Archive
TRUE LIES – Brad Fiedel
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the best and most enjoyable action-comedies of the 1990s was True Lies. A remake of the 1991 French film ‘La Totale’ by Claude Zidi, it was written and directed by James Cameron in what was his first theatrical movie since Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991. The movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Harry Tasker, a seemingly ordinary computer salesman who is actually a secret agent working for a covert U.S. government organization called Omega Sector. His wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) is unaware of his true occupation, but feels bored and unfulfilled in their marriage, longing for some excitement in her life. Harry’s double life starts to unravel when he begins to suspect that Helen might be having an affair with a used car salesman named Simon (Bill Paxton), who pretends to be a secret agent to seduce women. Harry’s jealousy leads him to use Omega Sector resources to investigate Helen, eventually pulling her into his world of espionage and action. The situation becomes even more complicated when a group of terrorists called the Crimson Jihad, led by the ruthless Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik), threatens national security with a stolen nuclear warhead. Read more…
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY – Brad Fiedel
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
James Cameron’s sci-fi masterpiece The Terminator became something of a cult classic following its release in 1984. It made a movie star out of its leading actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and left fans desperate to know more about this world of unstoppable time-travelling killer robots and their human interactions, to the extent that a sequel was inevitable. Terminator 2: Judgement Day picks up the story several years later, but things have not turned out well for the original film’s protagonist, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who is now incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, where doctors refuse to believe her apocalyptic predictions. Her teenage son John (Edward Furlong) is delinquent on the streets of Los Angeles, bouncing around between foster homes, while the tech company Cyberdyne is secretly continuing tests on the remains of the original Terminator from the first film. Things go from bad to worse for Sarah when a massively upgraded liquid metal terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), is sent back in time from the future to finish the job the original robot could not, and kill John; the T-1000 is a technological marvel that can shape-shift, repair its own wounds, and convincingly blend in with humans. In response, the leaders of the human resistance send back a T-101 Terminator (Schwarzenegger), physically identical to the original film’s unstoppable killer, but this time re-programmed to protect John from harm. Read more…
THE TERMINATOR – Brad Fiedel
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Terminator is one of the most acclaimed and important science fiction action movies ever made. Written and directed by James Cameron – then a fresh-faced 29-year-old making his mainstream debut after spending his apprenticeship working with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures – it took inspiration from the classic genre writings of people like Harland Ellison, and told the story of a young woman named Sarah Connor, who when the film begins is living a mundane life in suburban America in 1984. Connor’s world is turned upside down when a Terminator, an unstoppable human/robot cyborg assassin, is sent back in time from the year 2029 to murder her. She is saved by Kyle Reese, who explains that he was also sent back in time on the orders of John Connor, the leader of a group of resistance fighters on the brink of victory against the machine army that took over the world following a nuclear holocaust, and who is Sarah’s future son. The Terminator’s mission is to kill Sarah before John is born; Kyle’s mission is to protect her. The film was a massive success at the box office, reaping in almost $80 million from its paltry $6.5 million budget, and made stars of its young cast, which included Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose career was subsequently launched into the cinematic stratosphere. Read more…
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