![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I saw Terminator Salvation yesterday. Purely for the Christian Bale mancandy and the explosions, you understand, and when viewed through that lens, it's a glut of stupid fun. If you think too hard, the holes become glaringly apparent, and if you're a pedant like me, you'll wear yourself ragged trying to figure them out. My biggest aneurysm-inducing brain cramp? At the end of the movie, Marcus, the human cum Terminator cum human by crassly manipulative moment of self-determination volunteers his heart as a replacement for John Connor's fatally damaged one. How noble, and a move which simultaneously reaffirms Marcus' chosen humanity and causes John Connor to reevaluate his long-held definition of "human." Great. It's a wonderfully cinematic moment, and if you're engaged with the characters at all, it performs its job admirably. And it did. Until I started thinking.
There's a problem, if you remember that earlier in the film, the heart had been stopped for several minutes after a T-800 punched it. The heart shouldn't be functional, and even if there wasn't catastrophic structural damage from the punch itself, the lack of blood flow and cellular oxygenation should've rendered it unusable. Because even if Marcus' Terminator body was strong enough to override the damage and keep it pumping, John Connor's human body isn't, especially not if the aortic artery has been damaged.
Well, two, if you remember that human organs are not interchangeable and cannot be donated at need. There was no guarantee that Marcus' tissue was compatible with Connor's. It probably wasn't.
Three if you refuse to suspend belief and accept that a heart impaled by an iron bar is simply "damaged" and not destroyed.
Wait, four if you consider the fact that Marcus' donor heart had previously been damaged and contaminated by heart-stopping chemicals when he was executed by lethal injection, and contaminated again when Dr. Kelly Connor stopped it again to perform the transplant.
Five, if you recall that Connor resurrected Marcus by zapping his heart with a huge electric jolt from a handy set of nearby wires. That much electricity is bound to hurt as much as it helps.
Ergo, the blind transplant should not have been remotely possible, and even if it had succeeded, I refuse to believe that the post-apocalyptic world had ready access to immuno-suppressing drugs. Antibiotics were a rarity, as mentioned earlier in the movie, and I suspect they were more widely manufactured than immuno-suppressants. And even if there were vast caches of these drugs moldering in warehouses and hospitals, they're probably badly degraded and largely ineffective. In short, John Connor should be dead, tearful pregnant wife and messiah mandate notwithstanding.
I know, I know, humorless pedant talk, but that's the hazard of having an overactive mind and an inactive body. You think to curb the soporific tug of boredom and take grim pleasure in searching for the seams and joins of things, especially stories. I also found myself wondering how the human survivors coped with the lack of dental care, and if disabled humans were killed by their electric wheelchairs and scooters when Skynet took over the global network.
When viewed at a remove, Salvation is a Supernatural episode writ large, withDean Marcus martyring himself for the greater good because only Sam John Connor can stop the Apocalypse successfully lead the resistance. They could've subtitled it "Cuisinart Rising" in keeping with the current Supernatural mytharc.
A fun movie despite its flaws, and the soundtrack tickled my nostalgia bone. "You Could Be Mine" and "Rooster" are as badass now as they were for their initial run, and I found myself throwing up the devil horns in my seat.
B
I picked up my Emigrate CD yesterday, too. I'm undecided about most of it, but "Resolution" is fantastic. It's got this grotty, Middle Eastern undercurrent that lends an exotic, seedy spice to the brazen riff, a riff that hearkens back to the booty-shaking, hypnotic rhythm of "Sehnsucht", by the by. In simpler terms, "Resolution" would be right at home serving up muff shots in a Tijuana strip joint. It's a wicked, dirtynasty groove and I like it.
The rest of the album is afflicted with the necrotic malaise of emo angst rot and hampered by Kruspe's limited facility with English. It's not that Kruspe's English is poor; it's very good, and his conversational fluency would probably shame that of most native English speakers--he correctly pronounces and uses "alleviate", for instance--but his repertoire of metaphors is anemic at best. If he'd proclaimed that he was "drowning in____" one more time, Bloody Mary would've popped out of the recording studio glass and torn off his head just to make him shut the fuck up.
What isn't limited by the language barrier and differences in idiomatic expression is uneven. In one line, he offers up a beautiful turn of phrase like "sidewalk trash", but in the next, he's telling people not to look down or they might fall. And most of his lyrics are delivered in earnest, declarative bursts, thereby making him sound like a horny German tourist trying to pick up American women after three beers and a quick perusal of the grocery store greeting card aisle.
"Babe" is...well. Of all the words a rock star would know how to pronounce, you would think "babe" would be one of them. You would be wrong. The same tongue that can so artfully tackle "alleviate" just can't conquer "babe". It's like his brain is torn between the first-language mandate that tells him "babe" rhymes with "habe" and the learned mandate that tells him it has linguistic alleles in common with "table". He knows the first instinct to pronounce the "e" is incorrect, but his German brain just can't countenance dropping it altogether in favor of a long "a", and so, like a man trying to please his wife and his road mistress, he lengthens the "a" and voices the "e". As a consequence, he sounds like he's singing with a plippy fat lip. Not what he was going for, I'd wager.
