Adieu, Adieu, Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow.

Hello readers and friends.

It has been a long time, I figure the last thing you want to hear from someone who hasn’t spoken to you in a while is ‘goodbye’ but here’s the thing, I haven’t had anything to say.

I know crazy right? Someone actually admitting they don’t have anything worthwhile to say so they don’t, and I haven’t. I could tell you the reason why I haven’t said anything in over a year, about how I expect to be let down when I go to the movies, but I won’t.  I could tell you about how I fully embraced the memes and discontent with ‘Cape Crap,’ because honestly how many times can you watch the same movie with different characters,  but I won’t.

And speaking of, I know you all know about the upcoming Avengers Infinity Wars and then Avengers 4 slated to come out in 2019 where they are rumored to kill off a good deal of the current cast sending flurries of excitement through the ranks of fangirls and boys alike…(groan…sigh).

I will not be one of those people, because I don’t care. These characters are two dimensional at best, their deaths like their arrival will be met with raucous fan fair and tears shed by many, but in a few months will anyone remember? Or care? I don’t think so.

So, in honor of the coming demise of this generation’s …heroes… I take a look back at some famous deaths and goodbyes to some of my favorite characters and heroes. Some you will most certainly remember, others might be a bit more obscure, but these on-screen deaths still resonate with me and you can see their influence in a lot of the movies you watch today and you may see shadows of them in the coming years.

So sit back, grab a box of tissues and get ready to relive some of my favorite deaths and goodbyes of heroes and characters.

 

Terminator 2 Judgement day: T-800

I mean what can you say? After all these years it still gets me. It has it all, the reconciliation between the machine and the human. Sarah finds a respect for the machine that has haunted her and plagued her nightmares for years. The sacrifice of the hero to ensure a future where there is no war, giving hope to Sarah and John. Even the thumbs up at the end, it has been parodied and laughed at for the cheesiness of it. But here, it’s solemn and genuine. The music is great and the moment has stayed with me for all this time.

For all you Marvel and DC fans out there, this is how you do it. 😉 Feel free to take notes from what was once one of the great movie makers of all time.

 

Equilibrium: Partridge

This is an archetypal scene where a future hero kills his best friend in the name of honor and duty to an evil State or lord that he’s sworn fealty to. If you haven’t seen Equilibrium, it really is a good movie though some might find it a bit heavy handed on “symbolism”. I say it’s still better than a lot of movies that have covered the same subject matter.

Christian Bale who is using an emotional inhibitor drug called “Prozium” doesn’t feel anything, all he knows is that he is executing an enemy of the state and a criminal “sense offender”. This act will haunt John throughout the film and it is the catalyst for the greater story. A great death scene, one of many for Sean Bean.

Sean Bean really carries this scene. His quotation of Yeats and his attitude and body language. Sean Bean has done a lot of death scenes. I chose this one because of the poem and the solemn nature of the scene itself. It’s no accident that it takes place in a church. “But I being poor, I’ve only my dreams… tread softly for you tread on my dreams.” It’s a friend, asking another to not let the dream of freedom (in the context of the story it also means the freedom to feel and live as feeling human beings as they were meant to) die with him.

 

In Bruges: Ken

The first time I saw this movie this scene got to me so bad I must have replayed it over and over again at least five or six times. A lot of it had to do with the song “On Raglan Road”, by Luke Kelly. I had never heard it before this film and it just seems to fit so perfectly here.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film, Ken, played by Brendan Gleeson is climbing the bell tower so he can warn his friend Ray (Colin Farrell) that their boss is on his way to kill him. He grabs the gun and climbs the steps so he can beat his boss to Ray. he knows the fall will kill him but its the only way to get to Ray first and warn him.

This is a strange movie with its mood shifts and ups and downs maybe that’s why this scene has stayed with me for as long as it has. Its a strangely triumphant moment of ultimate defiance against death itself, giving one life to save another. Giving us one hell of a heroic death.

 

John Wick: Daisy

OK, we ALL know the story of the death of John Wick’s dog. One of the last things his dead wife was able to give him after she died from her illness. That’s why this messed John up so badly, not that it was just a dog, but because it was a piece of his dead wife, a lasting reminder of how much she loved him. This is a theme through out the movie and ultimately making this one of the saddest animal deaths in film (yes, even over Old Yeller for those of you who remember that movie).

