Always more content when punching dreadlocked aliens, physical manifestations of the antichrist and pretty much everyone to death than when using ‘ideas’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘any semblance of intelligence’ to get things done, it did indeed seem strange when Arnie was elected Governor of California in 2003. After slowly departing into his tenure in politics through a slew of tired and mechanically deficient star vehicles (ending with the competent tedium of Terminator 3) he disappeared from our screens almost completely. For eight years he subsisted upon minor roles, meagre cameos and his estimated $200 million fortune until his political career ended and his personal life collapsed amongst allegations of extra-marital affairs and children.

But today, no longer wanted by the government, Arnie looks once again to survive as soldier of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Scott Waugh and Mike McCoy have evidently found him and given him a bunch of money so come April 1^st, 2012 filming will commence on Black Sunday (hitherto known as Black Sands), a project that on initial announcement had Schwarzenegger playing “a loner who wages war against a ruthless weapons manufacturer and his private army in the Southwest.” But just as I was about to fall asleep onto my keyboard as I typed out that description, Arnie (speaking to TheArnoldFans) has come out and declared a change to proceedings; “I’m a kind of angel. I cannot currently say more about this film.”

Well I’ll be damned, the film that started out as a generic actioner has about turned into the realms of the supernatural. It’s gone from something like Collateral Damage into a cross between Commando and Constantine. So that’s End of Days then.

Come to think of it maybe Arnie in a superficial bid to return as a relevant force could just mash up a load of his old greats with some hefty religious classics (not to say that Constantine isn’t a religious classic of course, it’s all subjective). Think Rambo and The Greatest Story Ever Told. Conan and the Ten Commandments. The Terminator of Nazareth.

But cut away the dollop of mystic fluff heaped on what sounds to be a creaky action thriller and it seems we’re back to the stereotypical Arnie of yore.

But after gliding through his movie career with nothing more than muscles, well chosen projects and a precision crafted cliché to which the likes of Steven Seagal and Jason Statham can only aspire that’s fine by me. He never laid claim to being the next De Niro that’s for sure. Although he’s probably going to end up playing out his senior years in a helluva more graceful fashion than old ‘comedy’ Bob whether he clumsily punches his way to retirement or not.

On the 5th August, Super 8 will finally hit our shores, riding on a wave of critical praise from the other side of the Atlantic. Its combination of eighties youthful nostalgia (Stand by Me, Goonies) and Spielgburg-esque science fiction (Close Encounters, E.T) looks set to titillate young and old alike. However, Super 8 also acts to highlight the growing trend of modern Science Fiction taking its influences from the past. Whilst seemingly going against the grain of the genre’s forward thinking philosophy,  it’s a welcome relief from the recent influx of movies which have forgone the subtle underlying warnings which made Science Fiction such a stalwart of seventies and eighties cinema .

Unlike other genres of film this speculative, science based medium of entertainment isn’t bound to any particular era, period or location, allowing film makers a free reign when it comes to storytelling. However, as the genre has progressed through the years certain elements have become evocative of this explosive and thoughtful strand of cinema. As well as the spacecrafts, robots and other technological advances we’ve come to associate with these films, Science Fiction has often been used as a tool to explore political and social issues as well as more philosophical issues such our inheritably destructive human behaviour.
Despite becoming a mainstay of the silent era, by the time the fifties were upon us Science Fiction had faded to little more than cheap jovial entertainment consisting mainly of low-budget B movies who’s plot and premises where almost as flimsy as the cardboard set designs they were filmed on.

It wasn’t until 1957 and the beginnings of the Space Race that Science Fiction began to be taken seriously again. Ever since the dawn of time man has looked up and stared at the stars, but during the cold war there was a growing sense of marvel towards the universe that was clearly reflected within cinema. From Stanley Kubrick’s spectacular 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), New Wave darling Jean-Luc Godard’s desolately bleak Alphaville (1965), Tarkovsky’s sombre masterpiece Solaris (1972) to Chalton Heston’s surprisingly powerful performance in Soylent Green (1973), Science Fiction was beginning to grow a brain whilst simultaneously reflecting the social issues of a public which had plenty to feel disenfranchised about amidst this period of escalated fear.

Then a film came along which changed the game forever. Love it or hate it, there’s little doubt that the Star Wars trilogy took Science Fiction from a small committed audience of art house devotees and movie geeks and exploded it upon a mass audience. Smart and technically assured classics such as Terminator, Alien and Blade Runner may well have struggled to get financing beforehand but with every studio in Hollywood desperate to get a piece of the action the genre began to be taken seriously again by those who’s interest had been peaked by its new found commercial success.

