Taken together, Terminator 2 and Gemini Man are hardly what you would call twins. But there are some similarities. Both are made by intelligent directors (James Cameron and Ang Lee) who make films which are visually interesting, and often show a preoccupation with the human body. Both have lots of gunplay and indeed have an almost pornographic relationship to firearms. Both are at times aggressively stupid. Neither are masterpieces. The main difference is that Terminator 2 succeeds in spite of its flaws, while Gemini Man is the duddiest of duds.
Why do I say these films are aggressively stupid? With Terminator 2 it is partly just to do with the silliness of the plot, which even setting aside the problems with the basic premise (if on both occasions it sent a Terminator back in time Skynet came within a whisker of killing either Sarah Connor or John Connor respectively, why doesn't it keep sending them on a weekly basis, or just send 100? You're not allowed to say "Well, this is explained in the 6th episode in the franchise...") asks the audience on too many occasions to kick their brains out of the window.
I don't really mean the picky questions. (Why does the T-101 not know what crying is? Why is he completely impervious to rifle bullets but vulnerable to being whacked with a big steel pole? Why does he care about the destruction of Skynet? Why is he able to understand situational nuance ("They'll live.")? Why does he still allow himself to be destroyed despite John commanding him not to?) I mean the braindead, crude, medieval morality-play way in which the characters are presented. Some characters are bad, lazy, foul-mouthed, mean-spirited, or buffoonish, and they get killed. Some are the good guys - resourceful, daring and knowing the truth - and they survive. Cameron's films are always paint-by-numbers in terms of morality, but Terminator 2 really gives the audience no credit whatsoever for having the capacity for independent thought. In order to show John Connor's foster father is a bad 'un and hence deserving of death, we have to see him being lazy (sitting around on the sofa watching TV while his wife tries to discipline the kids), oafish (in the way he talks to her and John) and even abusive to animals (in the way he acts towards his dog. In order to show the mental hospital guard is nasty, we have to show him licking Sarah's face. In order to show the psychiatrist treating Sarah is a meanie, we have to see him stringing her along, making sarcastic comments when he thinks she's not listening, and giving only the most perfunctory attempts at treatment. We're then invited to cackle and bay for blood as these people get their violent comeuppances. In Cameron's universe, there are goodies and baddies and you can tell within 5 seconds which is which, and what the baddies deserve is cruel, violent death, and what the goodies deserve is to win in the end. It's that simple and that cartoonish.
With Gemini Man it's difficult to know where to start. It's not so much that the morality of that film is stupid. It's that everything about it is. The script is dreadful. (At one point you have to sit through Mary Winstead painstakingly explaining to Will Smith that the assassin trying to kill him has exactly the same DNA and what that means. The audience already guessed it was a clone 10 minutes previously. In this conversation it is made unmistakably clear. We still have to them have the line spelling things out at the end: "It's a clone." Because the audience, in the film-makers' minds, can only be idiots.) The characters are drawn in crayon. (Mary Winstead looks waif-like and sensitive, but we know she's tough because her dad was in the FBI and therefore of course she drinks boilermakers; Will Smith is Will Smith and we're shown at the beginning that he doesn't want to risk killing a child so he's a good guy). The plot can be summarised as: it's basically the first three "Bourne" films condensed into one, but much, much worse, full of completely ridiculous and OTT set-pieces, and it's not other assassins trying to kill Bourne, but his clone. And shot in a high frame rate which makes it look like 2 hours of cut scenes from a video game. Events depicted in it are just plainly daft: the opening sequence, featuring Will Smith firing a bullet from a sniper rifle into a high-speed train from a distance of 2km and hitting a target passenger is silly enough, but to imagine it happening in Belgium, for fuck's sake?
Perhaps worst of all, though, is that its setting is incoherent. What genre is Gemini Man? If the audience feels as though it is watching an SF film, it is more ready to give leeway in terms of the suspension of disbelief. If it feels as though it is watching a gritty espionage thriller, it expects the director to at least grope towards something vaguely realistic and plausible. Gemini Man somehow manages to create the impression it aims for the latter while striking the tone of the former. It sets itself up as being a gritty espionage thriller - that is its furniture, so to speak - but the plot is pure whimsy and the events depicted in it are absurd outside of the context of soft SF. The film is ludicrously badly conceived.
