Analog SFF, September 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines

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Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE ALTERNATE VIEW GOES TO THE MOVIES

by Jeffery D. Kooistra

I watched the movie True Lies the other night. It's a wonderful action-adventure comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, directed by James Cameron. I saw it the first time when it came out in the ‘90s. For a movie buff like me, it's entertaining in its own right to reflect on the biographies of the actors. This was Arnold after his first two successes in Terminator movies, but well before his time serving as “the Governator” of California. Jamie Lee Curtis has one of the solidest Hollywood pedigrees out there, being the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and it shows both in her acting and her exceptional beauty.

Schwarzenegger of course has appeared in a many SF related movies. In addition to the Terminator franchise, he starred in Predator, The Running Man, and Total Recall (based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). Even True Lies is on the borderline between straight action-adventure and science fiction. Jamie Lee Curtis is better known for her horror movies (that is, among her genre credits) than for her SF outings, although she was in the movie Forever Young with Mel Gibson, which was a pleasant SF love story. With The Terminator, The Abyss, Aliens, and Avatar, James Cameron is as recognized in the realm of science fiction cinema as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But the reason I wanted to watch True Lies that night was because I had just finished reading In The Arena, the autobiography of Charlton Heston (ISBN 0-684-80394-1), and Heston has a small but vital role in the film that no other actor could fill.

If you're unfamiliar with True Lies, here's a bit of background. Schwarzenegger plays a secret agent for a CIA-like agency. His cover is that of a computer company sales executive. Even his dear and long suffering wife Jamie Lee and his daughter (played by a young Eliza Dushku, well known for her later work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other somewhat-SF TV series) have no idea what hubby does when he goes off to work. At home Arnold is a tedious nerd, with (apparently) no life apart from his job, which he (apparently) really loves. I won't go any deeper into the plot, but for Arnold to portray this character in this kind of film, he can't be the kind of loose cannon, action hero, Terminatoresque sort of guy we have all come to know from most of his other movies. For one thing, such a man could never convincingly be boring and uninteresting at home; he wouldn't even have that kind of cover, let alone be able to hide his job from his friends and family.

For director Cameron to maintain the essential “suspension of disbelief” and keep his film from becoming just another silly special effects spectacular, he needed an anchor to hold the whole shebang in reality. Going

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