Dear Richard,
Your ex-wife might be hot, and your trouser gerbil might still pine for the soft, sweet burrow of her glorious wundersnatch, but she can't write songs. For the love of God, take away her pen and give her something harder and firmer to hold.
Unless, of course, you're attempting to honor the financial terms of your divorce settlement by granting her publishing credits to these half-assed ditties rather than forking over large sums of your Rammstein royalties, in which case, I salute your ingenuity, sir. I also hope you don't have to do it again.
La Guera
There's a problem, if you remember that earlier in the film, the heart had been stopped for several minutes after a T-800 punched it. The heart shouldn't be functional, and even if there wasn't catastrophic structural damage from the punch itself, the lack of blood flow and cellular oxygenation should've rendered it unusable. Because even if Marcus' Terminator body was strong enough to override the damage and keep it pumping, John Connor's human body isn't, especially not if the aortic artery has been damaged.
Well, two, if you remember that human organs are not interchangeable and cannot be donated at need. There was no guarantee that Marcus' tissue was compatible with Connor's. It probably wasn't.
Three if you refuse to suspend belief and accept that a heart impaled by an iron bar is simply "damaged" and not destroyed.
Wait, four if you consider the fact that Marcus' donor heart had previously been damaged and contaminated by heart-stopping chemicals when he was executed by lethal injection, and contaminated again when Dr. Kelly Connor stopped it again to perform the transplant.
Five, if you recall that Connor resurrected Marcus by zapping his heart with a huge electric jolt from a handy set of nearby wires. That much electricity is bound to hurt as much as it helps.
Ergo, the blind transplant should not have been remotely possible, and even if it had succeeded, I refuse to believe that the post-apocalyptic world had ready access to immuno-suppressing drugs. Antibiotics were a rarity, as mentioned earlier in the movie, and I suspect they were more widely manufactured than immuno-suppressants. And even if there were vast caches of these drugs moldering in warehouses and hospitals, they're probably badly degraded and largely ineffective. In short, John Connor should be dead, tearful pregnant wife and messiah mandate notwithstanding.
I know, I know, humorless pedant talk, but that's the hazard of having an overactive mind and an inactive body. You think to curb the soporific tug of boredom and take grim pleasure in searching for the seams and joins of things, especially stories. I also found myself wondering how the human survivors coped with the lack of dental care, and if disabled humans were killed by their electric wheelchairs and scooters when Skynet took over the global network.
When viewed at a remove, Salvation is a Supernatural episode writ large, with
A fun movie despite its flaws, and the soundtrack tickled my nostalgia bone. "You Could Be Mine" and "Rooster" are as badass now as they were for their initial run, and I found myself throwing up the devil horns in my seat.
B
I picked up my Emigrate CD yesterday, too. I'm undecided about most of it, but "Resolution" is fantastic. It's got this grotty, Middle Eastern undercurrent that lends an exotic, seedy spice to the brazen riff, a riff that hearkens back to the booty-shaking, hypnotic rhythm of "Sehnsucht", by the by. In simpler terms, "Resolution" would be right at home serving up muff shots in a Tijuana strip joint. It's a wicked, dirtynasty groove and I like it.
The rest of the album is afflicted with the necrotic malaise of emo angst rot and hampered by Kruspe's limited facility with English. It's not that Kruspe's English is poor; it's very good, and his conversational fluency would probably shame that of most native English speakers--he correctly pronounces and uses "alleviate", for instance--but his repertoire of metaphors is anemic at best. If he'd proclaimed that he was "drowning in____" one more time, Bloody Mary would've popped out of the recording studio glass and torn off his head just to make him shut the fuck up.
What isn't limited by the language barrier and differences in idiomatic expression is uneven. In one line, he offers up a beautiful turn of phrase like "sidewalk trash", but in the next, he's telling people not to look down or they might fall. And most of his lyrics are delivered in earnest, declarative bursts, thereby making him sound like a horny German tourist trying to pick up American women after three beers and a quick perusal of the grocery store greeting card aisle.
"Babe" is...well. Of all the words a rock star would know how to pronounce, you would think "babe" would be one of them. You would be wrong. The same tongue that can so artfully tackle "alleviate" just can't conquer "babe". It's like his brain is torn between the first-language mandate that tells him "babe" rhymes with "habe" and the learned mandate that tells him it has linguistic alleles in common with "table". He knows the first instinct to pronounce the "e" is incorrect, but his German brain just can't countenance dropping it altogether in favor of a long "a", and so, like a man trying to please his wife and his road mistress, he lengthens the "a" and voices the "e". As a consequence, he sounds like he's singing with a plippy fat lip. Not what he was going for, I'd wager.
Dear Richard,
Your ex-wife might be hot, and your trouser gerbil might still pine for the soft, sweet burrow of her glorious wundersnatch, but she can't write songs. For the love of God, take away her pen and give her something harder and firmer to hold.
Unless, of course, you're attempting to honor the financial terms of your divorce settlement by granting her publishing credits to these half-assed ditties rather than forking over large sums of your Rammstein royalties, in which case, I salute your ingenuity, sir. I also hope you don't have to do it again.
La Guera
Tags: