POPCORN AND POLITICS AT THE MOVIES
Ready for the fight: Terminator T-800 models being
primed for battle against the human resistance in "Terminator Salvation", now in
theaters in the U.S.
and Canada. (Photo: Warner Brothers)
No Fate But What We Make: The Obama-Connor
Guantanamo-Skynet Connection
By
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
On Thursday, May 21, 2009, a funny, or at least interesting thing happened, with
the time machine moving back and forth across the 20th and 21st centuries.
Try and follow the crazy timeline if you can.
The most powerful man in the world was giving a speech that Thursday in May at
the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and very recently his Democratic
former senate colleagues had been cowed by fear, running scared by recently
voting against closing Guantanamo Bay, the place where hundreds of people remain
imprisoned, still uncharged in conjunction with the terrorist attacks in the
United States on September 11, 2001, otherwise known as Judgment Day by
Republican acolytes like the late Jerry Falwell.
"In the midst of all these challenges, however, my single most important
responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe. It's the
first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. It's the last
thing I think about when I go to sleep at night."
With that, The Forty-Forth President of The United States proceeded to outline
his reasons for going ahead and closing down Guantanamo Bay.
Meanwhile, four years before that fateful September Tuesday in 2001, John
Connor, leader of the much-less cowardly Congress called the Resistance had
survived Judgment Day of August 29, 1997, a movie-invented armageddon conflict
not unlike the fictitious but real war that Dick Cheney and his malcontented
minions devised for Iraq that began in 2003 and has killed at least one million
Iraqis and well over 4,200 American soldiers and counting.
In the Judgment Day of the late summer of 1997, a nuclear onslaught claimed
three billion lives and Los Angeles was reduced to smithereens.
Some whooped and hollered with excitement. Others lamented the scorching of Tinseltown.
But Tinseltown was anything but dead, for it came back strong and unveiled
"Terminator Salvation" on May 21, 2009, with John Connor starring as
Christian Bale, a Resistance leader and
Dark Knight anti-hero brought in to give the real-life actor Mr. Bale
a brief respite from his fight against the evil computer network Skynet and its
Terminator machines. Mr. Connor also came back strong, older, wiser and
from a future nine years away, fighting and sounding like
Clint Eastwood. Besides the war against Skynet John Connor had
far more important fish to fry -- he had been expending copious amounts of
energy on his acidic tirade against "Terminator Salvation" cinematographer Shane
Hurlbut, who had apparently behaved like a paparazzi peacock in between takes.
"I don't ever want to see this guy on set again. Take him off the
planet!", screamed Mr. Connor.
"Cut!", shouted McC.
In the distance Mr. Hurlbut could be heard hurling up his own rear end and
bowels off-camera. Poor man. He thought that the "cut" order,
combined with the ruthless and rugged authority Mr. Connor wielded, meant that
his head was literally about to be put on the chopping block.
But just who was McC, you ask?
McC was Republican Senator John McCain, who was directing "Terminator Salvation"
as a last second replacement because the film's original director, McG, had been
fired for throwing in way too many clichés into the rough draft pretend shoot
version of the film. (In case you wondered: Mcs D, E and F were all on
vacation, and Mos DEF was busy working on a play on Broadway.) Mr. McCain,
who had been tortured for about six years in Vietnam during the prior century,
further tortured himself on the set of "Terminator Salvation" by listening to
Guns 'N' Roses' song "You Could Be Mine" in his headphones at full blast while
directing. (Psychologists at Warner Brothers stated privately that Mr.
McCain was channeling his inner youth with the popular G'N'R song because the
song's title indicated what McC was thinking about the White House and the
presidency he had campaigned for in 2008.)
Ever fearless however, McC, who turns 73 on August 29, 2009, set a world record
for the fastest motion picture film shoot and release in history: it took him a
full
two minutes to film and release the revised version of "Terminator Salvation" in
theaters simultaneously worldwide.
Even Skynet couldn't accomplish that.