It resulted in a flurry of Intelligent and exhilarating films which achieved a fine balance between mirroring social concerns and being universally enjoyable slices of entertainment. Despite the overwhelming success of Star Wars and George Lucas’s new found fame there was one man who became synonymous with this 2nd golden age of Sci-Fi.

Somehow managing to channel into the core themes of Science Fiction whilst injecting a commercially successful formula into his films, Steven Spielberg created several of the most loved films of the eighties and helped reignite this once sneered upon genre. His involvement in Super8 has sparked excitement that a bright new future is about to evolve, using this once successful template to break away from the current reliance on CGI effects and comic book adaptations in what has so far resulted in little more than superficial escapism of little depth or importance.

If successful, Super 8 will join a host of other films which are attempting to conjure up the same magic approach which worked so well in previous years. Attack the Block (2010) with its various references to eighties cinema is probably the most recent example of a film which managed to capture the nostalgically enjoyable themes from the past whilst transcending mere plagiarism and gaining its own identity through a subtle use of social satire which prevented it from feeling like a throw back or pastiche of a better time. Paul (2010) managed to transfer the E.T template to an older audience who had grown up on a diet of these Spielberg epics and whilst perhaps not the success many would have hoped for, it certainly showed signs of promising new direction.

Duncan Jones seems to be attempting to singlehandedly resusatate the genre’s more thoughtful approach so far delighting us with both Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011). Moon was set in a space station not dissimilar from those seen in Alien and Solaris (cold and sterile but with a eerie haunting quality), whilst GERTY, Sam Bell’s talking droid assistant, looked like the result of a bizarre cross breeding exercise between 2001:A Space Odyssey’s H.A.L and Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet. The same subtle evocation is also noticeable with Source Code which seems like a lovingly experimental amalgamation of Total Recall, Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day, yet somehow they both managed to show that whilst Science Fiction may well be 99% regurgitated material installed to add an air of familiarity to an otherwise outlandish genre, if you use that remaining 1% well enough you can still create something wonderfully unique and enjoyable.

It doesn’t stop there either, this year we still have re-imaginations of The Thing and Planet of the Apes to look forward to whilst Ridley Scott is putting the final touches to his Alien prequel Prometheus.
With the last ten years of Science Fiction failing to capture young imaginations due to its overly stylised and superficial reliance on visual effects, let’s pray that Super 8 continues this budding new approach of reinventing this golden era of cinema. Despite its futurist settings and apparent quest for knowledge, Science Fiction has always worked best when it stood as a social commentary, reflecting our concerns and fears as to which way society is heading. Indeed “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes” hopefully Hollywood will heed notice and once again start creating the socially important Science Fiction films we so richly deserve.

Written by Patrick Gamble

As The Beatles (almost) sang – It was Twenty Years and one day ago today when James Cameron unleashed Terminator 2: Judgment Day on an unsuspecting world.

The film would prove to be a defining moment in the sci-fi and action genres and the work done by ILM’s Dennis Muren and the legendary Stan Winston not only holds up today but serves as a pivotal moment in on-screen effects.

Thankfully though there was far more to the film than some stunning effects work. This is arguably Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finest screen role, different enough from his first incarnation in Cameron’s The Terminator and far more complex than any of the actor’s subsequent dalliances with the family friendly fare of Twins, Kindergarten Cop and the execrable Junior. Cameron also hangs the entire film on the broken family dynamic between Sarah and John Connor, and the emotional power of the film come journey’s end and the fate of unexpected surrogate father figure is entirely earned.

As the film’s legacy has been more than a little tarnished by the next two films in the series I thought today we’d look back at how the film was produced, unveiled and received by audiences and critics back in the day. I’ve collected a number of videos from around the web which, while focusing on the VFX, give a good indication of how James Cameron surprised and delighted audiences two decades ago.

First up is a low-res on the set featurette which has some candid moments with the focus on James Cameron’s directing technique (a choice quote has him proclaiming that he hates being the centre of attention), the usual banter and some pretty terrifying demonstrations of the model work from Stan Winston’s team.

The next video is a short clip of Stan Winston himself talking about the process of creating the effects, and it’s interesting to hear him talk about a time when visual effects were starting to show the potential to overtake the practical side of things. Winston’s genius is compounded by his desire to get things right, whoever creates the effect.

A slight change of focus here as I’ve included Siskel & Ebert’s review of the film, which is unreserved in its acclaim.

