Class is in session. Sadly, legions of kids know this to be true, as they begin to head back to school for another year of filling their brains with knowledge.
I am of the opinion that Arnold Schwarzenegger is currently making the most interesting movies of his career. Not necessarily the best or more satisfying on a visceral level; the most thoughtful, the most rich with themes and ideas, the most clearly made to comment upon and play with his image as the biggest action hero of the ’80s and ’90s. And while I really enjoy movies like Sabotage, Maggie, and Aftermath, they are much darker and more introspective films than Arnold used to make; in the last couple years, he hasn’t had much of a chance to flex his comedic muscles in exactly the same way.
If you’ve been ignoring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies since he returned to acting after seven years as the Governor of California, you’ve been missing out on some of the most interesting roles of his career. Though Schwarzenegger’s comeback kicked off with old-school action schtick like The Last Stand and The Expendables sequels, his recent output has seen him shift into darker, sadder territory. In the new movie Aftermath, he plays a man whose entire family is killed in a plane crash. There are no terrorists, no hijacking; a simple human error causes a tragic mid-air collision. The airline tries to buy off his silence, but Schwarzenegger’s Roman cannot let the tragedy go. He wants an apology for what happened, and no one will give it. And so he becomes fixated on the air traffic controller (played by Scoot McNairy) who was responsible for the fatal accident.
Ever since the news broke that Shane Black was making The Predator, many of us wondered what exactly we were supposed to call it. It’s not a reboot, because it features new characters in a new environment, and it’s not exactly a sequel either, since none of the characters from the original seem to be returning. Some thought Arnold Schwarzenegger would cameo to tie this movie in with the rest, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.