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Terminator's Story: From the end to the beginning and back
The most maddening and most intriguing story concerning time travels ever
In 1984 a movie came out where a star of these days, Arnold Schwarzenegger, appeared as a being from future, coincidentally called "a terminator". Perhaps it was because it came to L. A. to "terminate". Terminating is a cool and fun thing - there might be many people coming to do cool and fun things like terminating people in the city inhabitated by millions. "To terminate" means "to bound, to limit, to form the extreme point or end of something; to put an end to" - that?s what Cassell?s English Dictionary says to the words "terminate".
"Terminator" is the "one who or that which terminates", or, in terms astronomy, it is "the dividing-line between the illuminated and the dark part of a heavenly body."
Both of these words have an accurate, understandable meaning which fits to the terminator being just fine. It came to bound, it came to limit and it definetely came to form an extreme point or end of its task. It came to be the dividing-line between the illuminated today and the dark, unseen future of death and evil gloom. In other words, it understood its own name pretty well. We all should understand what we actually want or must do.
Somehow, Sarah Connor happened to be his target. From the terminator's point of view, it wasn't a coincidence. In the not-so-far future, her son, John Connor, commanded the last people rebelling against the tyranny of machines. He's good. Maybe too good to handle. A great idea popped into the hardware of a computer called Skynet which wasn't very relaxed constantly having Connor's kid in its face - it would be great to send a biomechanical assasin down the time drain to get rid of his mother.
The strange thing was that rebels had the same idea - though they didn't exactly wanted to kill Skynet's mother - they had something else in mind. Something much more simple - they sent Kyle Reese to protect Sarah.
Well, that's not very strange. But in the end, it was. Kyle Reese had sex with Sarah, Sarah had (besides she had sex with Reese) a boy, named him John and gradually married several tough guys to have her kid trained by the best. So, actually, sending terminator down the time drain wasn't as good an idea as it seemed at the start. It actually made things even worse. If Skynet hadn't sent his biomechanical hitchman back to the happy times even before Skynet itself was created in Cyberdyne, things would be great. The world would get nuked anyway, Skynet would rule and there wouldn't be any John Connor - at least not the one trained by the best. By this time you probably realized what happened to Kyle Reese... No, he didn't married Marilyn Monroe - he was killed, sticking a hand-made explosive between two of the terminator's titanium ribs. (Here's something kids should learn about hand-made explosive - Don't stick them among two of terminator's titanium ribs! It doesn't work anyway.)
Terminator got crushed and Sarah went to Mexico. Quite an end - though not very much of a happy one... But maybe this point is one of the advantages of the Terminator movies. Talking about movieS, there was a second movie about - more or less - the same topic. It was
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
Well, it began quite optimistically - with jagged skyline of a city smashed by nuclear disaster, piles of fire-blackened human bones and a lot of skulls, rusted and burnt tricycles, a couple of polished chrome Series 800 Terminators and flying Hunter-Killer patrol machines. Resisting human efforts is diminished by the massive powers of hi-tech death which mankind was sentenced to in reward for creating Skynet, the user-unfriendly personal (more personal than you would ever wish) computer.
Then, terminator is sent down the time drain again. Another funny story of a man walking in L. A. naked repeats but gets more elaborate. I, personally, like the last part of it when terminator sits on the Harley Davidson Fatboy motorbike and Lloyd bangs the door of the truck stop dinner open and tries to put the endoskeleton guy down with the shotgun (which then stars in most of the good parts - with T800).
But my most favourite part is that gunfight in the corridor of Galleria where terminator finally gets face to face with the little Connor freak: John emerges through a firedoor into a long corridor which connects to the parking garage. He's running full out, when around the corner ahead of him comes... TERMINATOR. Time stretches to nightmarish crawl as John tries to brake to a stop. Terminator reaches into the box of roses. SLOW MOTION. The cold black steel of the SHOTGUN emerges as the box falls open, the roses spilling to the floor. TERMINATOR'S BOOT crushes the flowers as it moves forward.
Of course, this part wouldn't be complete without the T800 slimy adversary - Series 1000 Terminator, also a polished chrome being - but this time it's liquid and, moreover, it can change into any form you can imagine (including any human which it contacts) except complex machines (guns and explosives) - which have chemicals, moving parts inside them - and stuff like that. This quoted part shows one hell of good handling of a shotgun and the best thing is that throughout the whole part before - until the moment when T800 covers John Connor with his own armored back - you never get to know anything about which of the two aggressive future characters is good and which is evil. Another part of this kind appears when the Series 800 Terminator - which is, as we learned, the good one - with John Connor enter Pescadero State Hospital to set Sarah free. Sarah Connor, being the whole time locked up and therefore perfectly isolated from the story-line, doesn't realize that T800 is actually a good guy this time: ON SARA as she rounds a corner and sees the elevators ahead. Now she's home-free. At a full tilt sprint, she's nearly there when the elevator doors part... TERMINATOR steps out... his head swivelling to face her. Sara reacts, stricken by the image from her worst nightmares. This part gets good when T1000 and the corridor gets filled by filled with high-velocity lead. I guess many directors should learn some new tricks from Cameron concerning this. The movie is simply full of top-level action and the end is also good which is not very typical for Hollywood's film. It's a bit depressive because through part of this it seems that T1000 really is going to win. But he doesn't - in the very end.
Terminator, though he would be - Sara really thinks so - a great father for her son (which would be one hell of a strange thing if John really got to the apocalyptic future with a terminator father...) sinks into the smelter. Luckily the final part of the script never appeared in the actual movie which would make it REALLY American.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE T2 SCRIPT
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