“I’ll be back.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line from the iconic
thriller, The Terminator. The movie was directed by another icon, James
Cameron. The Terminator had all the essential ingredients: good acting,
action packed, clever concept, but… it didn’t make sense. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie. It remains one of my favorites. However, when I left the theater after seeing
it for the first time, I wondered about one minor inconsistency. Well, it was a major inconsistency, but most
people have overlooked it so I guess it didn’t matter too much. So, okay, maybe a ‘minor’ inconsistency.
You have this future civilization dominated by
machines and run by a supercomputer. Impressive
war machines were slowly killing humans.
Cyborgs, indistinguishable from humans, but vastly more powerful,
infiltrated into the human ranks to kill a few humans in one subterranean hovel
or another. With all this evil
capability and seemingly endless funds, why didn’t the computer simply develop
a pathogen to kill off the remainder of the humans? Germ warfare, an obvious solution! It’s doubtful the machine civilization would
worry too much about the Geneva Conventions.
Simply infect a few prisoners and send them back
home. In those ‘caves’ the disease would
have spread faster than wild fires in a drought-ridden forest. There wouldn’t be any disease control in the
enclaves to either stop the spread or handle the patients. Such an attack would have been more thorough,
cheaper, quicker, safer… machines aren’t susceptible to biological diseases but
they could be shot down by humans.
That this super intelligent machine didn’t realize
such a simple solution has always bothered me.
Most thrillers are fun, like a roller-coaster ride. If you allow your mind to simply ignore the
impossible and forgive the implausible, they can be enjoyable.
The best thrillers are closest to reality. What made another James Cameron movie, Halloween, such a mega-hit was its believability. Michael Meyers, the unstoppable serial
killer, didn’t have to suspend the natural laws to frighten you and that made
the movie all the more frightening.
My own ‘thriller’ novel, Reap the Whirlwind, falls into the latter category. In this novel, a young writer’s bank account
is deep in the red due to a check he never wrote. Friends who can help him mysteriously die or
disappear. Someone using a computer is
destroying his life. But, why? As the story progresses, a threat to all mankind
emerges, such that the anguish and fears of one man become the collective fears
of an entire species. What makes this story
even more frightening than Halloween
is that not only could these events happen, but they may already be
happening.
Hmm… Maybe I’ll contact Cameron and find out if he
wants to produce another ‘real’ thriller.
Robert Sells, author of Return of the White Deer and Reap the Whirlwind
