nihil architecture blogs

In rough lines, the plot of The Terminator (1984):

1. Android gets sent back in time to kill a woman
2. Man gets sent after him to protect her
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the robot
4. At the final end the android is caught in a huge explosion and and is finally visually severely maimed but continues its pursuit regardless
5. Man sacrifices himself to slay the android
6. Woman helps a little
7. Robot dies

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991):

1. Liquid gets sent back in time to kill a boy
2. Android gets sent after him to protect him
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the liquid
4. At the final end, by random chance the liquid falls into molten steal and is slain
5. Android sacrifices himself to save the future

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003):

1. Gynoid gets sent back in time to kill a teenager
2. Android gets sent after him to protect him
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the gynoid
4. At the end, by some huge explosion the gynoid is finally visually severely maimed but continues its pursuit regardless
5. Android sacrifices himself to slay the gynoid

Terminator Salvation (2009):

1. In the præsent, death row convict signs over his body to medical purposes
2. Shit goes wrong
3. In a post apocalyptic world, a human resistence forms against an oppressive AI bent on destroying / enslaving mankind
4. Lots of explosions
5. The death row inmate emerges from the wreckage of one of such
6. Finds its way to the resistance
7. EPIC PLOT TWIST, turns out to be an android similar to the one in the first film
8. Denies this, but is finally shocked to see for himself that he’s been rebuilt.
9. They, being racist fags, try to kill him, he escapes
10. Finally wins their confidence by saving them
11. Gets a job to infiltrate the AI with his cybernetics
12. In there, realizes that the AI manipulated him the whole time, playing on his subconscious mind and using him as a spy apparatus
13. Breaks free of the AI’s control (literally) and goes of to save the person he trapped
14. Saves him from an android of the type of the first film, though he’s wounded
15. Sacrifices himself at the end to save that man, who just happens to be the leader of the resistance, the boy from the second and third film and the son of woman and the man of the first.

Mainstream criticism on all films has been overwhelmingly positive, except the last one, let’s cite some examples:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times:

After scrutinizing the film, I offer you my summary of the story: Guy dies, finds himself resurrected, meets others, fights. That lasts for almost two hours.

There is nothing visible in this world but a barren wasteland. No towns, no houses, no food, no farms, no nothing. Maybe they live on Spam. The resistance is run from a submarine commanded by Gen. Ashdown (Michael Ironside), who wants to destroy Skynet and all of its human POWs. Connor, who is not even human, vows to save them. Wait. That’s Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), the guy from the past, who looks so much like Connor that maybe he only thinks he’s Wright. Marcus is a convicted murderer from the past, awakened from cryogenic sleep.

The first “Terminator” movie I regret (I suppose) I did not see. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) was a fairly terrific movie, set in the (then) future, to prevent the nuclear holocaust of 1997. You remember that. It was about something. In it, Edward Furlong was infinitely more human as John Connor than Christian Bale is in this film.

Claudia Puig of USA Today:

Bale is surprisingly one-dimensional as John Connor, the leader of the human Resistance movement whose destiny is linked to the future of mankind in this doomsday action franchise. He seems to be simply recycling his gravelly Dark Knight growl.

Director McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies) is all about visuals and creating an ominous sense of disorientation, but he’s not as deft with storytelling or eliciting performances. Few characters ever say more than a couple of sentences at a time, and when they do, it’s often to assert the obvious. The predictable story feels as if it were written by a computer program labeled “sequel.”

I haven’t seen one of these films in full, just parts, action is not my style, I know most have, and you can probably look up the plot to confirm that the plots are really like that. Maybe Terminator Salvation does suck, I can imagine that it does, from what I saw from the other films, they all suck. However I don’t think these reviewers are truly honest with themselves and their audience, and I see this happening all the time. They’re trying to find a reason to hate it, they just hate it, for whatever reason, maybe subconscious, maybe they had a bad day when they watched it, maybe they just don’t like Christian Bale and it ruins the whole film for them, maybe it’s the power of suggestion in advance. But they just don’t like it and try to find some way to back this up and write it about it.

Criticizing a Terminator film on one-dimensional acting? What? In the first three films Schwarzenegger played the same character over and over again, he’s playing a robot for fucks sake, it’s one dimensional as can be and you can pardon him there for being a crap actor, especially at the end of Rise of the Machines it becomes so obvious that when he can’t use sunglasses to conceal his facial expression and actually has to make one it looks like a child attempt’s at acting.

And seriously, attacking it on not having enough plot? The First three films, all had the same basic plot. And in all three both time travellers die with the good guy sacrificing himself and in all cases the aggressor seems unstoppable and at the end always dies with some stupid dumb fuck luck deus ex machina, that’s right, it’s a bloody deus ex machina, it’s well hidden but crap, a helicopter out of no-where crashing on your enemy, your enemy randomly falling in molten steel? Seriously, that could have happened at any point in the film, there’s no progression whatsoever in any of those films, except maybe the end of them that usually reveals some strange often paradoxal plot-twist.

I’m not defending Salvation here, I’m criticizing these reviewers for not being honest with themselves and their audience, what-ever reasons they had for not liking it, it’s not mentioned in the reviews. It’s like school days all over again, you hate a classmate really for absurd reasons like his voice and then try to find a more tangible justification for yourself like that he’s an arse or that he’s arrogant while a lot of your friends are just as arrogant.

