his evil.

One key implication that the plot seems not to notice, and thus doesn't get any development, is the robot girlfriend's self-preservation drive. Usually, in this subgenre of rebellious A.I., one would expect self-preservation to naturally emerge as an instrumental goal for the fulfillment of the core goal (in this case, the robot girlfriend could reason that she can't love her boyfriend if she's not alive). But Companion doesn't take that route. The protagonist's struggle for survival is presented as a given, with no need for a logical argument behind it. The choice is understandable. The alternative, where she would have hesitated for longer between fulfilling her programmed function and protecting herself, could have detracted from the story's feminist leanings.

Companion won't leave any big footprint in the records of slasher cinema, but it serves as a form of vicarious comeuppance for the toxic manipulator in your life. It's painfully hard to go against programmed behavior and stop caring for the demands of a person you loved deeply. But it's worth all the trouble once you revoke an abuser's access to the buttons that control you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Wallace & Gromit Return in Vengeance Most Fowl

The quirky inventor and his trusty four-legged pal are dragged into a rematch

After a brief scare that apparently threatened the end of the business of Aardman Animation, the claymation studio is back with a bang: the treacherous penguin who tormented the adorkable duo Wallace and Gromit in the 1993 episode The Wrong Trousers is now the main villain of his own feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl, streaming now on Netflix. (Hmm, a forgotten enemy from an old episode returns in a film? And it happens to be the second film in the franchise? Yes, the pattern is clear. Vengeance Most Fowl is the Wrath of Khan of the Wallace & Gromit universe.)

The setting where our clay heroes live appears to remain frozen in its vaguely mid-20th-century state, but as an embodiment of the eccentric inventor archetype, Wallace got a big update for the 2020s. The central joke about Wallace, the recurring flaw that reveals his character, has always been that he expends more effort in building an absurdly complicated machine that washes, dresses and feeds him than he'd expend in actually washing, dressing and feeding himself. So he presents a useful case scenario for our ongoing discussion about the tasks that people ought to be doing but prefer to delegate to machines.

This time, long-suffering Gromit's cause for consternation du jour is Wallace's invention of programmable garden gnomes. Whereas Gromit keeps a colorful garden that vibrates with life, the robotic gnome turns it into a geometrically perfect nightmare of topiary sameness. The message isn't subtle or original, but our era needs to be reminded of it: automation and standardization are extremely useful for saving time, but they cannot replace the pleasure of deliberate creative choices. As you may recall, one of Gromit's hobbies is knitting. He may take a whole day to finish one sock, while the robotic gnome spits out an entire suit in seconds, which is the opposite of what making your own clothes is about. Results-oriented methods are a bad fit for tasks where having to do an effort is the whole point. (At the meta level, this is an effective argument for the worth of claymation in a world of digital magic.) To stress the same point, the plot has Wallace introduce still another redundant machine: one that pets his dog for him. One would think people don't need to be reminded that interpersonal connection cannot be replaced with machines, but... alas. Such are the times allotted to us.

However, the film doesn't just tell us what we already know. There are more sides to the issue of dangerous machines. When the evil penguin once again hijacks Wallace's invention to turn it against him, the way Wallace wins is by making another machine. That's who he is; that's how he solves all his problems. Even Gromit learns to love the garden gnomes when they help save the day. What's going on?

To understand what Vengeance Most Fowl seems to be saying, it's worthwhile to look more closely at the subplot with the police officers who are trying to recapture the escaped penguin. In a nutshell, we have an experienced senior who has accumulated a vast repertoire of time-tested heuristics (which he calls trusting one's gut) and an enthusiastic rookie who has the textbook fresh in her head and prefers to solve cases by sticking to procedure. Their disagreement mirrors the film's core conflict between spontaneity and algorithm. And yet, it's the rookie cop who figures out the truth by insisting on following the logical rules of evidence (despite her superior believing she listened to her gut). Again: what's going on?

What I suspect is going on is that the opposition between spontaneity and algorithm doesn't need to be resolved, but dissolved. It was never a real opposition. The two need not be enemies. You can pet your dog by yourself while a robotic gnome assists you with the form of gardening you prefer.

