Hacker Cinema
Shocking Dark
Terminator 2
1989 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Bruno Mattei
In a polluted future Venice researchers work to improve the situation. One day, unknown forces start killing them. A team of soldiers and a couple of civilians is sent to investigate. Soon, they encounter strange murderous creatures.
5 positive1 negative4 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
To me fireworks are enjoyable because of the light, sound and smell experience, plus the slightly chaotic/unpredictable behaviour.
Drone shows are pretty but.. well, quickly becomes kind of predictable and dull. Like any CGI in movies these days, just never amazes me or gives any "wow"-feeling like it did when Terminator 2 came out.
If it came from a “LLM” prompt that is jail broken and in 5 or so years. Just say generate the movie Terminator 2
I used POV-Ray on my 486 back in early '92. It was the most long-running, compute-intensive operation I did on the machine. After running it 24 x 7 for a few weeks it began hanging during renders. I'd just reboot and go on. It wasn't a bother and I chalked it up to something I was doing wrong in my POV-Ray scenes.
My father purchased the machine for me as a Christmas gift in '91. This was, in part, to stop me from repeatedly trashing his business computer with my 'experiments'. ("What does this 'interrupt 13h' do? Let's see..."). When I told him what happened he assumed I'd damaged the machine leaving it on 24x7 for so many days. He offered to call the guy who'd built it for service. There wasn't much of a hurry, though.
He'd purchased the machine from a local "computer consultant" who handled the business PC and DOS accounting software. This was a guy who had a regular day job but did on-the-side evenings / weekend IT work.
Eventually the machine started hanging under interactive use. This made games difficult to play. It was particularly galling because I'd gotten this exciting shareware game, Wolfenstein 3D, and it would hang nearly every time I played it.
It got bad enough that I decided to take matters into my own hands. I called the consultant at his day job and badgered him with questions. I'm certain he didn't like this 14 y/o kid bothering him at work. At the time, though, I knew no bounds of politeness or appropriateness. There were games to play, BBSs to call, programs to write, and ray tracing to be done!
He knew I had basic mechanical inclination, some electronics knowledge, and rudimentary PC hardware skills. Eventually he suggested I pull the motherboard, put it on a solid surface, and press all the socketed chips into place. If nothing else I assume this was to get me to stop calling him. Armed with a task I pulled the PC apart.
At this point my father got home to find the 6 month old (and still under warranty) PC completely disassembled. He was not pleased. I appealed to the advice of the consultant who'd built the PC. My father sternly told me to stop what I was doing.
He called the consultant at home that evening to make sure my story was true. I think, by that point, my father's own mechanical inclination and drive to fix things himself overpowered his frustration at my having torn apart this expensive and still new-to-him PC.
My father put the board on his wooden workbench and pressed each of the chips individually with his thumb. A group of chips in one corner of the board made that characteristic "crunch" of an IC seating into a DIP socket. The he supervised me reinstalling motherboard and cards. To my delight the PC seemed to be stable again. Wolfenstein 3D didn't hang!
I fired up a render and left it run overnight. The next morning the PC was still chugging away in POV-Ray.
The consultant did me a solid by explaining to my father that leaving the PC on wasn't harmful. After the motherboard's trip to the workbench and the consultant's sign-off that I wasn't going to "burn out" the machine by running it days at a time I was back to writing batch files to create TGA files to string into FLI movies.
Eventually I learned enough about PCs to understand the loose chips nestled in the corner of the board were the L2 cache. The chips had simply "walked" out of their sockets thru thermal cycling.
I hung out at my father's office whenever I heard the consultant was coming. I loved to badger this guy with my computer enthusiasm-- showing him programs I'd written, asking questions, and otherwise distracting him from work. I'm sure I was a frustration to him, though for all I know he probably just billed my father for the time.
The next time the consultant came around he asked what I was doing that kept the machine running for so long. I tried to explain POV-Ray to him and had limited success. He kept getting hung-up when I talked about "cameras" and "lights". He thought I was talking about real physical articles. I had no way to show him the images I'd created. Even if I could have somehow accessed my home PC from the office the Hercules graphics on the accounting PC's amber monochrome monitor wouldn't have helped.
Eventually I explained I was trying to make computer animations. I called out "Terminator 2" and that seemed to connect (though I think it also enhanced the misunderstanding re: physical cameras).
Of course, my animations were not "Terminator 2". They were 15 FPS FLI files in 8-bit color at a 320x200 resolution. They were mostly renderings of groups of chrome spheres spinning and gyrating over variously textured checkerboard floors. Everyone who ever uses a raytracer is required to make these images.