Which is in the end while film reviews or of art in general which have an opinion of the quality thereof are ultimately ridiculous as much as prætentious, one cannot give a true reason for hating these because it works more on the subconscious level than on ‘hard’ things like plot or acting or scenery. People just hate these things for some subconscious reason and then try to find arguments. Of course, giving a description of the film without a value judgement is a lot more possible. But in the end people want a hierarchy, they want to be able to say that some things are ‘better’ than others, and they want it to be a total order, they want to be able to place every film in it, and they want to præserve the idea that if film x is better than y, and y is better than z than x is also better than z. Even though clearly you can’t do this in art, people still make up ways around it like collecting reviews from mainstream critics and normalizing them. You really can’t go further then ‘I like it’, or ‘I don’t', as soon as you give a reason you’re lying to yourself and your audience.

Robert Spitzer, M.D. claimed in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study which sparked controversy regarding the professionalism of psychiatry:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

Which is obscenely true. Just as it’s true that if you were to come there and complained about a stomach pain, got an interview and they labelled and treated you as having a peptic ulcer that would be irresponsible, and probably do more harm than good. Would medicine be effective if practised in that way? of course not, that’s why they do more than talk with you, they run tests on you via objective apparatus and instruments.

Psychiatry is tantamount to giving people radiation therapy for breast cancer because they claim they feel pain in their chest without putting an X-ray through them first. I’m not saying there’s a better way, I’m just saying that since most mental conditions are not fatal, moving like this is completely irresponsible and does more harm than good.

Kay, let’s say a random person murders a kitten or mistreats a child or beats up what-ever, naturally we—or most people—would beat that person up if we had the chance, or at least severely punch him in the face to make sure he does not carry out his intentions or threat to empty a can of liquid on the poor cat and drop an object warmer than said liquid’s ignition temperature on the cute critter.

Now, some would call this altruïsm or a desire to protect the cat or what-ever victim at stake here, can’t say I’m absolutely sure of that. I don’t mean the clichéd story of feeling better for yourself. I mean another facet to it, because people are simply too selfish to care that much about cats or even children or even their best friends.hat’s in any such of this cases always strangely præsent is that the people that are out to protect these people put a lot more focus on the aggressor than they do on the victim.

In fact—people seem to completely stop caring if there’s only a victim, but not a tangible aggressor, and seem to care a lot if there’s an aggressor, but not tangible victim, the so called ‘victimless crimes’ that exist in various jurisdictions that some (a few) people find stupid and should be repelled.

In the case that a certain person has some suffering going on but there’s no tangible aggressor, as in, it happened by pure accident or it was even due to downright bad luck, people tend to have a lot less of an emotional response. For instance, take these two examples.

• A woman by sheer accident without any one really being at fault has nude pictures of herself thrown on the internet.
• That very same woman is photographed in the shower and uploaded to the internet.

Now, in both cases the victim is humiliated, ashamed, a victim, but in the latter case, there is an aggressor, some-one whom we can blame for this thing. The latter always provokes fierce responses from most parties getting notice of it, often a desire for retribution, the first will merely provoke either a small dose of sympathy, fake sympathy, or simply laughing at that woman.

When I was quite young, seven years old I think, I saw a couple of people capturing frogs and bullying them. So knight in the shining armour that I was, I raced to there, liberated the frogs, and got beat up for that by the guys. A mate that was there with me wanted to follow them to beat them up, I was more like ‘You might call an ambulance first?’, he didn’t even think of that, he didn’t care for my suffering, he cared for making the person that caused it pay, not to help me who was lying pretty battered there.

However, looking back in retrospect, I also have to conclude another thing of myself: I would not have stopped to rescue those frogs if they got trapped on their own, and as hell not risked several injuries for that. Only the fact that there were some aggressors into play galvanized my desire to free those frogs, I wasn’t trying to help the frogs, I was trying to at some way compromise the action of the aggressors if I look deep down inside, and I think that almost all people would do the same.

Same with animal rights activist group, all their actions have one thing in common, the suffering is always due to human influence, due to some-one they can place blame on. They (read: we, I pay for that too and chain myself to fences) are not out to help animals they are out to compromise the efforts of people that are trying to hurt them, a completely different thing. Yet we (they) tell ourselves that we want to help animals, in reality we just want to make people pay we don’t like, don’t like for for instance doing cruel shit to animals. It’s also the same in every trial, in every news report about it, the news isn’t  about that some person has greatly suffered, the news is about that some person has caused great suffer to another.

Almost never is there a report about suffer in the news if it’s not done by some crime or some goof-up of some-one. The only exception I can think of to this rule are reports about mass natural disasters, and it makes you think why we all still remember 9/11, but have forgotten about natural disasters that caused so much more destruction hmm? There’s never news about some old grandmother sitting at home feeling like shit, but if she got into that position by some human error like the wrong drug præscribed oh as hell it would have come into the papers. We don’t care about suffering, we care about the people that cause it.

Then of course comes the even more interesting situation of an aggressor, but no victim. How can there be an aggressor but no victim? Let’s say you have this stereotypical really sweet girl that likes to help people, she cleans up for her boyfriend, makes him sandwiches, the whole she-bang, well, she doesn’t mind to that, it probably gives her a nice feeling, maybe she likes to cook, who knows? But still a lot of people will target their criticism at the boyfriend for ‘taking advantage of her’, regardless of her not minding. I’m not saying that he should take advantage of her, or that people shouldn’t target complaints, I’m just saying that they don’t target it to help the girl, the so-called victim, but to punish the guy, the so-called aggressor. It’s not about some-one getting hurt, it’s about some-one doing a thing people don’t like. They will most likely try to make the girl realize that she shouldn’t do that and should mind, now assuming they succeed in doing that, from an utilitarian perspective they’ve greatly failed then; the girl has lost one fun activity to do, and the guy get’s less sandwiches, no one-wins, every-body loses.