I saw Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines this evening.

If the story had been told as a standalone, out of the shadow of the two James Cameron films, it’d be seen as a decent enough science fiction film, but nothing special. Trouble is, in our timeline T3 follows two ground-breaking, hugely popular films which established Arnie as an icon and set a dauntingly high standard for director Jonathan Mostow to follow. That said, T3 is by no means an Alien 3. David Fincher’s film managed to squander pretty much all the goodwill built up by its predecessors by trying to approach the basic situation in a very different way and fumbling it, whereas T3 is a disappointment because it falls right into the groove established by the previous films and does it all again, only with less originality on display for the most part. In fairness, I have to give credit for T3’s climax, which is quite different in tone to that of the earlier films and a highly effective way to wrap up the story. Trouble is, the rest of T3 is a retread of what came before: vehicular carnage, bullets flying thick and fast, and Arnie taking on a cleverer, faster, more adaptable terminator. There are a few neat in-jokes, from a reappearance of a minor character from the first two films to Arnie’s never-ending search for a suitable pair of sunglasses, but these are balanced by several laboured attempts at echoing lines from the earlier films. Arnie announcing that “She’s back” when the terminatrix shows up one more time just isn’t that funny, even in context.

One striking change from the earlier films is that this time round almost all the action takes place in daylight. Somehow I can’t help feeling that the biggest, baddest sequences in the Terminator films should happen at night. Probably a more important contrast with the earlier films is that this time round I didn’t feel that the plot was propelling me towards a huge climax. It was, of course - let’s face it, the approach of a nuclear apocalypse is a big enough ending for any film - but it didn’t feel like it at the time. For the most part the plot felt like nothing more than a sequence of chase scenes stitched together, with just the location changing.

I haven’t talked about the acting, because there’s not much to say. We all know what Arnie playing the Terminator is all about. Nick Stahl fails completely to make us believe that John Connor has supposedly had led a really shitty, lonely existence over the last decade, having lost his mother to leukemia and grown up on the run, waiting to see whether Judgement Day would happen. Claire Danes is playing a character whose main role is to run from Point A to Point B and duck when the bullets start flying, while occasionally stopping to break down in tears or look confused at all these warrior robots from the future and tales of an impending apocalypse. She did OK, and that’s about as much as you could expect with the part as written. Kristanna Loken looks suitably determined and sexy as the Terminatrix, but she’s not half as scary as Robert Patrick’s T-1000 from T2.

All in all, T3 is destined to go down in history as a thoroughly unloved, unnecessary sequel. Like Arnie’s T-800, the Terminator franchise has been superseded by faster, sexier and more versatile models. Time for the series to self-terminate.

If you’re a novelist and you mention a piece of software by name in one of your stories, you’d better make sure you get the details absolutely right. The tremendously well-informed - not to say, slightly scary - denizens of Planet PDF are watching you.

[Via Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent]

Why didn’t someone tell me how useful LaunchBar was? I read about it when it was first released and thought it was just a fancy way to launch applications, but just a single evening playing with it has made it clear to me that I’ve been a fool. A fool, I tell you!

LaunchBar is a beautifully simple tool for finding stuff on your hard disk without having to plough through any number of hierarchies of folders. If all LaunchBar did was search for files I’d have rated it as moderately useful but nothing I need badly enough to pay for. What makes LaunchBar seriously handy is that it can also find email addresses and bookmarks, and makes launching them just as easy as opening files. I may never have to click on a bookmark again.

Three excerpts from a Washington Post article about the tactics adopted by US forces in trying to quell resistance in “post-war” Iraq:

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

[…]

“I figure you can either sit barricaded in your base camp or take the fight to the enemy,” said Lt. Col. Larry “Pepper” Jackson, commander of an Army outpost on the outskirts of Bayji, which is still described as hostile by U.S. military intelligence analysts. “Our key to success is staying on the offense. But you don’t do it recklessly, because then you’d lose the people.”

[…]

After the fighting is over, U.S. military officials say, it becomes important to repair the damage — a door smashed, a wall breached, an irrigation culvert flattened by a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. Every U.S. brigade commander in Iraq has a “Commander’s Emergency Repair Fund” of $200,000 that is replenished as he spends it. Over the past six weeks of the U.S. offensive, commanders across Iraq dispensed $13 million to rebuild schools, clinics, water treatment plans and police stations, said Army Col. David MacEwen, who helps coordinate the civic works.

One of these quotes is not like the others. Isn’t taking hostages one of those things the “bad men” do?

To preempt the obvious response, no I don’t suppose that anything unpleasant would have befallen the family of the Iraqi officer hadn’t turned himself in. Which still doesn’t make hostage-taking right. (And calling it an “intelligence operation” instead of a “war” doesn’t excuse adopting tactics which, had they been adopted by the other side, would have been roundly condemned.)

[Via MetaFilter]

London’s ladybirds are sluts. Who knew?

Plastic Balls is a thoroughly addictive Flash game. I don’t have the hand-eye coordination or reflexes to be really good at it, but I can easily see myself wasting the remainder of the evening trying.

[Via Off On A Tangent]

Blair2004.com: Tony Blair for President!

I’m pretty sure several million Labour voters (not to mention Gordon Brown) would heartily endorse the nomination, if that’s what it takes to get him out of No 10.