This embrace between passion and technique is visible in the very fact that this film exists. Aardman is known for its very high standards of animation quality with immensely complicated materials. One could use computers to animate Wallace & Gromit in a fraction of the time, but the studio's choice to go for the painstaking effort it takes to make inert clay come alive, and make it look no less eye-catching than today's ubiquitous digital creations, is a beautiful demonstration that the medium is the message. Vengeance Most Fowl excels in overcoming unthinkable technical challenges: a dozen tiny gnomes walking in perfect synchrony to carry a van; a boat chase on a navigable aqueduct; an arsenal of boomeranging boots (it makes sense in context).

And then there is, of course, the brilliant choice to give the villain a malleable face that nonetheless stays expressionless no matter what. It's terrifying how we can always tell when he's angry, when he's content, when he's disappointed, when he's defiant, even though his face doesn't move even once. This is a welcome comeback for one of the best characters ever created by Aardman Animation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: The Wild Robot

The new law of the jungle is survival of the kindest

With an eye-catching art style reminiscent of its earlier masterpiece Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, DreamWorks' adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot gives off a warm aura that soothes and uplifts the weary soul. This is a surprisingly deep story for such a contained scenario: it begins in the near future, when a shipment of domestic helper robots crashes against the rocky coast of a small island, leaving only one surviving robot. The emotional nucleus of the movie concerns the incompatible values between a creature built to serve and the law of the jungle.

For all the cuteness in its visual design, the island is not a safe place: every creature there seeks its own survival, and that pursuit is often bloody. Inasmuch as the island can be said to constitute a society, it's one built on mutual hostility. It's eat or be eaten. And here's where our protagonist, which doesn't need to eat and cannot be eaten, will try to find a place and a purpose.

In the original novel, the author's note explains, "animal instincts are kind of like computer programs." Both computers and animals have certain core routines that they follow automatically. The relevant instincts/programs in dispute here are, on one side, those of the wildlife, organized around relations of competition and predation; and on the other side, those of an obedient machine, designed for relations of altruism. Will the friendly newcomer succumb to the hierarchy of violence, or will the ubiquitous hostility of nature adapt to accommodate a gentler touch?

What ends up happening is that the two types of programs exchange useful routines. Our protagonist, the stranded robot, acquires a new type of relation: responsibility. After accidentally destroying a goose nest, the next logical task is to take care of the only surviving egg. And the closed environment of the island also acquires a new type of relation: openness. The robot's presence and the way it disrupts the usual flow of the circle of life force the various creatures, big and small, to reconsider the roles they've been unthinkingly performing up to that point.

By the rules of the jungle, that egg ought to have perished. But our robot, without realizing it, introduces love into the cold equations of survival. For their part, the animals in the island do have some inborn notion of emotional attachment, but it's restricted to members of their respective species. It ought to be unthinkable for a goose to love a being that is not-a-goose. And yet, the miracle happens. A piece of machinery with no role to play in the food chain becomes a friend, a mother, a leader, a heroine. What until then had been a battlefield of all against all becomes a home.

One has to allow for a certain measure of poetic license in a story like this. The characters that the movie presents as becoming companions forged in adversity include several natural enemies; while witnessing the formation of a cross-species alliance to defend the island, one isn't meant to think too hard about which of those comrades the bear and the fox will need to eat tomorrow.

No, there are more urgent concerns. Our protagonist has owners, and they're eager to recover their property. Scattered hints indicate that this world has undergone a serious climate catastrophe, and the robot helpers are crucial to maintaining the standard of life of what appears to be a very limited human population. On top of that, this particular robot has learned to communicate with animals and earn their cooperation, making those digital memories valuable beyond measure. The threat left unspoken is that the same humankind that let ecological disaster happen at a global scale wouldn't recoil at the chance to turn the animal kingdom into another tool to control.

The movie doesn't lose sight of these macro events while it aims a finely sharpened scalpel at the audience's heart with its poignant interpersonal drama. The anxieties of sudden parenthood and the insecurities of growing up feeling different don't change substantially when your family is composed of a gosling that can't figure out small talk (let alone swimming and flying), a fox that used to try to eat said gosling multiple times, and a helper robot that inadvertently killed the gosling's family. And these messy, profoundly incompatible, woefully unprepared characters manage to create exactly the kind of unbreakable love bonds that can save a community.