Keeping on the theme of the pioneering visual effects here’s a three part documentary of the creation and ideas behind the CGI work. Foreshadowing Avatar and the technology catching up with the imagination of the director, Cameron talks about having the idea for the liquid metal Terminator during the first film and, once claymation was deemed unsuitable, the work on The Abyss paved the way for the T-1000.

Here’s the original trailer,

And here’s the famous music video of Guns N’ Roses You Could be Mine in which Arnold Schwarzenegger has the chance to blow seven shades of Sweet Child O’ Mine into Axl and his crew…

And finally there’s a bit of an oddity from Youtube user rymdreglage whose video for the track Anatoliy Shishkov features an eco-unfriendly tribute to the film.

The Terminator franchise is in the hands of producer Megan Ellison, who’s Annapurna Films fought it out with Lionsgate in a deal which has Fast & Furious 5’s Justin Lin onboard to direct and Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the starring role.

Ellison is the daughter of US business magnate Larry Ellison, and she’s decided to put some of daddy’s cash to good use and fund a number of interesting upcoming features, including the hunt for Osama Bin Laden project, which reteams The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and that film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal. It was also reported last week that she sold worldwide rights to The Weinstein Company for Paul Thomas Anderson’s next feature, which stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.

She appears to be putting her weight behind some prestige pictures, which don’t necessarily sit within (with the recent exception of the ‘Bin Laden’ feature) the mainstream or appeal to a large audience (she came through for Anderson after he’d seen his pet project stall many time, with studios unwilling to put their money behind it).

It remains to be seen if she’ll insist on the same level of commitment to quality over The Terminator series, but anything that’s produced by Annapurna Films (she was an executive producer on the recent True Grit too), has to be an marked improvement on ‘Salvation’ right?!?

News via Deadline

Here’s some lovely news for a Monday morning which comes from The Arnold Fans (with a nod to our friends at TotalFilm) which tells us that there is potential that Arnold Schwarzenegger could return to both the Terminator and Predator franchises. Schwarzenegger did appear in Terminator Salvation but he was a CG character which I personally didn’t think was very convincing. Then again, it probably never would be compared to having the man in the movie for real.

Now that Arnie has stepped down as The Governator, it looks like it’s time for him to return to movie making with him telling the audience at the ‘Arnold Seminar’, that he’s currently considering around 15 roles which have been offered to him.

“Well, first of all it’s more 15 films… obvious ones from The Terminator to remakes of Predator and The Running Man and all of those things.”

He went to on talk about a movie that he’s currently making which comes from a comic book with more news coming the end of this month or early next. He continued…

“Then also a lot of original stuff too.  But I am also packaging   a Comic Book character right now. I’m going to announce that sometime by the end of March or the beginning of April.”

We’ll obviously keep you posted.

It was inevitable that with his political career going as far as it could without a drastic rewrite of the American Constitution Arnold Schwarzenegger would be leaving office and facing a choice between returning to acting or spending his retirement on the golf courses of Southern California.

A recent appearance in ensemble in the jungle big bang flick The Expendables went a long way to signaling to the Hollywood hills that Arnie was on his way back, and would be looking for his comeback role. This is all preamble to a story Deadline is running about the apparent resurrection of the Terminator franchise, one which was run into the ground critically and commercially by McG’s Terminator: Salvation, a title which is now lumbered with an ironic weight given that the film which was supposed to the start of a new trilogy.

But nothing ever stays dead in Hollywood for long. Deadline have it that Justin Lin, the director Universal brought in to direct three of the rubber burning pentalogy Fast and Furious franchise, is being lined up to take on a new Terminator series for the studio. You’ll of course remember that McG had planned to make more Terminator films and even while standing in the burning wreckage of his 2009 film was adamant that he would return to the post apocalyptic world of the future.

Whether the Terminator series has the legs to carry on after the failure of the last film isn’t clear – but a ready made franchise is seemingly always more attractive than an original idea so there’s a good chance that if Lin and Universal are interested then it’ll happen one way or another. Schwarzenegger’s acting return merely flames the dying fire of a once great movie series.

So will is be P-45 to T-800 for Arnie? Probably not. Terminators don’t age.

I genuinely have nothing but love for Arnie. Even if he went off the boil a little during the years leading up to him becoming the Governator, we’ll always have The Terminator, Commando, Predator, Total Recall, Terminator 2 and True Lies. If you start talking to me about Junior or Batman & Robin, we’re going to have a falling out.

