I’m a fan of the original 1984 Terminator, the movie that started the franchise. It was unique in being the first (although the late science fiction author Harlan Jay Ellison would beg to differ, as he did in all things). It was raw, efficient, relentless, violent, and bloody, perfect for 1984. I watched the second movie, Judgement Day, when it was first  released. While it was more refined than the first, especially with regards to special effects, it lacked the sharp edge of originality of the first movie. None-the-less I was entertained and came away with good feelings about the movie.

Everything afterwards, not so much.

I’ve spent the past few days watching, in bits and pieces, Terminator: Dark Fate. The creators of this film might claim it’s the true heir to the second movie Judgement Day, but it’s not. There have been too many releases between Judgement and Fate to ignore. Furthermore consider that Judgement Day was released in 1991 and Dark Fate was released in 2019, a nearly 30 year span. Whatever good feelings I might have had towards the franchise have long since been washed away by the various releases (which I skipped) as well as the march of time. The two key actors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, are 74 and 65 respectively. I’m not an ageist, but come on. Those two aren’t going to hoof it across the landscape like they did 30 years ago. I’m in between those two age-wise, and I can assure you I’m not hoofing it across the landscape like I did 30 years ago. If anything I’m a smidgen cyborg-ish/Terminator-ish, what with my having had both of my knees replaced with beautifully machined surgical metals and plastic. But I digress…

I’m suffering from Terminator Fatigue. There’s only so many ways you can tell this limited story with a different cast in each movie before you decide to get off the Terminator Rollercoaster. The exit point for me was Rise of the Machines and Kristanna Loken’s inflata-boobs. I would have been more impressed if the female terminator had changed her entire appearance, not just her bust size (the terminator got the boob idea looking at a female model’s photo on a billboard). The movie is one silly contrived situation after another, the end of which I can no longer remember. That movie should have killed the franchise right then and there, but it didn’t. Instead they’ve shoveled out one stinker after another until the franchise has evolved into a decaying mechanical zombie.

In my opinion the absolute biggest flaw with the Terminator franchise is how time travel is used as a story crutch. Ignoring the fact that there is no time travel (really), using time travel to send a Terminator far back in time to kill the mother of the human who leads the resistance in the future is a shaky premise at best. Instead, look at the movie Edge of Tomorrow, where the alien antagonist uses time travel to travel back to the last battle it lost with humans, making corrections in how it fought until it wins, then moves on to the next battle. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until all of Europe is overrun and the aliens are poised to invade England. This is how Terminator should have handled losing battles, by going back a very short distance in time to each battle with corrections until it wins, repeating until the war itself is won. Unfortunately for the original cast if this particular plot had been followed then there’d be nothing like what we saw in all those movies. Which, come to think of it, would have been a Good Thing.

Apple TV+

I got a year’s free subscription to Apple TV+ when I purchased my iPhone 11 Pro Max in September 2019. It was January 2020 before I even bothered to set up the application, let alone start to watch anything on it. The only show I remember watching was “For All Mankind,” and I stopped watching it because I’m no fan of alternate history, especially when it involves the space race of the 1960s between the US and the Soviet Union. The whole series is based on what if the Russians moon rocket booster, the N1, had actually worked? I’ve studied the N1 and it was a manufacturing disaster. The N1, on paper, was the most powerful heavy lift first stage every built. That first stage used 30 NK-15 engines, which were considered the most powerful rocket engines in that class of their day. The problem is that the N1 first stage was not static fire tested, the entire N1 program being under-funded and rushed to completion. As a consequence, all four N1 test launches self-destructed when launched. An awful lot of what went wrong in our time line would have had to have been done correctly in an alternate history. An awful log stretching back decades. You can’t just blithely wish it so. Rocketry is stupidly hard, such that the only rocket that even comes close to the N1 is today’s Falcon Heavy, with three Falcon 9 cores, each core with nine engines, for a total of 27 when the Heavy is under full thrust.