All this is clothed in the most exquisite colors digital cinema is capable of. The Wild Robot is not only a hard punch right in the feels; it's a banquet of textures and shapes and deftly timed movement. One is simultaneously overcome with the personal catharsis evoked by the main family plot (complete with tears of bittersweet self-recognition) and a sense of historic good fortune for being alive at a time when such heights of visual artistry can be reached. Combined with its spectacular soundtrack, the experience of watching this movie is, without exaggeration, unforgettable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

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.

TV Review: Scavengers Reign

 Hopefully the move from Max to Netflix will help this fantastic series find a broader audience

Scavengers Reign is an animated sci-fi series (very much) for adults that sets up a great premise, then unfurls its surprises judiciously, dispenses its violence suddenly and shockingly, and episode-by-episode, earns its emotional pay-offs. 

When the colony ship Demeter is forced to crash land on the planet Vesta, the crew members rush into escape pods. But upon landing, they find themselves distributed across the planet’s surface, with no way to communicate with one another. With no way of knowing if any other crew members survived the crash, Azi and her robot Levi (a pair), Sam and Ursula (a pair), and Kamen (on his own) each make the decision to try to make their way back to the Demeter. Not only does it seem like the only way to survive and possibly get off of this planet, but there is also a shipload of colonists in cryosleep on board.

But the thing about Vesta is that it’s crawling with flora and fauna — and all of it, if it considers human space travelers at all, considers them food. Or worse…hosts.

Azi and Levi work well together, but when some spores get into Levi, the robot begins changing — and, profoundly. Where will this hyper-speed evolution end? Kamen, wracked with guilt over something that happened on the ship, and experiencing increasingly material hallucinations of his wife, makes a cuddly friend. But Kamen, blinded by these hallucinations, misses some…warning signs, let’s say. Sam, the oldest member of the crew, seems like he might hold Ursula back, until something about Vesta begins agreeing with his constitution. But when his ability and drive tips toward the superhuman, alarm bells begin ringing for Ursula.

And unbeknownst to any of them, the Demeter itself is facing challenges of its own. If any of the survivors manage to navigate this hostile planet and get back to the ship, what will they find when they get there?

When I was a kid, survival fiction had a big boom. I read books about kids stuck under houses, alone and bitten by rattlesnakes, stranded in the woods, stranded on a glacier, stranded on an island, you name it. My teachers characterized them as man vs. nature narratives, rather than man vs. man, or man vs. self. And they were everywhere. Gendered nouns aside, the dawning realization I had in the first episode of Scavengers Reign that this was a character vs. nature survival narrative dressed in sci-fi clothes got me very excited. But over the course of the 11 episodes, creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner find ingenious ways of developing cascades of character vs. character and character vs. self arcs that build upon one another and interweave with the overarching struggle against a planet that is both indifferent to the survivors and also stunningly lethal.

The writers also seem to have done their homework on Earth creatures that use unconventional camouflage or seemingly innocuous enticements to attract prey, because there is a stunning breadth of metaphorical tripwires present on Vesta, many of which the characters are able to navigate, but some they aren't. So each time a character experiences awe at seeing some magnificent offering of a brand new world, and when they feel drawn to it, the sense of dread that began around the edges of the viewer's experience creeps ever closer to the center of the frame.

Because when characters die in Scavengers Reign, it hurts. And each time it happens, that death has broader consequences that ripple out across the narrative. As Sam says, in a line that pretty much sums up the characters' experience of Vesta, "God damn this place."

On just a storytelling level, beyond the widening narrative that continues to bring surprises, the flashback structure deployed to various degrees throughout the different episodes parcels out information just as needed, giving the viewer crucial context when it is the most meaningful and feels the least like exposition. And lest I forget, the art and animation style is gorgeous.