The thing that makes it so sad is that Daisy does not have a quick death. We hear her get hit, but after the fade to black we see a blood trail on the floor leading to Daisy as she died in front of John. She suffered before she died. Old Yeller just got shot once and he died off screen, Daisy’s death is front and center for the audience.

 

Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan: Spock

One of the greatest friendships in the science fiction realm, Kirk, and Mr. Spock. It has been parodied, copied, and homaged. This is one of the great deaths in cinema history.

Spock has just sacrificed himself, exposing himself to lethal doses of radiation to save the Enterprise from the Genesis torpedo self-destruct detonation. What makes this scene so powerful is that Spock is one of the big three, the trinity of Star Trek, without Spock Star Trek doesn’t work. And audiences had to watch and live through him dying.

Fun fact, Paramount wasn’t planning on making another Star Trek, this was going to be the end of the franchise. Imagine if your favorite franchise ended on such a huge downer of a note. There would be internet rage the likes of which well..honestly I don’t know, but I can imagine it would be pretty bad. Like when Mass Effect 3 was first released with the crap ending, something like that only much bigger.

This was averted at the very end as the audience is treated to the famous opening lines from the Star Trek TV show, “Space, the final frontier…” voiced by Leonard Nimoy.

This is scene is so iconic that the hack job that calls itself a movie, Star Trek Into Darkness,  shamelessly copied this scene almost verbatim in order to tap into those nostalgic and powerful memories among the fans. Afterward, you can watch Family Guy’s parody of Spock’s funeral, with Stewie sending Ruppert off in the torpedo tube, to wash the taste out of your mouth. It’s funny and tastefully done, at least as tastefully as a parody can be done.

 

Flight of Dragons: Sir Orrin Neville-Smythe

Here is an animated death scene that belongs up there with the great hero sacrifices of all time.

The knight, Sir Orrin looks around him and see’s his fallen comrades. He is alone at last, looking up at a powerful dragon that has been magically augmented by his owner Ommadon. Sir Orrin knows he’s going to die but in the face of hopelessness he takes his sword and swears an oath to his sword that they will kill one last time before he dies. He faces a blast of dragon fire and sends his sword into Bryagh’s heart and the evil dragon is consumed by his own dragon’s fire and dies.

This is courage. Knowing that you are going to die before you even start but doing what must be done anyway. Also a very archetypal death, the heroe’s sacrifice. And that’s why it still strikes achordd with me, also his oath just sounds so bad ass, “Blade with whom I have lived, blade with whom I now die…” Who doesn’t feel a surge of emotion hearing something like that. Especially since he meant every word and fulfills his promise.

 

Star Wars: Obi Wan

Maybe a bit overdone perhaps, but this death started it all for a lot of children of the 70’s and 80’s. Obi Wan sacrificing himself because he knows he can’t defeat Vader. So he lets Vader kill him in cold blood and he becomes one with the force so he can continue to mentor Luke.

In the EU and I use that term carefully, this would be the book universe before The New Jedi Order. The last book written in this particular epoch would have been the two book series by Timothy Zahn, “Specter of the Past”, and “Visions of the Future”. In one book called, “The New Rebellion” Luke faces a similar situation as Obi Wan. He is facing a former student who has turned to the dark side.

During the fight, Luke feels all the guilt, the sorrow, and fear that millions of people have died because he failed his student. Because of this, during the fight, Luke grows weaker, and his dark side infused former student grows stronger. Luke was on the verge of sacrificing himself in a similar vein to Obi Wan, but was saved and his former student was defeated.

No such luck for Obi Wan though as he is cut down by Vader, only to live on through the force and make appearances in the next two films in the original and really only Star Wars Trilogy worth mentioning.

 

Superman: Lois Lane

Let’s face it, there have been a lot of deaths in the DC and Marvel comics universes over the years, Barry Allen, Bruce Wayne, hell, even Superman himself gets taken out by Doomsday, an event that sent shock waves through the comic fandom for months. Of course, DC couldn’t keep Superman dead for long but when “The Death of Superman” came out it disturbed a lot of people.

But here a decade and a half before Superman’s comic book death, we got the immortal Richard Donner film. And we see here another example of “all those things I can do, all those powers, and I couldn’t even save him”.

You see how hurt Superman is, the pain and anguish but that all turns to rage and a bone chilling roar before he flies off.