I got tired of all the glib passing over of the technical issues so that “For All Mankind’s” writers could write a convoluted soap opera. I skipped around a few episodes in the first season, and gave up.

After several months of light watching I stopped watching Apple TV+ completely. I only remembered I had it when I received an email from Apple that my free subscription was expiring in November 2020. That’s when I unsubscribed.

CBS All Access

That service was offered through Apple TV+ with a free 30 day all-you-could-watch trial, so I signed up. I managed to watch “Star Trek: Picard” as well as “Star Trek: Discovery.” Both shows were fan-service shows. If you’re a die-hard Trekkie then those shows are certainly for you. I’m not in that category. I’m the 8th grader who turned off the original Star Trek, season three, first episode, “Spock’s Brain,” because it was so bad. That episode has absolutely no redeeming qualities; by the time I’d gotten to the mid-point of the episode I’d had enough. I never watched another episode of season 3, and when NBC finally killed it I barely noticed.

Both of those new shows reminded me a bit of that crap. I quickly went through all the episodes, skipping parts that were of no interest to me. On “Picard,” the last episode where Data dies was particularly bilious. “Discovery” on the other hand was just off the scale when it came to overall acceptance of any of the stories or plot lines. “Discovery” is just bad fantasy wrapped in Star Trek technobabble and flashing lights. Once I finished with “Discovery” I killed my subscription.

Netflix

I was an old subscriber to Netflix. I opened a subscription with Netflix back when you ordered DVDs to be shipped to your home, back in the early 2000s. It was cheap, a lot cheaper than going to the movies, and it helped entertain the family, including the girls who were in high school at the time. I stuck with Netflix when they switched over to streaming; I first streamed Netflix with an app I installed on the family Nintendo Wii. When I upgraded the family DVD to Blueray, it came with Netflix streaming pre-installed. Same with my first digital TV, a Samsung 55 incher. Netflix was ubiquitous, and full of video content from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was cheap and plentiful.

Then it got not so cheap and not so plentiful. Other streaming services came along (Disney, for example) and starting pulling movies to show on their services. And then Netflix started to “rotate” movies out, so that if you didn’t watch it, and it was rotated out, too bad, so sad. And then Netflix started to make their own movies, none of which appealed to me. I know my taste in movies can get pretty trashy, but not Netflix trashy. So early 2020 I killed that subscription.

So what are we watching these days?

Amazon Prime with Brit Box

It’s Amazon, and it seems to come with everything. I added Brit Box so we could see all the British TV that never was complete on any other streaming service. So all the seasons and all the episodes are complete on Brit Box. I watched Amazon pretty much because of “The Expanse,” but if you read my last post, you pretty much know I’ve walked away from that. I use Amazon Prime for a lot of other services besides movies, so I’m not to concerned with whether I keep it or not; Video is just one of those added perks.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ because it’s cheap and because of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision,” as well as the complete catalog of Star Wars, MCU, and Pixar. There’s a lot there to keep me occupied. But not necessarily happy.

I’ve already passed judgement on “The Mandalorian” and found it lacking. Once again, a fan service episode. If there’s any redeeming feature to the show, it was season 1, episode 1, in which Werner Herzog stared as “The Client.” It slowly went down hill from there.

“WandaVision” is a bit more enigmatic. They’re trying to be clever, and they’re almost making it happen. These first few episodes remind me a bit of the first few seasons of “Agents of Shield.” The fact that new episodes are only released weekly every Friday is a bit of a letdown, but then, it takes time to film and produce anything, so I can wait for the finished product to be delivered.

Going back through the MCU catalog has allowed me to build a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. The problem with movies is the long delay between releases, when you memory of the last movies grow a bit hazy. So when I see something that doesn’t quite make sense in one film, I can go back to a prior film and see how that led to an event in the later film(s). I’ve grown to have a better appreciation of what the MCU accomplished up to this point.

