The Terminator Paradox

So when you think of hidden messages in The Terminator, the main thing you think of is the threat of Artificial Intelligence becoming fully sentient, and the belief that it may take humanity's fate into its own hands. But one thing that I found interesting was the underlying presentation of the classic time travel paradox.

Just in case you don't know, the time travel paradox that I'm talking about is the belief that time travel should never really change anything. The reasoning for this is that if something has been changed in the past, you should be already living in that reality. In the story in The Terminator, Sarah meets Reese, who had traveled back in time to protect her from the T-101. Reese tells Sarah that she will give birth to a hero that will defeat the machines that aim for human extinction. Of course Sarah gets curious of who the dad will be, and Reese tells her that John (her future son) never knew him, that he died before the war. Long story short, Reese and Sarah end up hooking up, but Reese dies as Sarah finally kills the Terminator. This fulfills the timeline Reese told Sarah about, therefore keeping the timeline constant.

Now this is subtle, and there isn't really any cultural issue presented here, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Since the Terminator franchise as a whole takes place in more than a couple different timelines, it's interesting to see that the original creator envisioned the story in one loop.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Robot

The Terminator is a classic in the science fiction genre, known for its brutal human versus robot combat, extremely humanoid antagonists, and of course the infamous "I'll be back" line. Now I wanted to know what inspired the desing of the first terminator. I wanted to know why the creator of this movie wanted him to look exactly like a human.

My interest in this piqued when I remembered the discussion on how C3-P0 from Star Wars was designed somewhat after the robot from Metropolis. Was he designed to go along with the plot? Was he modeled after some earlier android? I decided to do some research.

It turns out that the decision to make the terminator look like a human was purely so that the plot would make sense. The man who wrote the original screenplay for the movie said that his main inspirations were a couple of episodes from a science fiction show from the 1960's, neither of which had robots in them. I couldn't really find anything about inspiration for the terminator itself, and it seems like he was made to look human in accordance with the story line, where the terminators need to appear like just another human so that they can blend in when going after targets in the past. Anyway, sorry for the anticlimactic ending.

Giant Japanese Robots

As we did an independent study about the influence of various famous science fiction works for our project a while back , I thought it would be interesting to delve into the inspiration for one of the best science fiction movies to come out fairly recently. This movie has enough action for even the most hardcore adrenaline junkie, explosions galore, and most importantly, tons of giant robots. Yep, you guessed it, it's Pacific Rim.

You may have gathered that I'm being sarcastic when I call Pacific Rim one of the best movies to come out in the science fiction genre lately. Although the movie scored an astounding 7/10 on IMDb, it came under harsh criticism for having no plot, and just a stereotypical and underdeveloped story line. I wanted to know what great works were used as inspiration for this $190 million money pit, I was not expecting what I found. I was expecting Godzilla and other monster movies of the sort to be in the mix, but it turns out that the plot was almost a complete ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series from 1995-96. This brought up an extremely philosophical question rarely dared to be addressed by humans: can anime be science fiction?

As crazy as this sounds, I think it can. I mean, Evangelion is about aliens fighting giant robots, which sounds pretty science fiction-esque to me. It also has strong religious references and mixes them in pretty heavily with the aliens and robots. Now I don't know how you can classify this as anything but Science Fiction, so it is in my book. This perfectly illustrated to me just how broad of a genre scifi is.

Vietnam, But in Space

I really found it interesting how clear of an analogy to the Vietnam War Star Trek was making in "A Private Little War". Given the ban, basically, on political topics that was enforced in pop culture, this was a pretty risky parallel to draw. I also was drawn into the reasoning behind Kirk arming the peaceful villagers. 

I'm a huge military history fan, but Vietnam is one war I have never really looked into the reasoning behind. When Spock justified arming the villagers just to even out the technology that was being given by the Klingons, it got me thinking. Now this means the Star Trek creators thought we were only arming the South Vietnamese because the Communists were arming the North. The itch to go fight back was furthered by our already in place hatred for Communism. The authors clearly thought that we were arming them to get even with the weapons given by the Communists. The thing is, our weapon aid evolved into us dumping masses of soldiers to go die fighting in Vietnam. It makes me wonder where the authors would have gone if they had to expand on this episode. 

The Human Popsicle

In Philip K. Dick's story, "The Frozen Journey", a man is awakened during a ten year journey, only to find he cannot do anything but swim in his own subdued memories. Now this would be torture to me. When I look back on things, I always end up nitpicking every little detail, and constantly reliving the parts I messed up. Combine that with an attention span that's practically nonexistent, and it would make one hell of a time for me.
Back to the nitpicking thing though. I feel like that's something that everybody does to some extent. We have such a desire to fix the things that we did wrong, that we end up trying to make amends somehow through constantly replaying it in our heads. I think the amount we end up doing this gives some insight into our psyche. It shows how much even extremely small mistakes can bother us. I also think it can show how much we care about people. You'll probably end up remembering saying something stupid to a crush in 8th grade more clearly than saying something dumb to a stranger a few days ago.
I think that no matter how much we care about things that happen in the past though, we'd all end up corrupting our memories in some way

Doubting Clarke

    One of the creators of "2001: A Space Odyssey" didn't really have faith in the intelligence of the audience. I found it very interesting in how different the level of explanation differed between the novel and the movie. Kubrick went very light on explanation in the film, but Clarke explained a lot more in his novel, which he released as the film was being produced.

    Now I think this shows a great rift in the trust the 2 creators had in their audience's intelligence. It seems as though Kubrick was very confident in the way he showed the story, and that he thought he had provided enough detail to at least give the audience a clue of what was going on. Clarke on the other hand believed many things needed to be explained or the audience would not be able to pick up on what was going on.

    The film was not received well at all, as droves of people walked out confused, and angered that they had just wasted their money. I think this along the fact that I had no idea what was going on prove that Clarke was right in doubting us.

Mars Invaders

    In The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, a pretty blatant and interesting allusion is made. In the story when the humans send their expedition to Mars, chicken pox wreaks havoc. Almost all Martians are killed by this new disease, causing an inadvertent genocide. An entire culture wiped out, with no warning and nothing done wrong.

    Now doesn't this sound familiar, one group finding a native people, wreaking havoc on them with disease, and forcing out the natives who would not work with them. This is pretty close to the story of the Native Americans. The European explorers found the Native Americans, wiped out mass amounts of them with western diseases, and drove out the ones who wouldn't give up their culture and land to the explorers. 

    My theory is that Bradbury put did this as a warning, to discourage us from overextending in our explanation. To tell us to stay in our domain, lest we cause even more damage to other cultures.

 

So in class a while back we read a small excerpt from the work "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", and I found something very interesting. The submarine in the story is powered completely by electricity, which was just an extension of the technology that existed at the time. It was very surprising to me that the technology in the story was not anything that seemed insanely far out, but rather, a furthered version of the technology that was already being used.
    This led me to look at stories over time, and I found that there are a broad range of stories that focus on extensions of the technology we have already, either fearing or fantasizing it. Prime examples of this are things like "Terminator", "1984", and even "Metropolis" to an extent. I think this shows how whether positively or negatively, we are always dreaming of advancement subconsciously.
    Until next time - Aaron.