There have been a number of times a hero has to bury a loved one, there have been very good performances, and some pretty bad ones. But this one doesn’t feel like I’m watching a performance.  Lois Lane is dead and this is Superman really reacting to that loss, its not acting, this is a reality. And that’s why this scene stands head and shoulder’s above a lot of similar scenes in other movies.

 

The Thing: MacReady

I have only included this particular death scene out of a number of horror movies. MacReady has just blown up the Thing with a stick of Dynamite and now their Antarctica Camp site has been blown to hell as well. There’s no shelter from the oncoming cold.

MacReady simply sits down and see’s that he’s not the only survivor. Childs (Keith David) walks up and tells him that they’re pretty much screwed because there’s no shelter and the fire from the various explosions wont last. He assures MacReady that he hasn’t been changed by the Thing. MacReady just smiles and says, “Why don’t we just sit here awhile…see what happens.”

This is another one of those hero moments. He knows he doesn’t have anything left. If Childs is part of the Thing he can’t do anything about it, but he’s done everything he can, he’s got nothing left. I choose to believe that the Thing was killed even though both MacReady and Childs dies, at least they saved the planet from an alien takeover/ infection.

Of course if you were a fan of Spoony (Noah Antwiler) then you know they made a video game that I suppose is canon and (Spoiler Alert) when you beat the game MacReady fly’s you out of Antarctica in his helicopter. I choose not to buy that crap though. MacReady died a hero’s death defeating the evil that had to be killed, even though in doing so he created the circumstances for his own death.

 

Top Gun: Goose

This is a popular motif in a lot of movies. We see a similar thing in Days of Thunder except then the friend doesn’t die he’s just sick and can’t race anymore.

But here we see the tragic death of a friend in what is essentially a training accident. The military is hard, and accidents happen. The fact that Top Gun is willing to add that to its story and make this a defining moment for Maverick must have struck a deep chord with a lot of military people.

Top Gun is a seminal film and I believe that this death and the scene that shows it is a big reason for it’s success and longevity.

 

Braveheart: Father

I could have shown a hundred different scenes of parental character’s deaths. I mean Bambi’s mom is practically a internet meme, the mention of her is synonymous with dying. Who didn’t shed a tear a two when Littlefoot’s mom died after her battle with Sharptooth, in The Land Before Time? Johnathan Kent from Superman was a very poignant death as I explained above.

But here its not just the death, it the final goodbye from his kinsmen and fellow Scotsmen. “Playing outlawed tunes, on outlawed pipes”. He died in a fight for Scottish freedom from the tyrannical control of England. This is such a powerful moment. That even in death he has inspired his countrymen to defy the law and hold to their values and traditions.

This is something not a whole lot of people are willing to do, a sign of courage in itself. That and the music itself is so powerful and moving on its own.

So, I know some heavy stuff. Death isn’t something that most people like to think about. It reminds us of our own frailty and mortality, the only guarantee in life is death. It’s something we all must face in the end. I do believe that when you die it reflects upon you as a person of how you have lived. I don’t intend to die alone and when it’s my time, I hope that I can show as much courage as some of these characters were able to convey in their final moments.

Till next time

 

 

Terminator, Terminators, and those crazy AI’s who want to kill us

There has been something that has bothered me for a long time when it comes to movie/franchise fandom. People are way too eager to accept supposed truths about a story when it has never been enforced by anything in the movies.

I’m not talking about canon material. Canon material is anything from video games to books (all licensed of course). One of the HUGE problems with this blanket, “canon” concept is that sometimes the expanded canon is completely ignored by the director of the current installment of the franchise. There is no bigger example of this than…you guessed it! George Lucas.

There has been a ton of great material that had been written by intelligent established authors like Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson (before he went all Dune crazy and thought he was man’s modern gift to science fiction) and Barbara Hambly who wrote, Children of the Jedi. I really liked it and it was pretty original with a fully fleshed out female character for Luke to play off of and even fall in love with. This plot line was dropped in favor of Timothy Zahn’s pairing of Luke and Mara Jade who eventually married each other.

So after all those hundreds of pages of lore and culture and history that these authors were licensed to write about, George took all that written material, especially the parts in Vision of the Future, by Timothy Zahn who described what a “Force” battle would look like, and dumped just about every last word of it (except for the name of Coruscant), because this was his story. Timothy Zahn wrote a witness’ account of Yoda fighting a Sith Lord for three days. How the swamps of Dagobah were lit up with lightning and energy of every color. The very air seemed to be alive and screamed through this witness’ body as he watched these two masters fight each other through the Force as both defense and weapon.