In conclusion

That’s about it. My TV watching is declining over time. I have a recent LG 55 inch TV that is programmed to stream just about everything. Funny thing is I spend as much time watching streamed content on my iPhone and iPads as I do on the LG. My wife is going down the same path. If we want to watch something together I’ll pull up my 12 inch iPad Pro and share it with her. It seems sufficient, and it harkens back to the early days of broadcast TV when my primary TV was a 13″ Sony that my wife and I shared right when we married. Talk about coming around in circles…

As for the other kind of visual entertainment, video games, I hardly play anything anymore. I have exactly one game I play on both iPhone and iPad. My oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Nintendo Switch Lite, on which I play “Animal Crossing” and share it with them and my youngest daughter. I’ve tried to get interested in other Switch games, especially when the local Walmart puts them on sale, but I play them a bit then put the cartridges in my Switch case and don’t think much about them after that.

I have no patience anymore with fantasy and make believe worlds. They take too much time, have too many logic and story holes, and demand too much money over time for too little in return.

I didn’t hit the multiplex to see “The Last Jedi.” I already knew that it was a swan song for Carrie Fisher, who died right after filming had wrapped up on “The Last Jedi.” I know a lot of fans who viewed the movie based on sentimental reasons alone, but I refused to see it when it was released precisely because of her recent death; I felt it a bit morbid. But TLJ just came out on Netflix, so I decided to take a look. And that’s when I couldn’t believe what I saw in just the first three minutes of the film. Let me show you what I saw in about the first three minutes of the film.
First, we have an image of a ship boarding a lot of smaller ships, which are all streaming from the surface of the planet below. Apparently they’re trying to get out of the area before something Terrible Happens. I wonder what that might be?
The movie changes viewpoint to the surface of the planet where we see everyone who hasn’t gotten off, getting off and leaving a lot of good supplies behind. They’re in a very big hurry. While the tension mounts, one of the characters utters an “oh no” and looks up to see a pair of Star Destroyers appear in space (complete with sound effects even). These Star Destroyers must be huge to appear this large from the planet’s surface during daylight, especially when we see in the next establishing scene they’re well clear of the planet’s atmosphere.
And here they are in all their glory, pointed right at the earlier escape ship. But wait, we’re about to be visually treated to an even bigger ship than the Star Destoyers.
That’s right. Here we see a Dreadnaught starship appear. We also get to see that there’s actually three Star Destoyers around the Dreadnaught.
And, of course, what would a Dreadnaught be without its planet destroying weaponry?

So here’s my problem with all of this. We have four capital warships show up above an enemy base with absolutely no defensive capability against this massed array of firepower. And yet, in the minutes that follow, they do manage to get away (sort of) and destroy the Dreadnaught in the process. And that makes no rational sense, even if I’m willing to suspend belief that such can ever exist in the first place. Here’s what I would have done, ignoring anything to do with real science and physics, and just concentrating on the logic of the battle:

1. If I were in charge of the operation, I’d have had everyone rendezvous at a location well away from the final attack location, get everything coordinated, and then move my squadron of capital ships so that they appeared all at once over the intended target. Having the Dreadnaught show up late might have made for movie drama, but it showed poor planning on someone’s part.
2. And while we’re at the rendezvous point, a plan would be put together with the intel on the enemy (and they would have had intel, especially if they knew where they were to start with). That plan would include an offensive operation to go into effect as soon as the squadron appeared over the target.
   1. Remember all those TIE fighters swarming out of the Dreadnaught? They would have been swarming out as soon as the Dreadnaught appeared over the target. Their target(s) would have been anything in front in space, which meant all those rebel ships coming up from the surface and the even bigger target, the destination transport ship taking them in.
   2. The Dreadnaught would have been ready to open fire as soon as it appeared as well. No waiting around. If nothing else, it would be suppressive fire with some attempt to range towards the final target, then fire for effect. Those are big guns; use them.

With all that going on, nothing should have been left to chance, or left alive to cause any issues. Everyone on the planet and in space should have been dead or dying within 10 minutes of the squadron’s appearance. You’ve got four heavily armed, massive capital ships against essentially nothing.

