(mildly off-topic) Terminator Salvation (if Wolfe did it) Very minor spoilers

James Wynn · 26 May 2009, 15:04 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 10:04:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) (mildly off-topic) Terminator Salvation (if Wolfe did
	it) Very minor spoilers
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***This contains very minor spoilers that you probably no about unless you 
have avoided all the trailers***

I saw Terminator Salvation this weekend and I liked it with the exception of 
about 3 minutes of political commentary that was about as subtle as 
"America! F*** Yeah!" (except this was "GWB! F*** You!").
However, I was dissatisfied with what little opportunity the 
writers/director made of the human/terminator hybrid. If Wolfe had told this 
story, rather than having a merely "human-good/robot-bad" split personality, 
the merger between the human-mind and the Skynet programming would have 
become a new unforeseeable creature. Similarly, if Michael Crichton had 
written this story, he would have had a morality tale about attempting to 
use software to "ride herd" over a nearly chaotic system like the human mind 
without the software being compromised. On the other hand, if William Gibson 
had written this story, he would have had the hybrid become a new glorious 
evolutionary step for humanity.

I suppose that level of nuance is a lot to hope for from Terminator IV, but 
after 25 years of thinking about "What does it mean to be human?", it would 
have been nice for someone to actually think about that.

(Funniest line from the Terminator franchise was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 
Terminator II:
<soft tender voice>"Why do you cry?")

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