Having done nothing but cameos since T3, Arnie may now be back in the game. His Twitter feed reports that he has told his reps, CAA, to start seriously considering offers for him, which at least means he is on the look-out. Whether he still has an appetite for leading roles, or would prefer the occasional “have fun!” as in Welcome to the Jungle, we have yet to see. Personally, I would love to see him in another Predator film, or the occasionally mentioned Commando sequel. What I would not like, is any more of the “talk to the hand” self-satirising nonsense of T3. I think that particular dead horse has been well and truly flogged.

If Arnie starts sniffing around any specific projects, we’ll be sure to let you know.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger’s time as Governor of California draws to a close, having failed to tackle and alleviate the state’s spiralling $28 billion deficit and with approval ratings at an all time low, now would seem like a better time than any for the Austrian Oak to head back to the welcoming embrace of show business. That politics lark is too much like hard work anyway, with little reward for the effort.

The Arnold Fans website is running a story in which The Terminator star reveals that he’s currently toying with three potential projects, one of which has really captured his imagination.

“Currently I’m reading three scripts. One topic/script, which I considered a long time ago before governor, is delighting me particularly. In it I would play an older soldier, who gets the order at the ending of the war to kill a bunch of kids. But he doesn’t do it and get them to safety at the risk of his life and it has all kind of adventure. This script is based on a true story!”

Although he doesn’t mention the title, the site reveals it to be With Wings As Eagles, a script from as far back as 2001, written by Randall Wallace and based on the true life story about a German officer who does not agree with his surrounding Nazi party and instead helps a band of American POWs to escape.

Sounds like an action-packed none-too-subtle reworking of Schindler’s List, and given Wallace’s past proclivity to playing fast and loose with real historical events (he wrote Braveheart, Pearl Harbour and We Were Soldiers) this could well be the case.

Unlike his contemporary in the action genre, Sylvester Stallone, Schwarzenegger also states that his days of action man may be behind him now.

“In the future I have to adapt my roles to my age. Clint Eastwood also has done it in the same way. Extreme fighting or shooting is not possible anymore. I want to be more encouraged as an actor and I believe that I can manage this challenge. I am like a sponge, which is absorbing all the knowledge and always be willing to learn all new things.”

Hmmmmm. Not sure if his thespian skills are even remotely close to that of Eastwood’s (who has also revealed himself to be a dab hand at the ole’ directing game too), but time will tell whether this once huge action star will be back as a permanent fixture on the big screen.

With the Blu-ray release of the Alien Anthology on the 25th of October HeyUGuys are taking a look at the entire Alien and Predator series. From Facehuggers to trophy hunting Predators, from the iconic and classic to the dubious crossovers – this is your ultimate retrospective.

So remember, even if you ain’t got time to bleed, in the Video Vault no-one can hear you scream…

Adam Lowes is our man in the penal colony.

Third entries into popular film franchises are notoriously difficult to get right. For every Toy Story 3, there are the second sequels to Blade, Spiderman, X-Men, The Terminator and even The Godfather, all of which have failed to deliver the goods and satisfy fans by either losing a grip on character continuity or generally been unable to match what has come before.

Alien 3, a departure from the previous film’s “Vietnam-in-space”, action-packed extravaganza, and considered a failure by most critics and audiences upon it’s release, won me over upon seeing it for the first time (thanks to a shoddy cinema copy on VHS) due partly because of it’s attempts to do something different with the material.

If the ending to Aliens had a fairy tale quality to it, with the surviving members of the ill-fated rescue mission all now finally safe and earth-bound, and Ripley having tucked Newt in and wished her sweet dreams, the beginning (and indeed the rest of) Alien 3 is like a waking nightmare. Any chance of living happily ever after for Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character and co. is suddenly gone when the spaceship experiences an onboard fire and launches an escape pod containing the crew, into the stars.

The pod then crashes on Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161, an all-male penal colony, full of shaven-headed (due to space lice) hardened criminals, many of whom have now taken the religious path in seeking atonement for their crimes. Ripley awakens in the prison hospital where she discovers that she too has been scalped and is informed by a kindly doctor (Charles Dance) that she is the only survivor of the crash, well…at least the only human one.

Not even the presence here of Brian Glover (bread advert voice-over extraordinaire and the fascist PE teacher from Kes) as the prison warden was enough to distract me my sympathetic reaction to the grim surroundings and situations Ripley has to contend with in this film. The prisoners all look suitably malnourished and grimy, although that Hollywood conceit of casting all British actors to play them (and the guards) is present and correct, although arguably, this does add another dimension to the film.