I guess that's a very roundabout way of saying POV-Ray was fun and a formative part of the experience that got me where I am today.
> For political reasons, to avoid supporting DRM.
This is very much a practical reason as well, though this overlaps with "not available in a usable form". DRM is the reason I can't watch movies at the highest bitrates and resolutions on my device from Netflix or Amazon. It's the reason I can't trust that things I purchase will be available to me indefinitely. It's the reason I can't build a collection of media (e.g. with Kodi) that is playable on my TV with one click with a single unifying interface.
> The product is not offered for sale.
This extends to some other cases as well. For instance, where the only available version is a crappy remaster (Terminator 2), and the original is much superior. Or if you want to watch the film with a director's commentary.
There's also, very broadly, a 4th reason - convenience. This encompasses both ease of use (if I know what movie I want to watch, I don't have to search to see where it's streaming), and discoverability (a good torrent site will easily let you see all the movies by a director or actor, and provide recommendations). Or if you're looking for a particular special feature, it's much more convenient to be able to download it than to go looking for a physical media copy and wait for it to be shipped to your door.
1988 Die Hard http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016
1988 Red Heat https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095963/
1988 My Stepmother Is an Alien https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095687/
1988 Twins https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096320/
1989 Honey, I Shrunk the kids https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097523/
1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097576/
1989 Tango & Cash https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098439/
1990 Edward Scissorhands https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099487/
1990 Home Alone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099785/
1990 Pretty Woman https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/
1991 Terminator 2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
1991 Silence of the Lambs https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102926/
1991 The Last Boy Scout https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102266/
From the top of my mind that movie is "Terminator 2".
Runners-up: "Scent of a woman" and "The talented Mr. Ripley". Several Woody Allen movies are worth to revisit. "Deliverance" and "Pulp fiction" also.
The recent "Nobody" is a good twist on action, as well as "Hardcore Henry" is interesting. When the storyline takes unexpected turns, or uses clichés as bait and does not follow through on the cliché can be fresh. In general, a feature length film is too short to do many literary works justice, and serialization does a far better job relating a quality story. For example, Netflix's "Ozark" would not be called "action" in the feature film sense, but the intellectual violence in that show is far and above stupid gun/car/fist violence. Films like "The Congress", "Terminator 2", and "Tropic Thunder" represent the best the Hollywood feature film system can produce.
"I love the movies, love ‘em. Now, I’m watching Terminator 2 the other day, and I’m thinking to myself: They cannot top the stunts in this film, they cannot top this shit, unless … they start using terminally ill people as stunt people in feature films … well, hear me out, ’cause I know to a lot of you this may seem a little cruel. “Aww, Bill, terminally ill stunt people? That’s cruel!” You know what I think’s cruel? Leaving your loved ones to die in a hospital room surrounded by strangers. Fuck that! Put ‘em in the movies! What, you wanna let your grandmother live out her last days in a sterile hospital room, with translucent skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet… Chuck Norris?
Hey, how come you dressed my grandmother up as a mugger? Shut up and get off the set. Action! Push her towards Chuck! (Karate noises) Wow, he kicked her head right off her body! Did you see that? Did you see my Grammy? She's out of her misery, you've seen the greatest film of all time!"
- bill hicks
I know. The "seven basic plots" idea works, but only if you completely ignore the subtly and nuance of story-telling that authors have used most of the time. The point I was making was that you can't just boil every movie since Terminator 2 down to a rehash of what's come before. If the poster I was replying to is going to be over-simplify film plots then you also have to accept we can over-simplify book plots to get to the same point.
This actually supports my theory that the 90s were the greatest decade in popular culture history. It jibes so well with the (arguable) Golden Age of Rap/Hip-Hop music as well as the Seattle Grunge and Hard Rock renaissance.
Rap in the 90s had Biggie, Tupac, Wu-Tang, NWA, Nas, Outkast, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and a Tribe Called Quest.
Rock in the 90s had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Weezer, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.
It also had some of the greatest movies of all time in the 90s as well: Goodfellas, Terminator 2, Trainspotting, Fight Club, the Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Schindler's List, Rushmore, and Pulp Fiction.
Now, I may be looking through with rose-tinted glasses (and having my adolescence back then, how could I not?), but let's just make it official, and not only with just cartoons. It's almost empirical that the 90s were the greatest decade of American Popular Culture.