So, tell me…where was any of that in, Episode II: Attack of the Clones? Vision of the Future is/was cannon. Of course with Episode VII coming out from Disney Pictures the Star Wars: Expanded Universe is null and void. Still, George took none of his cues from better writers than himself and what do we, the fans get to witness when two Force masters come together? A light saber duel. What happened to the different disciplines of force techniques? The consular versus the Guardian? In the game series, Knights of the Old Republic. The different classes of Jedi tell not only what color your light saber is but where your discipline will lie, force powers or light saber prowess.

These concepts were thrown to the four winds in the prequels and in most lore the light saber color is determined by the color of the focusing crystal used to make the light saber, with no other significance than that. Thanks, George. Way to dumb down a pretty in-depth expanded lore and culture because you couldn’t be bothered to accept what fans of the franchise had already taken to be fact in the universe.

If you don’t take my ramblings as proof you can access Red Letter Media’s Star Wars prequel critiques, which points out these inconsistencies in the atmosphere and the mythos between the prequels and the sequels in greater detail.

Mr. Plinkett

But back to the point. There are legitimate cannon material and then there isn’t. There is this thing that has grown up around several franchises that has never been enforced by video game, book, or movie. Certain precepts that people just take at face value and build their arguments from there.

There is one glaring thing about The Terminator franchise in particular that nobody can argue their way around. There is, and never has been, a real concrete reason for there to have been a sequel.

This is one instance where the title might say,Terminator 2: Judgement Day but in fact it is nothing more than a remake.

This is not to say that I don’t like, T2 I do. But when you look at the two movies they are exactly the same.

T2 starts out with a bit of a prequel flashback to when Los Angeles was fried with a brilliant white flash and then mounds of skulls around a child’s playground. Then we see a terminator with plasma rifle in hand and laser bolts flying back and forth between man and machine.

This same scene is in, Terminator albeit a low-budget version. A tracked hunter-killer rolling over bones and skulls and a lone flying H-K blasting its way through the battlefield.

The two warriors come into our time with the same ball of energy, just replace Michael Biehn with Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger with Robert Patrick and there you go.

The T-1000 goes to John’s home and kills his foster parents, the T-800 goes to Sarah’s home and kills her roommate Ginger and boyfriend Matt.

I could go through the whole movie listing such parallels but I think I made my point.

For some of you, you might be so pissed off right now that you are going to comment about how stupid and ignorant I am and that all sequels pull from their source material. That may be but very few sequels and franchises have the kind of following that Terminator does. And most sequels at least try to make it look like a different scenario or place. Take, Die Hard 2 yeah its the same stuff and Bruce Willis even comments at one point about, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice!” A little wink to the audience to just go with it. Die Hard was never trying to be, nor did it become anything more than what it was, a set of really entertaining action movies.

And you might be able to make the same argument for Terminator…except for that voice over at the end of T2: “If a machine, a Terminator, could learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.” Can you honestly hear that line and not attach some kind of commentary on the present day human condition? James Cameron with that one line turned a pretty cool action movie into a statement piece. Thus opening it up for scrutiny and challenge. Kind of funny how life works out sometimes, huh?

But aside from all that, Terminator 2 should not exist, pure and simple. And there are a couple of key things that point out the complete impossibility, plot and story wise, of there being a sequel to Terminator in the first place.

The first is, in James Cameron’s own original rough draft for, Terminator 2 he wrote in a scene showing the temporal displacement chamber in the future. There are story boards of what this would look like and having Kyle jump into the field and disappear.

Ok so what? Right? Well we know from the first film that Kyle says they, (freedom fighters from the future) blew the whole complex after Kyle went in. And since there was always a Cyberdyne, Skynet main hub and core, (except for what happened in Terminator 3 which we don’t talk about and James Cameron was not attached to in any way) there was always the assumption that said core was inside the same complex that housed the temporal displacement equipment. This is reinforced by T2 3D the 3D show at Universal Studios, which was written and directed by James Cameron. And the freedom fighters blew it up! Thus they blew up Skynet! The resistance won the war!

If Skynet was blown up and the temporal displacement equipment along with it, and we know this because Kyle wasn’t able to go home, HOW IN THE BLUE HELL did Skynet manage to send back an even more advanced model at a later time?