I think one of the main problems fan of the series had here was that they couldn’t reconcile the fact that after such a gripping and bombastic second film, this was another similarly thoughtful and meditative take on the material to that of the first film. In many ways, it’s almost the antithesis of Aliens. There is only one creature stalking all the men but (owing to the fact that this is a prison planet) all forms of firearms have been prohibited, leaving the prison inhabitants extremely vulnerable and essentially sitting ducks. The space marines back on LV-426 could easily destroy a whole enclave of aliens with one round from their pulse guns (although they were ultimately outmatched too).

Around two-thirds of the way into the film when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do. Ripley makes the horrific discovery that she has been impregnated with an egg from a stray facehugger who must have hitched a lift on the spaceship after the events of the previous film. I remember watching this for the first time and feeling utterly devastated that this strong paternal figure, who had managed to survive two other near-fatal encounters with the xenomorph, was now destined to meet her fate because of the species.

This is why Alien 3 resonated so much for me at the time. No matter the flaws, you will rarely see a mainstream sci-fi picture with such a grim sense of foreboding doom. This was further confirmed to me when I first watched the scene where Charles Dutton (playing the religious leader of the inmates), giving his fellow prisoners a pep talk and uttering the line that they were “all gonna die anyway” so they should do their best to eliminate the source of what was killing them.

It’s been well documented that director David Fincher had a nightmare of a time on his debut feature, clashing with the studio and having to contend with endless, day-to-day rewrites. There have been many of occasions where films with similar problems have failed spectacularly from both a critical viewpoint and at the box office (the recent Jonah Hex springs to mind), so it’s to Fincher’s credit here that he was able to sculpt something interesting and unique out of all the troubles, and maintain a vision of sorts.

The bittersweet and highly touching ending, where Ripley “gives birth” and is a mother-figure once again for a fleeting moment, resonated with me on a far more emotional level than the celebrated ending of Terminator 2, another considerately more successful sequel at the time.

For that reason alone, I will always look upon Alien 3 as a fascinating attempt to take a film series in a different direction to that of it’s predecessors which, for better or worse, still managed to leave a lasting and profound affect on me – a feat that appears to be increasingly harder to do in modern mainstream filmmaking of any genre.

Every week Apple offer a film for rental at a discounted price of 99p on iTunes. For several weeks, the selections were pretty poor. Then last week saw a quality jump, with Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake.

 Would this week continue the improvement? The answer would be a resounding yes, as to coincide with the DVD release of Terminator: Salvation, we’ve been treated to James Cameron’s 1984 classic, the original The Terminator.

 In the future, a post-apocalyptic war rages on, as small pockets of human resistance fighter struggle for survival. The predators intent on their destruction are man’s own creation, machines. Robotic soldiers pursue what remains of our race, the genocide of an entire species almost complete. One man (Arnold Schwarzenneger) is sent back, through time, to before the civil war began. He begins tracking down all the Sarah Connors in the phonebook eliminating them one by one. Someone else is also sent back.

 Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is an ordinary woman, with a dead end job, and a life going nowhere. When the news reports a serial killer is hunting down people with her name, she tries to find a safe place. But there is no safe refuge from this killing machine, and he tracks her down. The second man sent back comes to her rescue. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has to convince Connor that she holds the key to mankind’s survival, and together they must evade both the police and an unstoppable cyborg killing machine.

 You’ve all seen Terminator, you don’t need my opinion on the story. Does it still hold up today? Thematically, it’s still just as relevant. Our dependence on technology to live continues to increase unabated. Large corporations still hold far too much power and exert too much influence. Our paranoia towards the secret experiments conducted by the men and women in political power hasn’t decreased in the last twenty-five years. The action is as exciting as ever, the sub-par acting to be expected from an 80′s action movie.

 The effects, great at the time, obviously are incomparable to today’s standards. The stop-motion effects particularly have aged badly. Whereas in a horror film like The Thing the jerky look of this technique give the alien creatures a suitably creepy, otherworldly feel, in a movie based on a premise of then futuristic technology it does let the movie down a bit.

 Unfair criticism, as i said it was good for the time. After all, no amount of cutting edge technology and CGI could make Terminator: Salvation anything more than a big let down. Definitely worth a pound of anyone’s money, if you haven’t seen it for a while give The Terminator a watch, and remind yourself why we are all looking forward to Cameron’s Avatar next month.

 The Terminator is available on iTunes at the discounted price until Midnight Monday 30th November, and on DVD and Blu-Ray now.

 Bazmann – You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/baz_mann