Pumping Iron (George Butler, Robert Fiore, 1977)

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Matty Ferrigno, Victoria Ferrigno, Mike Katz, Franco Columbu, Ed Corney, Ken Waller, Serge Nubret. Screenplay: George Butler, Robert Fiore. Cinematography: Robert Fiore. Film editing: Geof Bartz, Larence Silk. Music: Michael Small.

The semi-documentary Pumping Iron is often credited as the movie that made an unlikely star (not to mention California governor) out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. But if anything, the film shows that Schwarzenegger possessed the kind of ambition and drive and intelligence that might have propelled his career anyway. The film gets its narrative drive from competition, first between the aspiring bodybuilder Mike Katz and the more experienced Ken Waller, and then repeating that motif with relative newcomer Lou Ferrigno taking on Schwarzenegger at the Mr. Olympia contest. There’s a good deal of wit in the characterization of the men, as well as a good deal of fictionalizing – for example, in the film it’s implied that Waller wins because he steals Katz’s “lucky” T-shirt,  when in fact it was only a prank that didn’t really annoy Katz that much. Schwarzenegger finds similar ways to needle Ferrigno. Pumping Iron is also credited with having propelled physical fitness into a national phenomenon and turning a struggling Venice Beach, Calif., gym into the franchised Gold’s Gym International, Inc, with almost 700 locations around the world. It legitimized competitive bodybuilding as a sport – or almost: There are still those who find the oiled, hairless bodies displaying slabs and blobs of muscle masses in strained and contorted poses ludicrous, and who find the sport graceless in comparison with others that display bodies in motion, like running, swimming, diving, or gymnastics. But even Pumping Iron hints at this gracelessness with an opening scene in which a ballet instructor tries to help Schwarzenegger and other bodybuilders refine their poses. 

 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, Earl Boen, S. Epatha Merkerson, Castulo Guerra, Jenette Goldstein, Xander Berkeley, Danny Cooksey. Screenplay: James Cameron, William Wisher. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Conrad Buff IV, Mark Goldblatt, Richard A. Harris. Music: Brad Fiedel.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a complex system that would use satellites to detect the launch of nuclear missiles and then destroy them in mid-flight with automatically launched anti-ballistic missiles. Critics of SDI called it unrealistic, fanciful, and ultimately destablizing for international peace. It became known by a nickname familiar from the movies: "star wars." The following year, James Cameron released a film called The Terminator in which a cyborg arrived from the future to make sure that a potential leader of a rebellion against his fellow cyborgs and other creatures of artificial intelligence never gets born. It wasn't immediately clear to most people at the time that Cameron's film contained a sly reference to what many people feared might be a consequence of Reagan's SDI: out-of-control automated weaponry. By 1991, when Cameron released the sequel to that film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that reference had become explicit: The "Skynet" of the sequel is clearly a fantasized version of SDI, in which the AI creations began a war against humans with a nuclear strike that killed three billion people in 1997. Today, that historical subtext is probably lost on most viewers of the movie, as Reagan's "star wars" has faded from memory, except in some think tanks and Pentagon brainstorming sessions. But to those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the reference in the movie was more than just subtext. There are some actual digs at supporters of SDI in the film, as when Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist behind Skynet, attempts to defend technological research and John Connor (Edward Furlong) retorts that the kind of research that proceeds without considering the consequences produced the hydrogen bomb. One of the most ardent proponents of SDI, who sold Reagan on the idea, was Edward Teller, the physicist who became known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," a title he never fully rejected. But even without the historical underpinnings, Terminator 2 is a kind of landmark in popular entertainment: an exciting concoction of violence and special effects, with old-fashioned touches of humanity and wit that lots of today's CGI blockbusters no longer find necessary. Cameron never seems content just to dazzle us but to make us think and feel. If there's too much feeling in his Titanic (1997) and not enough thought in Avatar (2009), there's the right amount of both in Terminator 2.  

The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Rearden, Bill Paxton, and Brian Thompson in The Terminator

The Terminator: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sarah Connor: Linda Hamilton
Kyle Reese: Michael Biehn
Lt. Ed Traxler: Paul Winfield
Detective Hal Vukovich: Lance Henriksen
Ginger Ventura: Bess Motta
Matt Buchanan: Rick Rossovich
Dr. Peter Silberman: Earl Boen
Pawn Shop Clerk: Dick Miller

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd
Cinematography: Adam Greenberg
Art direction: George Costello, Maria Caso
Film editing: Mark Goldblatt
Music: Brad Fiedel

Watching The Terminator a week after the school shootings in Parkland, Florida, is a different experience than it might have been, especially when the Terminator goes into a pawnshop to get his weaponry and is told by the owner, "There's a 15-day wait on the handguns, but the rifles you can take right now." Still, although the movie's promiscuous mayhem may feel a bit off at the moment, it serves its purpose. The Terminator is a film of ideas about humanity and artificial intelligence, about machismo and law and order and survival -- maybe not as much as it's a film about things blowing up, but still enough that many of us can watch it and not feel the deadening effect that some action films produce. It's also a movie whose old-fashioned special effects like stop-motion puppetry feel oddly fresh and real when contrasted with the slick computer-generated effects of most sci-fi films now -- including most of director James Cameron's later work. The performances are good, the pacing is right, there's just enough humor in the dialogue, and even the time-travel gimmickry manages to make enough sense to be plausible within the confines of its fable.