The first thing that most people will notice about Terminator 2: Judgment Day in comparison to The Terminator is its vastly increased budget, the opening battle sequence alone seemingly costing more than the entirety of its predecessor. If The Terminator showcased James Cameron's ability to work within his limits, then Terminator 2: Judgment Day is him showing us what he can do when those limits are significantly higher - it's an ambitious film, and one that almost entirely succeeds at what it is trying to do.
Set roughly a decade after The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day follows 10 year old John Connor, future leader of the resistance against Skynet, as he attempts to avoid being murdered by an advanced liquid metal terminator known as the T1000. Unlike The Terminator, which has more in common with the slasher flicks that were prevalent in the early 80's, Terminator 2: Judgment Day instead chooses to be an action film first and foremost, handing John a terminator ally in the form of a reprogrammed T800 in order to give him a fighting chance against the bigger threat of the T1000.
At this point it seems pretty safe to say that Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice didn't exactly set the world on fire. A box office disappointment and an unmitigated critical disaster, it's the kind of film that will be best remembered for the sheer level of "What the shit is going on" on display throughout, a movie that even a lot of die-hard Man of Steel apologists have to admit simply doesn't work - which makes me want to take a look back at the first film in what would later become known as the DC Extended Universe.
Because Man of Steel is, at best, a divisive movie. Even a full three years after it was released you can still find people arguing about it online, and it's usually an argument based around one of two things - either that Superman isn't meant to kill people, or that Superman didn't do enough to stop the destruction of Metropolis. And there is a very good reason why these two in particular are the most common complaints that people have with Man of Steel.
The film that put James Cameron on the map, The Terminator is quite rightly seen as a science fiction classic, a film that has had enormous impact on modern pop culture thanks to both the lasting impression that The Terminator made and the huge career boost that James Cameron received afterwards. Without The Terminator, I very much doubt that we would have seen the rest of James Cameron's filmography come to fruition, never mind the number of actors that he has since helped turn into film stars.
The story follows Kyle Reese as he travels back in time from a post-apocalyptic future in which an artificial intelligence known as Skynet has taken over the world. His mission is to protect Sarah Connor from a killing machine known as a Terminator that was also sent back in time to kill her thanks to the fact that she is destined to give birth to the leader of the human resistance.
When District 9 hit in 2009, a lot of people assumed that we had a new science fiction visionary entering the world of cinema. It was, at the time, a fair enough assumption - audiences hadn't really seen that kind of aesthetic applied to a sci-fi story in years, and the story being told was original, interesting, and had the kind of social commentary needed to create a classic film, a deeper (although admittedly, rather heavy handed) meaning underneath the story.
Now that Chappie has made everyone revisit their pre-conceived notions of Neil Blomkamp (and you can read my full review of Chappie here), I decided to go back and take another look at District 9, the film that catapulted Blomkamp into the spotlight as the supposed saviour of science fiction back in 2009.
Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, District 9 follows Wikus Van De Merwe, employee of the MNU, a weapons company that are also in control of the District 9 slums. Wikus is charged with leading a task force as they serve eviction notices to the inhabitants of District 9, an alien race known locally as "prawns" that are stranded on Earth after their mothership broke down directly above Johannesburg. Unfortunately for Wikus, he ends up getting a strange alien substance on himself that begins to slowly turn him into one of the "prawns".
Thank to the sour taste that the truly awful Jupiter Ascending recently left in my mouth (and you can read my full review here), I decided that a great way to cleanse my film palate would be to go back and re-watch a Wachowski film that initially blew me away - I'm talking, of course, about Cloud Atlas.
Directed in tandem by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer and based on a book of the same name, Cloud Atlas was considered unfilmable by a great many people thanks to the nature of the story being told. Cloud Atlas has no central narrative or main characters, the film instead being split into six short stories that are each set in a different time period, linked by something (whether that be a character, a decision, a piece of art or an idea) to the last one in a demonstration of how the decisions that we make now will no doubt have long lasting consequences in the future, not just for ourselves but for potentially the entire human race.
