Out of respect for Card God and the governor, I chose to watch the premiere of "Terminator 6: Dark Fate" (hereinafter referred to as "End 6") at zero o'clock. There were not many people, probably only one-fifth of the giant screen hall was filled. The last time I watched the premiere was "Avengers 4" in May. Between the crowded seats at that moment and the empty seats at the moment, it was the different fates of the two super IPs in the Chinese market.
Perhaps just as Lei Gong was dissatisfied with the mediocre and streamlined adaptations of the Alien series by later directors (including Kashen), Kashen finally announced that he would take it in 2019 after nearly 30 years of disobeying the Terminator series. Copyright to the Terminator series. In the eyes of many fans, "The End 6", which he personally supervised, is the authentic sequel to one or two Terminator films, which is indeed the case. The new Terminator follows the two classics from the plot to the character design, not to mention the tribute eggs that fans are always keen to discuss.
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For audiences familiar with the first two films, the story of "End 6" is not complicated, and it still uses the future AI to rebel against humans as the background. A newest type of Terminator (REV9 liquid robot) is sent from 2042 to 2020 to kill the immature human resistance leader, while the future human leader sends another super soldier (Mackenzie Davis played Grace )protect yourself. The righteous super soldier has been defeated and fled many times because of the backward performance, and finally perished with the evil Terminator in a factory to complete his mission.
The beginning of the film "End 6" is an extension of the end of "End 2": perhaps the Skynet system also has a saying of "saturated assassination", although in "End 1" the T-800 infiltrating Terminator played by the governor was blocked, But another Terminator ended up killing John Connor in 1997, on a mission that didn't exist. John's death changed the timeline. Although the AI still rebelled against humans, it was no longer called "Skynet" but "Legion". The leader of the human resistance army became a Mexican-American black woman, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). ), this is the biggest rewrite of the previous work. Sarah Connor, who saw her son's death and decided to hunt down the Terminator, and the T-800 robot, who had experienced decades of vicissitudes on Earth, joined the operation to protect Dani, and formed a resistance team with Grace.
To say the greatest tribute to the original work, we have to mention the "grandmother paradox" that cannot be circumvented in time travel sci-fi works: a person can never travel back in time to kill his unpregnant grandmother because of his own Existence has proven that the grandmother is alive.
In the first two works of "Terminator", because the Skynet system sent the Terminator to the past, the Human Resistance Army sent a soldier Kyle Reese to the past. It was the revolutionary friendship between Kyle and young Sarah that sparked the fight against the Terminator, giving birth to future rebel leader John Connor. In this way, it seems that the Skynet system is self-defeating - if the Terminator is not dispatched from the beginning, can it prevent the birth of John?
The specter of the grandmother paradox lingers in the worldview of "Terminator" - John's existence in the future itself has determined that the Skynet system will definitely send a Terminator to carry out the assassination plan, the time is formed in the first two "Terminator" movies The resulting sense of fatalism is one of the reasons the series has been repeatedly discussed and enduring.
In "End 6", the transforming person Grace and Dani also have a similar relationship: in the future, Dani, who organized the rebel army, raised the young Grace. Grace, who was sent back to 2020 from 2042, used her life to protect the girl Dani and teach her how to fight against the Legion. In other words, two people cross the river of time to educate and grow each other. At the end of the film, Dani in 2020 watched childhood Grace in kindergarten and said, "I won't let her die for me again." But we know that in the "Terminator" worldview, Grace's destiny is for Dani Sacrifice, the phrase is not so much a belief as a mourning.
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"End 1" was born in 1984. As a young Chinese audience, I tried to imagine how a teenage American boy would be affected by the complex sci-fi settings, cool action scenes and Shocked by the grim goggles of the governor. "End 2" was released 7 years later, and the teenage children have become young people of the same age as me. The CGI liquid metal man T-1000 created with the highest technology will definitely refresh his understanding of science fiction movies again. . Today, 28 years later, when he walks into the movie theater and sees the old governor and Linda Hamilton, who already knows his destiny, how much will he feel about the time that has passed quietly and the fading childhood?
I learned about the "Terminator" series on "The Tenth Screening Room", and I didn't finish watching "The Terminator 2" until I was in junior high school with a network speed of several hundred K. When I saw the brand-new liquid robot REV9 on the big screen, I experienced the horror of the year again. He is indestructible and indestructible. In the new work, a set of avatar skills in which the steel bones are separated from the body has been derived. After the explosion of the T-800, the classic machine skeleton and the pervasive T-1000 in "End 2" paid tribute.
The tribute to the details is even more numerous: how could there be no trucks in the action movie of the card god who turned out to be a truck driver? The chase scene of "End 6" brought me into the memories of "End 2" frequently; after the Governor appeared, the scene of shooting REV9 with a machine gun has become an old stalk of the "Terminator" series; "I won't be back!", which had been passed down by word of mouth among fans before its release, and the scene where the governor fell from the factory with REV9 at the end was even more determined to make the audience dream back to 30 years ago.
How to make sense of this obvious tribute, even forced nostalgia? It is not only a commercial means for "End 6" to obtain the box office, but also a grand narrative strategy that echoes its worldview. The theme of the art film "Heavy Rain is Coming", which is also related to time, is called "Time never dies, the circle is not round." From this, the theme of the "Terminator" series may be called "Time seems dies, the circle is round." (Time seems dies, the circle is round.). In modern society, the river of time is constantly rushing, and people are washed away. "Terminator" gives audiences (especially older American audiences) a chance to return to their childhood to breathe. Don't panic, time is a Circle, fate is already doomed.
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I don’t know if it’s Kashen’s vision or a crooked plan, the doomsday prophecy that AI will replace human beings demonstrated by the “Terminator” series as early as the 1980s has become more and more anxiety within the reach of contemporary people. Forgot to read from that book, a Google executive predicted that after AI matures, the global unemployment rate will be as high as 98%. I don't know how much sensationalized there is in this, but if this day does come, I'm confident that it must not be the 2%.
Humorously, "End 1" may also use a war scene where humanoid AI slaughtered humans to create a sense of horror. By "End 6", humanoid AI can no longer add anxiety to contemporary people. What we fear is never being slaughtered by human-like robots with reinforced bones, but being replaced by a super-brain that is not at all human, or even has a physical presence. In other words, "End 6" can no longer resonate with reality as strongly as "End 1".
In the face of such huge cultural differences between the past and today, "End 6" has also made many adjustments. Regardless of whether it is political correctness to replace the savior of mankind from a white American man to a black Mexican woman, the rich handling of the US-Mexico border and the teasing of the soldiers stationed in the US have a distinct sense of the times. In terms of rhythm, it inserts several funny scenes for the governor in the tense scenes like Marvel. It is not dense but the effect is good; in terms of color, it is more like today's mainstream sci-fi movies, much brighter and clearer than "End 1", But it also lost the "Blade Runner"-style shabby feel.
After all, you can only look back on the past by standing firmly in the present, right?
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