The Guardian sent Alexis Petridis in search of Kraftwerk at work in Düsseldorf. He didn’t find them, but the resulting article is all the better for it.

Why go looking for Kraftwerk? Well, there’s their enormous influence on just about every genre of popular music created since the late 1970s. And then there are the other reasons:

In addition to their artistic importance, there’s certainly plenty to talk about. In lieu of actual publicity, bizarre rumours about Kraftwerk began to abound during the 80s. Ralf Hütter was said to have suffered a minor heart attack, not due to stress - in fairness, overwork was hardly likely to be a factor - but as a result of obsessively drinking coffee. There were also allegations of a kind of cultural Stalinism: after Bartos and fellow percussionist Wolfgang Flür left the band, not only were their names removed from some covers, but their faces were removed as well. Less troublingly, someone once solemnly swore to me that the Düsseldorf accent in which Kraftwerk sing was a Teutonic equivalent of the Brummie drawl, which would certainly add a whole new layer of humour to their deadpan lyrics: “Oi prowgramme me howme compewter, bring meself into the fewcher” etc.

I know it’s childish of me, but I’d really like to hear a Brummie cover version of Autobahn.

An exhibition has opened in the UK commemorating the measurement of The Great Arc of India. The survey, which involved moving vast amounts of equipment across all sorts of terrain and making fantastically accurate measurements along the way, took some forty years to complete. The end result provided a spine for the mapping of the entire subcontinent, as well as contributing vital data which helped establish the precise shape of the planet.

If, like me, you’ve never heard of the Great Arc of India, you’ve almost certainly heard of one of its’ consequences. Following a subsequent survey of the Himalayas, which was made possible by the Great Arc survey itself, the world’s tallest mountain was named after one of the Great Arc survey’s leaders.

There’s a book by John Keay, published a couple of years ago and available in paperback, which tells the story of the survey. This review makes it sound worth a read, so that’s yet another addition to my Amazon wishlist. And I’m going to seriously consider a trip to Birmingham to catch the touring version of the exhibition in September.

[Via MetaFilter]

WARNING: Do not click on this link if you have a headache, are suffering from a hangover, or are otherwise prone to nausea.

I had no idea that Homicide: Life on the Street veteran Clark Johnson is directing the big-screen adaptation of 70s TV series S.W.A.T.. This profile of Johnson paints a picture of an actor who’s been forced to move behind the camera by a lack of career opportunities. I knew he’d done a certain amount of direction on TV, but I didn’t know he’d moved into feature work, and I hadn’t realised just how busy he’d been since Homicide ended.

Judging by the list of high-quality TV series Johnson has directed - The West Wing, NYPD Blue, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Third Watch, The Wire and The Shield - there’s reason to hope that he’ll make S.W.A.T. something more than a routine action movie.

[Via Windowseat Weblog]

Mark Twain might just be the most quotable writer in the English language:

On Halley’s Comet: I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

On blindness: Blindness is an exciting business, I tell you; if you don’t believe it get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door.

On Onanism: Of all the kinds of sexual intercourse, this has least to recommend it. As an amusement it is too fleeting, as an occupation it is to wearing; as a public exhibition there is no money in it. It has, in our last day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence - among the best bred these two arts are now indulged only in private - though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo upon the fundamental sigh.

[Via MetaFilter]

In the current edition of The Atlantic Sarah Cohen interviews Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded. Judging by Cohen’s introductory comments, Winchester’s book is a lot more than an account of a geological catastrophe:

The result is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded - a work that weaves natural, cultural, and political elements of the volcano’s story into a multifaceted whole. Winchester recounts the development of plate tectonics and modern geology through the stories of scientists who explored the world’s remote corners and found evidence for the controversial idea that the continents move around on the surface of the earth, causing earthquakes, volcanoes, and other disturbances where the landmasses push together or pull apart. He also evokes the Dutch colonial culture on Java, chronicling such idiosyncrasies as a fad for refrigerated meat imported from Australia, and such intriguing details as the story of a popular circus elephant whose skittishness just before the eruption may have been caused by an awareness of the tectonic activity underfoot. And he describes the scientific inquiry into the eruption that was enthusiastically undertaken by Britain’s Royal Society of scientists, and by eager Victorians who observed and recorded changes in atmospheric pressure using amateur meteorological instruments. Throughout the book Winchester makes the case that the eruption of Krakatoa was much more than a dramatic disaster on a remote island; it also became a cultural touchstone and was reported on around the world, including in The Atlantic Monthly.

At one point Winchester quotes an aphorism which sounds to me very much like something Arthur C Clarke might have written:

I love the aphorism from Will Durant, which I quoted in the book, that “man exists on earth subject to geological consent, which can be withdrawn at any time.” I think that is a sort of guiding mantra for the book. When the earth flexes its muscles and reminds us how puny and insignificant we are, then to me, as a former geologist (not a very good geologist, but nonetheless as someone who knows and adores the science), that is not just awesome but it has a sort of beauty to it, no matter how destructive the event might be.

The paperback is out in the UK next month; yet another entry for my wish-list.

[Entry edited to amend name of author. JR 21 August 2003]

Switch Linux is a very nice parody of the Apple ’switch’ ads.

[Via User Friendly Link of the Day for 25 July 2003]