Mother’s Note: my son, the Little Man, has been homeschooled since July. At the age of 15, he’s quite autonomous, and we have been working together on his curriculum to fulfill requirements and motivate him to learn. One of the things we have gone round and round with is writing essays. I maintain they are good practice for learning to write well. He maintains they are boring and unnecessary. However, we finally met on a middle ground: reviewing movies he was discovering. Not new ones, no. Ones that he considers *coff* classics. So this is the first of those essays, which was also incentivized (as he mentions near the end) by the promise of getting to do it again with the Alien franchise.
Terminator Series
by the Little Man
As a teen in the 21st century I have never been interested in movies from the 20th century, well, until recently. As a non-horror fan I have had respect for the genre, movies that were made to scare people that bring in more money than I will ever have in my hand at any time. But as I said, I never liked horror, it’s not my thing, but some “horror” movies are more action than horror, that’s my thing. Terminator, RoboCop, and Aliens in a way, to name a few. But, as I’m watching Fact Fiend, or Dead Meat on youtube, I’m finding a love for these movies.
It started with RoboCop: an amazing soundtrack, a fun story to look into the lore of, and a good amount of action. After bugging my mother to buy the first one I started to watch more videos that got me into Robocop. (This is just one of the videos I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ANqPdMKAuE) But like most things I got distracted and left, then when browsing youtube I saw something I was not expecting: free movies, most were bad/ or I’ve never hear of them, but one that I saw was Terminator; turns out I took too long to write this and Terminator is no longer free on youtube. After kinda watching it, kinda talking to people on discord, I have to agree it is quite a good movie. And knowing some background too, it makes dissecting it fun. Like, did you know, when filming the opening scenes they drove around without a filming permit to find alleys with those lights that emit that unnatural blue light.
Now I normally would leave for a bit before watching the sequel, but Dark Fate is free on prime video, so I spent 3 dollars in prime video to rent Terminator 2 Judgement day, which is even better than the first. Now before I go and talk about what I think about the first 2erminators, I must just say that the 3rd Terminator, Dark fate, is bad. Bad logic, bad cgi, bad writing. The only thing that comes close to that in the first 2 terminators is the fact of naked teleporting, “only living things can go through” I believe was the quote, using that logic a skin sack would be the only part of the T-800 that would come through as the endoskeleton is metal, and plastics would also be left behind. But other than that Dark fate is leagues behind both terminators.
All I can say about the 2 first terminators is they are truly a classic duo. And anything I can say will undersell them. And the only reason I’m continuing to write is to get Aliens as a “school” project, I have to hit 500 words, so https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2IYWWifoIht9T47z1Z5lJw this is the other channel I was talking about they have Kill counts here: they take horror movies and break them down counting all the deaths I just binged the Friday the 13th series they have.
Comments
6 responses to “As a Teen in the 21st Century”
Essays are good practice for organizing your thoughts and presenting solid arguments. Not bad for a first shot. But the audience is seeing that the author has preferences but not quite why (except for Dark Fate). This is actually the nucleus for a couple essays in which the author could develop arguments for why T1 and T3 are good and/or point to really good scenes. Just sayin and grinning. But now we start to realize how good essays develop research skills.
Good first essay! Is he going to do different types of essays as well? (How-to, informative, convincing, and so on?)
Here’s a seed point: T2 sucks. Change my mind!
And indeed a pretty good first effort.
You are incorrect. T2 is awesome. Your opinion is invalid.
Picture at the top: Robo Rally. I liked this for quite a while, but couldn’t get the rest of the family to play it.
“Koi” scratches the same programming itch, and is more wife-friendly. Meaning she actually looks forward to playing it.
Essays: Beginning at 15? Wow, how things have changed. We had to write weekly book reviews in 6th grade. Plus we had to give a summary speech to the class, with props (show & tell), once a month. We all hated it, but it payed huge dividends. That was after the week-long class on how to understand the propaganda techniques used in advertisements. (The older I get, the more I appreciate just how outstanding my public school education was.)
Oh, he’s had to do them before. And he hates them, as a result. I am working toward getting him passionate about writing, because one of his career goals is historian.