But there’s one character in this movie I have a special animosity towards: Poe Dameron. To start with, with any decent warship, there is no way a singly manned attack craft should have gotten through anything like a close-in weapon system, or point defense system. Modern Earth navies have them studded all over every respectable ship in their fleets, and have since the mid-1970s starting with the Phalanx CIWS. I heard the line of dialog about how the little X-wing was to small and nimble against the Dreadnaught’s CIWS, which I find totally ludicrous. This is the same stupid excuse that got the first Death Star killed (which I also found totally ludicrous). A half-decent CIWS, totally automated, especially with homing missiles, should have wiped out the X-wing before the various bridge crews were even aware of the X-wing in the first place.

Ah well, this is Disney after all. I managed to see most of the film by skipping through a lot more stupidisms (thank you Netflix for that capability). If there’s any comfort in feeling cheated for wasting my time, it’s that the next movie out of the Disney Star Wars movie chute, “Solo”, did pretty terrible by Star Wars money making standards, such that any future side movies are on hold. Perhaps “Solo” died on its own, or perhaps TLJ left a bad taste in more mouths than Disney realized. Who knows. But I do know this: I’m never watching another movie from the Disney/Star Wars confluence. Anything Disney buys or creates they eventually destroy because all that matters to them is the money being made, plot and/or story be damned. “Star Wars” is turning into another “Pirates,” with each new sequel more expensive, more heavily invested in visual glitter, and more creatively bankrupt the further you go.

P.S.

The screen shots were made on my MBP with the latest Firefox. I tried to screen shot the same scenes using Netflix on both iOS and Android, but was blocked by doing so by the apps. Whatever…

I mentioned the original Star Wars movie in the last post. What I didn’t mention is that I watched it a total of 24 times over a twelve month period. I did that because I was “starved” for entertaining science fiction that made an attempt to actually look like it had some chance of being real. The last decent contemporary science fiction file I’d watched was 2001, and that was nine years before in 1968. When Star Wars was released, it was like a oasis in a cultural desert.

The first I ever heard about Star Wars was right before it was released through critic Gene Shalit on the Today Show. Mr. Shalit was excited about Star Wars. Over about a week before it hit the theaters, he would do a number of stories and reviews of the movie. That got me motivated to see it the weekend of the release. I was immediately taken by the movie, so much that I took my dad and brother out the next weekend to see it. Folks now find much to criticize about the movie, but when it was first released, we all just accepted the entire movie and ignored whatever so-called flaws it might have (such as how a lone missile, with or without the Force, could blow up a major planet-sized weapon system called the Death Star). It was the idea of seeing all that tech flying around. Because movie tickets were only $2 back then and I wasn’t dating at the time, I watched the movie 24 times before it finally left the area.

And it was so much fun watching Carrie Fischer, as Princess Leia, the character with so much sass, who certainly wasn’t the screaming damsel in distress. If anything she was helping to save our ostensible heroes, such as when they were trying to get her out of the detention block on the Death Star and she shot their way out of it. She was a wonderfully fresh change to similar characters in other movies. I didn’t so much fall in love with Carrie Fischer the actress as Princess Leia the character.

To give you some idea what it was like to listen to Gene Shalit as well as the then-fresh faces from Star Wars, follow this link to the interview. It’s so much fun to watch it again.

I didn’t know Carrie, never met her, but I’m going to miss her none-the-less.

I saw the original “Alien” when it was released in 1979. Not knowing what to expect, I went in with an open mind and was greatly pleased with what I saw. I’d been prepped, as it were, by the original “Star Wars” of 1977, and I expected a good, if somewhat flawed, science fiction movie. I came away from “Alien” feeling in the same great mood I’d felt after watching “Star Wars.” It wasn’t until 1986, a good seven years later, before I got to watch “Aliens.” But it was very much worth the wait. If anything the second movie proved even better than the first. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1987, winning two. Sigourney Weaver (then, now, and forever so incredibly beautiful) was nominated for a Best Actress, although she didn’t win it (Marlene Matlin won for “Children of a Lesser God”). Such an incredibly good start to the Alien franchise.

