Actually, when I watched it yesterday I think this interpretation isn’t quite right. Obviously in T1 Arnold is the bad guy. At the start of T2 a voice-over explicitly says that two terminators were sent back in time, one bad one good. You see both Arnold and the T-1000 travel back in time. Up until they meet in the service hallway in the shopping mall and Arnold says “get down” it’s quite ambiguous as to which one is the bad one. Someone who had never seen T1 would be completely guessing, and even someone who had might have doubts.
If they wanted the audience to think Arnold was the bad one, and then get surprised, they could have had the T-1000 be more friendly instead of murdering a cop immediately upon appearing.
In the T2, the T-1000 is explicitly only the volume of a single human. In other words, it’s likely that MOST people aren’t going to be the main villain.
Arnie doing an entire Gatling gun scene and killing nobody is a big character moment for him. Zero fatalities.
As opposed to the Matrix. In that movie, Neo is told explicitly that ANY person could become an Agent at any time.
And so Neo and Trinity raid the building and KILL EVERYONE.
In both movies there is a shape shifting villain, but the resulting actions from the hero are diametrically opposed.
Beginning of the 90’s: kill nobody but the main villain.
End of the 90’s: kill everyone.
It’s almost as if the zeitgeist has changed in the 8 years between the movies.
Saying “they are basically the same” and stopping there? It just removes the interesting stuff from consideration.
True, The Matrix is an upgrade in that regard. It has a major character that is not white, as well as some in supporting roles. Outside of the Dyson family the only not-white people in T2 are I guess the Mexicans and extras. And Dyson isn’t exactly “main”, definitely not on the level that Morpheus is.
I didn’t realize this until it was pointed out to me recently, but the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar looks pretty different from a lot of other hollywood casts. Switch, anyone?
Morpheus is in no way a token black character. Even if he was the only black character in the movie, he wouldn’t be a token black character. He’s like the second most important character in the entire movie, and happens to be played by a black actor.
And to be clear, the end sequences of the movies kick off for completely different reasons.
In T2, the good guys are away and free, and in this lull of the movie, Sarah decides to go kill Dyson, and the other follow to try to stop her.
In the Matrix, the team are on a visit to the Oracle, and are betrayed by a traitor. It all goes south and Morpheus is captured, and from then on it’s all about rescuing him.
The “we guns” scene isn’t at the same points of the movie. One comes at a time of heightened tension, and the other comes in a lull in the action. They have different functions within the movies.
Having watched the Matrix trilogy movies just last month, the diversity of the cast really stands out. But then, in a way that feels more telling, there isn’t a single biracial relationship in any of them. All white characters partner up with white characters, while all the black characters have black love interests.
I can’t help but think those movies would be different to that if made in 2021.
In 1991, the “good guy” got his outfit from a biker bar, and the bad guy got his outfit from a cop. This was seen as opposite.
In 1999, the good guys are styled as counter-culture bondage-adjacent punk-light characters. The bad guys are literally men in suits. Very much opposites.
Weirdly, in 2022, a biker gang and cops wouldn’t be seen as “opposite” in the same way. In fact, in a fight against the “good guys”, the bikers and cops would probably be on the same side.
In 2022 movies, the weird hacker types are probably represented by tech bros are just as likely to be villains as government agency guys in smart suits.
Right. It’s on my to-watch list and I’ll get to it as soon as it’s available on streaming/iTunes.
My observation mainly reflects watching Don’t Look Up a few days ago, and the actor Mark Rylance.
In Ready Player One, based on a story written in 2010, Rylance plays the benevolent tech god who leaves his fortune to the hero.
In Don’t Look Up, written in 2021, he’s also a tech god, but anything but benevolent.
We can learn a lot about how society collectively feels about a subject by how it is portrayed in a movie, and how we are all supposed to instinctively react to that portrayal.
You raise an interesting point about the occupation or background of the movie villain and that it changes over time. I would love to see a comprehensive analysis of the trend with annotations with notable real-world cultural events. This is the best I have found so far and it seems to be rather limited and 6 years out of date.
I guess Daniel Craig came out of his stint with two Very Good Bond Movies, one Good Bond Movie, one Okay Movie That Didn’t Feel Like a Bond Movie, and one Bottom of the Barrel Bond Movie.
In order I’d go with:
Casino Royale
Skyfall
No Time to Die
A Quantum of Solace
Spectre
I’m pleased his series was wrapped up with a mostly decent movie, with a strong ending for this version of Bond.
I’m also impressed it never felt like the role of James Bond defined Daniel Craig as an actor. When Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore appeared in other movies during their time as Bond, I would always think things like: “Hey, James Bond is playing the role of Thomas Crown in the Thomas Crown Affair”.
I’ve got a feeling Craig will be best known for Benoit Blanc from Knives Out.
I’d heard about a sequel to Unbreakable. This was it. But then it had way less Bruce Willis than I was expecting.
Turns out: I’d heard about the movie Glass, from 2019, and I’d got mixed up.
Anyway, Split is a weird movie, in all the ways I like a movie to be weird. And it’s fantastical horror at the just right level for me, someone who has never watched any Saw or other “lock people up and torture them” type movie.
It might as well be called “James McAvoy gets to have a lot of fun with acting” because, you know, a role like this doesn’t come along that often. Patricia, Hedwig, The Beast, etcetera? Great.
Split wasn’t a sequel to Unbreakable, but Glass is a sequel to both Split and Unbreakable.
Or, to be even clearer: Glass is the first crossover movie event in the Unbreakable Cinematic Universe.
It’s an ambitious project by M. Night Shyamalan, but all the weakest elements of the movie, those that let it down the most, were those that referenced The Avengers and other movies of that type.
Mixing super heroes or villains established in their own movies only works because of the bigger-than-life fight scenes, the action, the destruction, the special effects, etcetera. You can’t remove all the big budget dumb stuff, or else you are just left with the dumb idea of mixing super powers, and that rarely makes any sense at all.
So Glass looked like it was trying to be a more clever, or intelligent, or cerebral version of a big dumb superhero team-up movie, but the dumbness weighed down any attempt at cleverness.
I liked the ambition, but the final movie was a complete mess.
That said, it was fun to revisit the characters from previous movies. Glass had some great moments, The Hoard was back in JAMES MCAVOY IS ACTING NOW full force, and it was interesting to catch up again with David Dunn and his son, who was played by the same actor but 19 years older.
But all that fun wasn’t strong enough to make it a good movie etcetera.
Really the only thing I remember from Spectre is that I really enjoyed the Man With The Golden Gun sneaking-through-the-basement scene. I knew how it ends, and it did, and it still surprised me!
It would be a really funny move if the next James Bond is Daniel Craig.
I put off watching this for a long time because I thought it would be very stupid for very obvious reasons, but it turns out that Rubber was a much much better film than I was expecting. I absolutely was not expecting an overt meta-commentary on the Hollywood film industry, yet that seem to be what we have here. Perhaps it was that subversion of expectations that made this film so captivating and enjoyable to watch in spite of apparent absurdities and intentional simplicity.
(Opening scene)
In a weird way, this film almost fits into an Isekai framework. In that the protagonist, waking up with an unfamiliar body in a bizarre nightmare world, is an overpowered interchangeable stand-in for an audience with problematic control fantasies. Add to that the fact that the surface story is clearly being used to explore something completely unrelated to the plot.