How do we know it was at a later time and not before hand? If the resistance had the capability to reprogram terminators which is stated in the Sarah Conner Chronicles why would they risk not sending a terminator back with Kyle to protect both him and Sarah? And why did Kyle never mention this as a possibility to Sarah even one time in the first movie? Why wasn’t it ever mentioned in, T2? Why would Skynet, an advanced super computer AI, send an obsolete model Terminator to deal with its biggest threat?

Lets put this in perspective. If you were playing “Madden” or watching your favorite professional team play their biggest rivals in a championship game, would you EVER think to sit all your starters and play nothing but your back ups?! I don’t know about you but if the head coach of my team did that I would want him to be fired…like before the first quarter ended fired.

So if us, flawed human beings wouldn’t do that why would a super computer?

Speaking of the T-1000 was there ever an explanation as to how a high-tech, fluid metal, shape shifter broke the cardinal rule set down in Terminator, that only organic or things surrounded by organic tissue could make the trip back?

The second one is pretty obvious and one that a lot of people have pointed out as being one of the biggest lies in cinema. The infamous, “No fate but what we make for ourselves” rewrite of the short passage that Kyle recites for Sarah from the first film. Kyle never said anything about, “no fate”. He said, “the future is not set.”

That is a huge difference because, “No fate” becomes Sarah’s driving focus in the lore between the two films. She has already tried to blow up a Cyberdyne facility once and was thrown in Atascadero for it. And that becomes the plan of action in, T2. Blow up Cyberdyne before Skynet goes online…sounds very familiar to me, plot wise I mean.

Of course this whole plot line is a contradiction to what Kyle tells Sarah in the first film anyway, “I know he died before you went into hiding before the war.” He was talking about John’s father. But what part of, “went into hiding” takes into account the attempt to blow up a Cyberdyne research facility?

T2 though a pretty damn good movie has a completely different feel from the first. The first one is very dark and ends with Sarah driving off into an incoming storm. Indicating her resignation and resilience. T2 ends with headlights on a dark highway with Sarah doing a voice over about hope. So what’s the similarity between the two? An incoming force of nature that one can only hide from and deal with the aftermath later, or hope in a brighter future? Nope you’re right they are exactly the same!…(sarcasm people…sarcasm).

And how about the unspoken consequence that if the future is actually changed then John Connor poofs out of existence as none of the events that happened in  Terminator would occur and lead to the circumstances of his conception? Do not email me about the alternate timeline theory as neither films really address that as a possibility explicitly or implicitly; not like they do in Back to the Future where Marty actually experiences both timelines. This makes Kyle’s speech tragic and sinister at the same time as both of them are trapped in a delicate time loop and any deviation from the events relayed to Sarah would possibly disrupt the future and impact humanity’s survival and victory over the machines. It wasn’t a message of hope, it was a warning.

The only real reason Terminator 2 exists is because James Cameron wanted to do a bigger and better Terminator movie with a real blockbuster budget behind him. THAT’S IT! That’s the only reason this movie exists.

(In fact some posit that Aliens is more a spiritual sequel to the original Terminator than T2. I don’t necessarily agree or see it but its an interesting point nonetheless. The series of articles that introduces this notion reveals some interesting back story Cameron the man, on the production of  Aliens, and T2 and where the Terminator franchise was headed. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)

I’m glad it exists don’t get me wrong. I like both films equally, depending on my mood. But honestly the conversation should end here. There is no plot reason, there is no character reason for, T2 to exist.

It was made because James Cameron wanted to make a bigger better movie in 1991 than what he was able to do with a shoe string budget in 1984.

You can argue which film is better till you’re blue in face. Both of them are great films and are fun rides in their own unique ways. Of course I think we can all agree on the single fact that there should have been only, “one other chip that must be destroyed.”…instead of the two, disastrous and lack luster, additions that have been made in the last 15 years to the franchise.

God only knows what kind of crap will be served up to us next. Terminator Salvation ruined any chance we as a fandom ever had of seeing a full length movie that takes place in those dark, horrible, laser blasted landscapes that were revealed in those early scenes from, Terminator and, T2. And the sad thing is there is some schmuck out there that is going to try to squeeze a little more money out this franchise. And we’ll go see it, against everything that our hearts and minds tell us, we will go see it.

And you may be asking yourself, “What did he just say?”

I said, “There’s a storm coming in…”