That was the last Alien franchise movie I watched until “Prometheus.” I’d watch the trailers for the successive Alien movies after “Aliens”, finding little in them to convince me to spend my hard-earned cash to watch the complete film. All I ever saw in the trailers were variations on the first two films. Along the way I made the mistake of watching “Alien vs Predator.” After that cinematic debacle I made sure to stay away from all the other movies in that particular franchise mashup. Then “Prometheus” came along in 2012, far enough away in time from the “Alien vs Predator” release that I broke down and gave “Prometheus” a shot. That was a big mistake on my part I came to regret almost instantly.

“Prometheus” is a crude horror movie, steeped in pseudo-intellectualism about the creation of life on Earth, in which every character behaved in the most moronic and self-destructive way imaginable. They all deserved to die, in their own horrific manner. I felt absolutely no sympathy for any of the characters. The only emotion I felt was a deep disappointment in that the character Elizabeth Shaw survived, along with the android David’s head.

On Christmas Day they released the trailer to the second movie in this franchise reboot, “Alien: Covenant.” Everything a pre-pubescent male could ever want in a schlock-filled horror movie is there in this two-minute trailer: an alien bursting out of a human, a screaming blood covered female (with knife), two naked humans making love in a shower scene with an alien slashing them into a bloody mess (stealing death-because-of-sex from “Friday the 13th”), an exploding flaming spaceship, a face-hugger, mindless screaming while running through the dark, etc, etc, etc. It’s a rote movie, with minor variations from the many prior releases, which were themselves just as rote after the very first two in the original franchise series. There’s not a damn thing that’s truly new except for the planet. Who the hell cares about the Engineers? Who really cares who created the xenomorph/neomorph? Does that really add anything important to the overall story telling? Not really. It is, instead, an opportunity to churn out yet another tiresome Alien related movie, another cynical money-making exercise.

I watched the trailer because I had managed to nurture just a glimmer of hope that things might actually be better this time around. The trailer effectively slashed that hope into a bloody mess.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has by any measure you want to apply been an incredible financial success. As of today, 30 December, it’s crossed the $600M gross receipts mark, breaking yet another record time-wise in its unstoppable (it would appear) race to $1B and beyond. Everywhere you look, everyone is gushing over how Star Wars has boosted not only its own sales, but the overall North American box office gross receipts to $11B+ for the year.

If I’m lucky I hopefully won’t add to the growing pile of cash surrounding this Star Wars movie.

I have for decades taken a dismal view of the entire Hollywood Industrial Complex. I can’t remember how far back my dark view goes, but it was kicked into high gear with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which essentially made making copies, any copies, felonious behavior, by the “dissemination” of means and methods for breaking digital rights management, or DRM. It went so far to criminalize the mere act, even if no actual infringement (especially for profit) takes place. And that was used to lard up digital systems with hardware and software in our electronic devices to enforce it.

This incredibly invasive law and the incredibly abusive system that that has grown up to enforce it since then has motivated me to avoid just about everything the HIC can produce, from music to movies. The only thing I buy in any quantity anymore are dead-tree books, if for no other reason that they can’t be erased or recalled, unless the Firemen come to claim my books.

It further inflames my passions against the HIC when I read all the stories trumpeting 2015’s record ticket sales of just over $11B. And this isn’t the first year with such records. This year’s record breaks the last record set a mere two years ago in 2013 of $10.9B. So it’s not like a few record years in the midst of many poor years, like the US car industry for example. The HIC has been stepping from record to record each year, riding abusively and heavily on the backs of the US citizens, helped with the gross enforcement of the DMCA and other similar actions. When you see such a colluding, abusive marketplace, investigations usually take place and people get sued. But not the HIC. Instead, with their carefully bought legislative drones, they make billions, talking out of one side of their mouths about how wonderful it is, while at the same time talking out the other about how they’re being driven to the poor house by copyright abusers. The only real copyright abuse is with the HIC, who are masters at it. And so I do as little as possible, personally, to help put money into a system that abuses me in so many big and little ways. I don’t buy tickets, I don’t watch movies at the theaters if I can help it, and I don’t stream anymore (I streamed very little to start with), especially music.