What rescues Terminator 2 and leaves it as the vastly more superior of the two films? First, you have to say that the quality of the female leads makes a huge difference. Linda Hamilton can be histrionic in her performances, but she is also capable of pulling off a really gutsy and emotive scene - witness Sarah's breakdown after the attempt to kill Dyson. And she has the genuine physicality to pull off the action scenes in a believable way. Mary Winstead looks great and she's not a bad actress but she simply fails Mark Kermode's old "Meg Ryan is a helicopter pilot" test - you just can't take her seriously as a hard-boiled secret agent.
Second, it actually matters that James Cameron didn't have much in the way of CGI to play with when making Terminator 2, and had to do his stunts and set-pieces the old-fashioned way. That film was made in 1991. Some elements have dated. But the action scenes mostly still look great. because in the end a massive truck exploding after a frantic chase down a highway smashing cars hither and thither in 1991 is a massive truck exploding after a frantic chase down a hightway smashing cars hither and thither in 2019. Gemini Man, on the other hand, already looks bad, which is a bizarre thing to say about an Ang Lee film; if anything its visuals most strongly remind me of Michael Mann's rather drab Public Enemies, which never looked as if it hadn't been made on a film set - there is something similar going on in Gemini Man, which always feels as though it is on a screen, rather than really taking place.
Third, at least for all the flaws in execution, it is to Cameron's credit in Terminator 2 that he attempts to do something really new and interesting with the T-101 character. Ultimately the transformation from unthinking robot into thinking, feeling cyborg is not convincing (especially if you've never seen the director's cut). But at least he tried. In Gemini Man, we get Will Smith, being Will Smith as an assassin. This is new and interesting in the sense that "Will Smith as an assassin" sounds like in theory it could be a real career-shift. But what we get is, ultimately, Will Smith as an assassin - an implausibly nice, warm, screen presence who surely has never killed a fly, let alone another human being. There isn't even an attempt to give him an edge.
Fourth, though, the reason why Terminator 2 works is that it's a film which actually has a big idea. Its characters are grappling with things that are bigger than themselves - life, death, the universe, everything. Not just nuclear war but family, love, the ongoing capacity for humanity to be truly human rather than simply one side against another in a bitter and possibly endless struggle for survival. Their mission is imbued with meaning. And they pursue their goals at least in a way that shows why we should be rooting for them: because they value life, because they think that it's good that human beings exist and that human societies flourish, and because they want to save the good in such societies even while they are clear-sighted about the bad things within them (crime, lies, pettiness, incarceration, and all the rest). Gemini Man's lens is much more narrow. It's a question of Will Smith staying alive, and presented in such a lacklustre way that the conclusion is foregone from the beginning. Why follow a story to its conclusion when its result is never in doubt, and when the main protagonists have such little depth or consequence?
Terminator 2 somehow became the gold standard for the series, when it's plain (to me) that the first movie was superior. The first film is gritty, dark (so much of it was filmed at night), and a much more raw experience. Sure, the internal logic makes about as much sense as the sequel's, but the low-ish budget is disarming and allows you to give the time travel nonsense a pass. And the unrelenting programming of the Terminator itself is never in doubt by the viewer. In the sequel, suddenly this unthinking machine is huggable and asking questions.
ReplyDeleteNow that I think of it, it might also be that in the first film the time travel logic is simply the set-up to create the situation, only really reflected upon when Sarah drives into the desert at the end. In the sequel the characters are fighting a time travel paradox and questioning fate constantly, and so the logic becomes more examined and suspect.
Terminator 2 was incredibly stupid, but that stupidity helped to give it such emotion. As cheesy as it was, it'd take a heart of stone to feel nothing when the T-101 gives a thumbs up while being lower into molten metal, having learned to what it means to be human just in time to understand why it had to abandon the one person it had sworn to protect. Trying to be more sophisticated about it would've buried the simple statement punching the viewer in the face that this is sad and we should feel sad while watching it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I just have a soft spot for Schwarzenneger.