Terminator 3 vs Alien Resurrection

Arnold Schwartzenegger is, I think, an underrated actor.  He’s surely not your first choice for say, King Lear, but when you need a guy who understands how to act a scene in which he’s reattaching his own head after it’s been stomped off, well, Arnold’s your man. I especially like him in the Terminator movies.  The first one is probably darker than you remember. It plays like a horror movie, especially with that killing-all-the-Sarah Conners stuff. It’s lower budget and has to depend on Arnold’s* physical presense and resilence countered with Linda Hamilton being really frickin’ scared. The second, of course, turned the series into science fiction, with its prophecies of the coming apocalypse and amazing special effects. That one is perhaps remembered most for the liquid metal Terminator, but I think it stands out because of Hamilton, with her paranoid, steely performance and crazy back muscles.  And now, years later, we have a new Terminator:  T3: The Rise of the Machines. Arnold’s back, but this time without Hamilton and director James Cameron (replaced by Jonathan Mostow), and focusing less (much less) on the storyline and more on chasing and punching and shooting (oh my).

*I refuse to spell his name as he would say it phonetically. Assholes do that. Next time you see “Ah-nuld” in print, promise me you’ll mumble the word “asshole.”

As T3 opens, we find John Conner (now played by Nick Stahl), alive and well and living town to town, as he calls it “off the grid.”  He’s homeless and working as a rock buster or something.  He has no address or phone number, and after a motorcycle accident, sneaks into an animal clinic for medicine (the painkillers he finds are labeled “for veterinary use only”, as if that’s necessary to tell the veterinarians, but whatever.) He doesn’t suspect, of course, that across town, or in another town maybe (it’s never really clear) a new Terminator has arrived.  This one is female, and in Terminator tradition, she arrives naked, although she has long curly hair over her breasts, like in a PETA ad.  She finds a suitable car and some clothing, including earrings and a necklace (and ties back her hair, begging the question of why she has it in the first place.) The Arnold Terminator isn’t far behind, and soon, they’re duking it out at the pet clinic, with John and Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) caught in the crossfire.  The fights in this movie are pretty brutal.  They seem even more so, because unlike most everything else lately, they’re light on slow-motion, and heavy on people getting their heads smashed into urinals and toilets. Kate Brewster (she’s almost always called by her full name) is a target of the Terminatrix as well, because of her role in the future resistance.  She and John have an obvious future together, given their relative age and opposite genders and so on in a major Hollywood release, but it’s presented as somewhat of a mystery by the plot, so I’ll not reveal more about their connection.  Soon, John, Kate and Arnold Terminator hit the road, first in her veterinarian-mobile (the toughest Toyota Tundra ever), then a Hearse, and finally in an R.V.  They’re torn between warning her father of the pending end of the world, which only he can stop, and running for Mexico, where the world will apparently not be ending. Or something.  The movie is basically one big chase, stopping momentarily for passages of heartfelt face punching. Oh, and lots of shit blows up, with Kate and John diving out of the way each time. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen two people hit the deck more often. I bet they would kick ass on a Slip and Slide.

Terminator 3 has fun moments, to be sure.  There’s a suspenseful sequence at Skynet with the original Terminators being controlled by the Terminatrix (one of her powers, way underused, but cool nonetheless).  A huge car chase with cranes and fire engines and motorcycles and Arnold as a wrecking ball at the beginning rivals the semi/motorcycle chase in T2. I also liked Nick Stahl and Claire Danes. They’re mature enough to handle the emotional moments, yet naïve enough to seem scared during the chases and fights.  (Danes has become an expert at movie crying. She can get those tears flowing faster than Garth Brooks on a collect call to Barbara Walters.)

And, of course, there are problems.  Why, if this Terminator has no memory of the events in Terminator 2, didn’t the bad guys send back the Robert Patrick liquid Terminator?  Or two, or ten or a hundred? The new Terminatrix is cool and all, but it’s kind of like she takes her special effects for granted. It’s all just beside the fact.  Terminator 2 took time with Patrick’s Terminator, even having moments when he seemed impressed with his own abilities.  He relished the mayhem he was creating.  Likewise, Kristanna Loken, our new T-X, does a lot with her eyes and certain ways she tilts her head.  No one really seems that frightened of her though, and she doesn’t inspire as much destruction as you think she might. She’s also able to repair her clothing using her powers, making the previous stealing of clothing completely unnecessary.

Unfortunately, Terminator 3 has no visual style of its own. Everything looks pretty much like a standard action movie, and the military sets start with military set clichés and stop there. The mental image you get from “underground military bunker” is exactly what you see on screen. The script follows suit in many ways, giving the impression that it had been lying around for a while since T2.  When Danes finds out her vet’s medicine cabinet has been broken into, she says something along the lines of “Oh great, junkies!” and “talk to the hand” makes not one, but two appearances. It’s a shame they couldn’t find a role for Linda Hamilton (Sarah Conner is mentioned, but only in an off-handed way, as if she threw a great party one time, but you were too drunk to remember much of it).  She’s the center of the other two movies, the second especially, and the gravity she brought to her part is missing here. At the end, Arnold Terminator promises we’ll all meet again.  Maybe, maybe not.

During Terminator 3, I found my thoughts drifting not only to the previous films in the series, but also to another series all together.  The Terminator films make a nice counterpart to the Alien films.  Both series cross various genres, both are dependent upon one actor, and both peaked with James Cameron as director. Terminator 3, conveniently (for me at least), shares a few qualities with the most recent entry in the Alien series, Alien Resurrection.  Like Terminator, the previous entry in the Alien franchise saw the hero dying in a pit of fire, and returning, same-yet-different for another adventure. Alien Resurrection doesn’t hold up as well as the rest of the movies in the series, but with its stunning and unique cinematography and a stunning and unique performance from Sigourney Weaver, it comes pretty close.

Alien Resurrection was directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet with the same visual imagination he used in City of Lost Children and would later improve upon with Amelie.  If nothing else, I think Alien Resurrection is cool to look at (you know, in that Blade Runner, the future is industrial and ugly/cool kind of way).  An early shot of Ripley awakening from surgery wrapped in cocoon-like gauze is beautiful.  Everything has been shot in tones of silver and rust; even Ripley’s skin gives off a metallic sheen to match her new alien cousins.

The movie opens with an alien being removed from Ripley during surgery.  She’s been cloned from a drop of her blood collected 200 years previous in Alien 3. At that time, she was pregnant with an alien, although it wasn’t really a pregnancy, it was an incubation, and I’m not sure the alien would be part of her DNA, or maybe it would, but I’m not sure a pregnant woman cloned results in a pregnant clone. That’s what happens in Alien Resurrection, anyway. While being examined by doctors post-surgery, we learn that Ripley is more than she seems. Not only does she possess many of the original Ripley’s memories (again I’m not sure this is a side effect of cloning, but I’ll take their word for it), but she’s also super strong and quick, with a nifty quick-healing power and acid blood. Jeez, cloning is hard.  There are three set-pieces that stand out in the film for me: the first is a basketball game with Ripley taking on her new crew of thugs, each one a different type, with Ron Perlman making the biggest impression.  Another is an underwater chase through a flooded chamber of the station, with aliens following close by as Ripley swims like a dolphin or alien or whatever without using her arms, which you think you can do, but you can’t (at least I can’t. I basically just splash in place anytime I try it.) Also memorable is a scene when Ripley finds the previous seven attempts at cloning, all of them repulsive, one still alive.  Throughout all this, Sigourney Weaver impresses, giving us a Ripley we’ve not seen before.  In the past, Ripley was the voice of reason and compassion, but here she comes on like Eastwood, spitting out one-liners and kicking ass.  Of the classy, mannered actresses of Weaver’s generation, it’s virtually impossible to imagine anyone else in this role, palming basketballs and barking threats and uh…communing with aliens. That Alien Resurrection came out at the same time as The Ice Storm is testament to her talent. 

Like Terminator, though, the Alien series may have exhausted itself.  The aliens in this installment just aren’t as scary as they used to be, and once Ripley’s been cloned, it’s kind of hard to feel like she’s in any danger; number nine could be right around the corner. There’s a new alien/human hybrid, which basically comes out of nowhere and grows to enormous proportions in no time at all.  Unfortunately, it’s goofier than it is scary, and designwise, is confusingly unlike any of the other aliens.  Also, the cast isn’t as distinctive this time.  Ron Perlman is cool, but everyone else kind of blends together. There’s another female you won’t notice until she’s killed (and come on, you know they’re mostly getting killed. You can study the poster for about two seconds and know who lives and who doesn’t). Winona Ryder plays the Bishop-style android, but she plays her role as if she used to be human and reluctantly became an android. She’s not bad, but it would have been cool to identify her as non-human from the beginning and skip all the not surprising “surprises” about her character. Or maybe she’s just wrong for this part. I tend to be nice to Winona because I love Beetlejuice and Heathers and she put up with all that crazy, ticky acting in Girl, Interrupted and she loves music and shopping. So what if she’s a whiny android, right? It was just a couple purses, for crying out loud.

Not that any of this matters. The Alien series has always been Sigourney Weaver’s show.  This time, she’s given a fantastic opportunity, and while there’s maybe not so much to hang it on, she’s more than prepared to carry the movie on her own.  It’s enough to make you think maybe a fifth time isn’t such a bad idea, with the right script, and it’s more than enough to make you wish Sarah Conner had gotten another chance as well. 

Terminator 3: The Rise Of The Machines:  C+
Alien Resurrection:  B