I’ve a confession to make: when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 I saw it 24 times. That’s right, 24 times. That’s because the last good science fiction movie I saw with space ships was 1968’s “2001.” That period from 1968 to 1977 was a vast cinematic wasteland for me, so when the first Star Wars film was released I was incredibly motivated to see it as much as possible (it also helped that I was 23 at the time, a key age for such oddball behavior). I kept going back to tease out how the special effects were created (I was heavy into film still photography back then, and nursed the ambition of going into film making; we all know how that turned out). Key to supporting this behavior were ticket prices in 1977. I could afford it back then because tickets cost $2, dropping to $1, per showing. That is literally an order of magnitude less than today.

I’m not the only one not buying tickets. In spite of all the record breaking money made, the number of tickets sold has declined to levels not seen since 1996. That’s because the cost of tickets, driven by new gimmicks such as 3D and IMAX screens, has pushed single ticket sales well above $10 in just about every market across the country, especially for 2015’s Star Wars movie. Think about that for a moment. The number of tickets sold is at a level not seen since three years before the DMCA was passed. Number of tickets sold has been dropping steadily for years now, driven in part by a poor quality product as well as ever higher prices. Lest you think that this current Star Wars release is some artistic wonder, think again. There are many vocal critics who aren’t all that keen about the movie, such as this example at Forbes, and for many good reasons. The drive to see the movie is due in no small part to just how bad the last three movies were, not how good this one is. Remember that this movie was directed by JJ Abrams, the same auteur who gave us 2009’s Star Trek reboot.

While there are a few tongue-in-check movie reviews scattered around this blog, there are only a few. It seems like every time I break my vow of non-viewing I come away disappointed. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson; to avoid future disappointments and an appreciably lighter wallet, I’ll stay away. Not just from Star Wars, but all the other hyped science fiction films headed my way.

One of those binge-watched trailers is for the latest Terminator franchise installment, “Terminator: Genisys” (with genesis horribly misspelled). I’m now ashamed to say I’ve seen every terminator movie since the original. All four. Now with a fifth coming out they’re changing up the plot and introducing new faces for old characters. It still has Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original Terminator in something of a bridge role, just like they had Leonard Nimoy bridge between old and new with his original Spock character in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot.

Except this time Old Arnold/Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator goes back in time a lot farther such that he raised a very young Sara Connor into something of a modern-day Amazon warrior. When this trailer shows Kyle Reese’s arrival, like it did in the first movie, Sarah shows up to rescue Kyle, rather than the other way around in the first movie. To top it all off we’ve got another T-1000 in this movie reboot (that didn’t show up the first time in this franchise until the second movie), showing up at the same time Kyle shows up. Whatever…

Here’s my issue: Assuming you could time travel and you knew exactly how near historical battles played out, then why would you go farther back in time before those battles to beat your enemy? If Skynet knew precisely how critical near-term historical battles (those where it was fighting the Resistance) that it lost would turn out then it would have made much better sense to analyse those key battles and then send multiple Terminators back to those specific battles, changing the outcomes from a loss for Skynet to a win. Do that enough times and you kill off the Resistance and possibly the rest of the human race. The whole idea of even having to go far back in time to kill the mother of your enemy’s key leader makes absolutely no sense: going back in time and trying (and failing) to murder Sarah Connor, Skynet wasted incredible opportunities to finish the job much more quickly and much closer to home, chronologically speaking.

Terminator shows how poor a story teller James Cameron is compared to Harlan Ellison, whose Outer Limits stories “Soldier” and “Demon With a Glass Hand” underpinned the whole Terminator franchise. Ellison’s stories are elegant and powerful, while Cameron’s Terminator is a very poor retelling of Ellison.

Nope. I won’t be shelling out any hard earned cash to see this one.