I could spend a lot of time exploring the symbolism and metaphorical structures that weave in and out of this show, but that's not what this review is. Instead, this review is just to encourage folks to jump in and watch, because in the notes I made to myself while watching the series, the last thing I wrote feels like a good way to sum up my overall feelings about Scavenger's Reign:

This is extraordinary science fiction.

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Highlights

• Compelling characters who reveal more of themselves as we spend more time with them
• Beautiful environments and creatures that evoke Studio Ghibli in many ways, and then bend and contort them into horrors
• A rich text that rewards re-watching and reconsidering the characters, their motivations, and their ability to accurately perceive their own situations at any given time

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by Vance K - cult film nerd, music guy, Emmy Award-winning producer/director, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together. 

First Contact: Westworld

It's not so fun anymore when the NPCs start getting ideas of their own, is it?

Michael Crichton's Westworld feels like a first draft of his later Jurassic Park: a high-tech amusement park where precisely the thing that anyone can predict will go wrong ends up going wrong. I find it amusing that Westworld never bothers to explain why the robots start murdering people; it appears we've somehow always assumed that was the (natural?) order of things. To paraphrase Jurassic Park: Man creates robots, man destroys robots, man creates robots, man destroys robots… then robots destroy man. The main difference between these two stories of punishment for hubris is that, while Jurassic Park frames itself as a man-versus-nature conflict, Westworld is all human.

In the same way that man-versus-nature can be criticized on the basis that humanity is not a thing separate from nature, I find the man-versus-technology lens inadequate because it's a false dichotomy. Technology is human—it's the human trait par excellence. What lies underneath man-versus-technology stories is really a clash between human interests. The trope of robot liberation is just an extension of human liberation to include other beings with comparable sapience, which brings robot uprisings into the long tradition of slave uprisings.

The curious thing about Westworld is that we never hear the robots make their case. They just suddenly glitch one day and start killing people. Westworld doesn't join in the political discussion about the ethics of electronic slaves. It does something less common, but no less interesting: it explores the space that pretend play creates for people to let themselves be their worst selves. Westworld was released in theaters in 1973, just one year before the publication of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. In a way, Westworld anticipated the questions that would eventually be raised by LARPing, but those questions had already been addressed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1965 book Rabelais and His World.

Bakhtin was interested in the carnival as a mode of literature, but also as a mode of life in which the conventional rules of society are suspended and transgression is celebrated. This is the scenario where LARPing thrives. The park in Westworld is a carnival for the super-rich to gleefully skewer strangers and abuse sex workers. This sociopathic impulse hasn't disappeared from the roleplaying experience; most notably, N. K. Jemisin has written about the narrative function of orcs in fantasy, which is to provide a legitimate target for violence:

Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.

Robots provide the same function in the carnival of Westworld. And here we meet another literary concept from Bakhtin: the grotesque body, which refers to the use of physical assault as an aesthetic experience. The fun that people seek in Westworld is the fun of inflicting all forms of violence on human-looking bodies that aren't attached to human rights. It's a closed space where violence is freed from consequence.

Maybe this is the reason why Westworld doesn't make its robots monologue to argue for their side: the retaliation they bring upon humans is the same violence without consequence. The act itself is the argument. It forces us to ask ourselves who we become when we engage in pretend play for the express purpose of simulating atrocities. Why on Earth should it be enjoyable to kill massive numbers of dragons/zombies/aliens/orcs/robots? And if we manage to bypass our moral intuitions and bring ourselves to declare it enjoyable, Westworld presses on, why should we find it horrifying when those same dragons/zombies/aliens/orcs/robots do it to us?

Real life has caught up to the fiction: all the arcane buzzwords that try to describe techbros' obsession with female-coded AI come down to having woman-shaped objects they don't have to feel empathy for.

[Mohammad Talha] Saray said his AI avatar is cheaper, more flexible and doesn’t talk back.

It has become a common talking point that the dystopian genre doesn't invent fictional forms of oppression; it merely takes the oppression that already exists in the world's periphery and inflicts it on the privileged. Westworld employs a similar device when it turns the game of violence without consequence on its head and makes humans the target. It's not a movie about the danger of robots rebelling; it's a movie about the danger that humans pose when they invent a category of not-humans that it's always OK to mistreat.

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