Somewhere the 78-year-old Gran Torino Clint Eastwood, the master of The Quick
and The Few -- meaning the speed and amount of takes of a film scene -- a man
Frank Sinatra would have loved to have worked with -- had to be sneering with
envy.
In "Terminator Salvation", an ear-splitting experience if ever there was one
(with the Hollywood sign torpedoed from stress of the decibel level), hundreds of
the world's citizens are plucked from the ground by machines, grabbed the way
King Kong grasped Fay Wray in a vise-like grip and held in post-Judgment Day Los
Angeles or San Francisco or both, in holding pens or Holocaust-like camps.
Spoiler: John Connor releases them all.
(Definitely not seeking to trivialize in any way at all but wasn't it Oskar
Schindler or Elie Wiesel or someone else who said, "whoever saves one, saves the
world entire"?)
Speaking on May 21, 2009 at the
Star Trek (American) Enterprise Institute, the current American
president's cousin, Dick Cheney, the Dark Star's Death Star Darth Vader, sounded
alarm about this celluloid matter and those who would criticize the decision to
indefinitely hold prisoners of post-9/11 Bushmeister policies: "in the category
of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar
newspaper that referred to terrorists we've captured as, quote, "abducted".
Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave
operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them
sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the
movies."
Ah yes, Mr. Cheney said it: the movies.
Mr. Vader-Cheney must surely have been referring to "Terminator Salvation".
Right? Mr. Cheney's cousin President Barack Obama had just finished
speaking, cautioning against fear and rushing to judgment, and here, seconds
later after President Obama's concluded speech Mr. Cheney was rushing to
judgment and promoting fear, alarmed at John Connor's daring gall in opening the
floodgates of Skynet holding pens and Guantanamo Bay centers to the innocents
held therein to stream out into the far, open and occasionally paranoid or
xenophobic reaches of American society.
Earlier on the same May Day Thursday, President Obama made himself clear, even
if he wasn't exactly talking about Skynet. "Now let me be clear: we are
indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our
institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding
confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and
accountability." Adding that more than 525, or two-thirds of the detainees
at Guantanamo were released during George W. Bush's administration, the
Commander-In-Chief made mention that Mr. Bush himself wanted to close Guantanamo
Bay prison.
And on the movie screen in the movie state called California, whose movie
governator Terminator extraordinaire jettisoned the Golden State sunshine to
visit President Obama in D.C. back on May 19, 2009 -- after all, Mr.
Schwarzenegger's special election propositions to terminate California's deficit
were terminated by voters and moviegoers alike that day -- there was the
following shout: "Stand down!"
"Central Command wants us to launch an attack on Skynet", says Mr. Bale as John
Connor (or is it the other way around?) during "Terminator Salvation", warning
of what would be imminent cataclysmic nuclear destruction of planet Earth.
Just like Cousin Dick, after being warned of the consequences the movie's
Central Commander Old (Michael) Ironside(s) himself urges John Connor to "stay
the course" and attack, adding that the possible fate of death for one Kyle Reese
was -- well -- que sera sera.
Not undaunted however, John Connor's Mr. Bale has none of it on the big screen:
"They want us to attack like the machines. If we become like them
then what will be the point of winning?", barks Mr. Bale over the
airwaves to his fellow Resistance members, in the most menacing fashion
imaginable. Once again, this is in the year 2018.
President Obama took a much calmer tone back on May 21, 2009 but John Connor's
2018 ideas were right in line with the 44th President's.
"I do know with certainty that we can defeat Al Qaeda," said the American
president that day. "Because the terrorists can only succeed if they swell
their ranks and alienate America from our allies, and they will never be able to
do that if we stay true to who we are, if we forge tough and durable approaches
to fighting terrorism that are anchored in our timeless ideals. This must
be our common purpose."
The future isn't safe. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
(That includes McC, McG, the vacationing McD, E and F -- and Shane Hurlbut, too.)
Copyright The Popcorn Reel. PopcornReel.com. 2009. All Rights
Reserved.
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