Arnold Schwarzenegger
The Running Man
Los Angeles 2017: Prisoners have talent agents, people are manipulated with deepfakes every day, and you can fight for your freedom on a nationally televised game show hosted by Richard Dawson. This is the world of The Running Man, our first entry in Schwarzenegger September. This movie was very forward thinking, and not only because it stars two future governors. We are going to explain how this movie lead to The Internet of Things, and how it predicted the out of control world of reality TV. Finally, we will show you how to take over your own television station.
Predator
When Arnold and his elite paramilitary group are brought in on a rescue mission in Central America, they thought the most dangerous part would be the heavily armed guerillas. Little did they know that a technologically advanced alien had come to Earth to hunt. In this episode, we discuss all the cool gadgets The Predator has, including a cloaking device, a triangulating targeting system, a shoulder mounted plasma gun, and a compact medical satchel, complete with a cauterizing chemical for bullet wounds.
Terminator: Dark Fate
The T800, the unstoppable killing machine from the Terminator franchise is probably Arnold’s most iconic role. In the most recent sequel Dark Fate, a T800 is sent to kill John Conner and succeeds. After the mission is complete, he live a normal life with a family, completely fitting in to human society as a drapery cleaner. On top of that, we have an augmented human who can push her body to superhuman limits, and a new robot that can split itself into two distinct entities. It is a very interesting installment.
Total Recall
In the future, it is possible to have memories implanted in your head so you believe you went vacationing on another planet. This is what happens to Arnold, which opens up a whole adventure. This movie is really about two major scientific phenomena: Implanting memories over memories, and traveling to Mars. These seemingly unrelated occurrences are intertwined in a strange way, which is what makes this movie so fun. In this episode, we discuss both memories and interplanetary travel, as well as creating an atmosphere on Mars, animatronic masks, giant x-ray machines, digital fingernails and of course ancient alien technology.
Last Action Hero
Last Action Hero is one of Schwarzenegger’s most unusual movies because it plays with the physical conventions of three distinct worlds. First, we have the our world which operates under conventional Newtonian physics. Then we have the movie world where the main character Danny lives, which follows movie physics, and then we have the cartoonish physics of the movie within a movie where Schwarzenegger’s character Jack Slater is an unstoppable, unflappable action hero. This week, we compare and contrast these three levels of reality and analyze how we can travel back and forth between each world.