Organization: Penn State University
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 16:32:31 EDT
From: Matt Pyson <MRP105@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: Re: TERMINATOR II
 <64238@hydra.gatech.EDU> <1992Jul24.221646.500@sura.net>

In article <fubar>, wbarnes@sura.net (Bill Barnes) writes:
> Also, you're overlooking the fact that the scene served a dramatic purpose,
> as someone else mentioned, namely Sarah coming to grips with herself,
> wrestling with the question of whether she could kill another person in order
> to prevent nuclear war. Since the blatant message of the movie is that you
> shouldn't kill, it was important to see whether our heroine would.
>
> Cameron routinely sacrifices plot integrity in order to have a good dramatic
> moment or to prove his point. It's his style; deal with it.

It's not just Cameron, most moviemakers are not out to make a movie that is a
paragon of continuity. They're out to make a film that will keep an audience
entertained, and at the same time get their message (whatever it may happen to
be) across at the same time. Continuity is followed unless it would be more
dramatic otherwise. ("Nobody pays attention to continuity." -- Ozu.) Science
fiction movies, with their arbitrary settings and speculative physical laws,
just seem to fall prey to this tendency more obviously than other genres.

> In article <64238@hydra.gatech.EDU> ccoprdj@prism.gatech.EDU (Jorge Diaz)
> writes:
>> In article <5607@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at> mst@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at
>> (Markus Stumptner) writes:
>>> How would she know what it's programmed to do? Because it tells her it's
>>> her friend? Even a completely sane person would be very careful before
>>> choosing to believe the Terminator. Actually, her near-paranoia was one of
>>> the most convincing parts of the film.
>>
>> Gee I don't know. If it hasn't killed her and John by now, there's a good
>> chance that he's on their side.... All he needs to do is kill Johnny, and
>> it's all over. If he didn't do it, there's probably a reason.
>
> Or maybe - brace yourself for this - she was behaving IRRATIONALLY. Like a
> person whose life has been ruined by a gun inherently distrusts guns and gun
> owners ever after - her life has been ruined by a Terminator and so she
> inherently distrusts them.

Trusting a Terminator.... I'd say that she'd be very safe trusting a Terminator
since they are not sophisticated enough to do sneaky, manipulative plotting...
they're just too single-minded. Skynet has one approach to defend itself: kill
the humans. If a Terminator gets within arm's reach of John Connor it kills
him. No negotiation, no bargaining. It's doubtful if Skynet even thinks
humanity can be dealt with as an equal. If Arnie comes up to Skynet's prime
enemies and tells them he's there to protect them, and does.... that's it.
That's what is really there to do, or die trying.

Sarah is a survivor, which means she isn't totally off the deep end. It's like
making a deal with the devil, but she deals with Arnie once she's convinced
that he's there to help. She has to overcome her own bias, and change her
attitudes on how to change the world. Throughout the first part of T2, one of
Sarah's main obstacles is that she's suffering because she's trying to change
the future in exactly the same way Skynet is: by killing innocent people. She
acts more like a Terminator than Arnie does.

[Stuff deleted about the terminator possibly being mis-programmed]
>
> Do the words, "bug," "glitch," "malfunction," "crash," or even "Trojan horse"
> mean anything to you?

These are all certainly possible, but they don't fit in with the tone of the
rest of the story as presented. The movie isn't about humanity being destroyed
because of a programming error. That's closer to what WarGames was about. T2 is
about the triumph of humanity and human feelings over inhumanity and emotion-
lessness. All machinery functions as it ought, unless it is part of the story
that it doesn't. There was no subplot about Arnie having ulterior motives,
therefore he didn't have any.

---
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