Saturdays with the Stars: Sigourney Weaver

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we talked about Tom Cruise, oftentimes billed as the "Last Great Movie Star."  This month, we're going to make sure that "actress" intro I've said to every one of these biographies isn't just name-checking.  Despite action films being largely a male-dominated field, we're going to talk about a woman who made her initial fame in action films, but still managed to have a really impressive career as a dramatic performer, gaining Oscar attention while headlining several big-name franchises.  This month's star is Sigourney Weaver.

Many of the men we've talked about this year had rough childhoods, ones that it's hard to see how they exactly got to Hollywood.  That is not the case for Sigourney Weaver, born Susan Alexandra Weaver, whose mother was a character actress (who made films with Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, & Edward G. Robinson) and her father was Pat Weaver, the president of NBC, who was the initial creator of The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and who ended up saving Meet the Press from cancellation.  She got her unusual name from The Great Gatsby, an erudite moniker that would complement her Yale education.  While at school, she'd originate a role in Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, where she'd play opposite Meryl Streep, whom she'd have a friendly professional rivalry with in her early career.

That rivalry led to what would end up being Weaver's first really big role: as Ellen Ripley in Alien.  Streep was considered for the part, but had to turn it down as she was still recovering from the death of her boyfriend John Cazale, and so Weaver got the film, and it would end up becoming one of the biggest movies of the year (it's worth noting that the biggest film of the year, Kramer vs. Kramer, not only starred Streep but won her an Oscar, a distinction Weaver still hasn't achieved).  For decades, Weaver would alternate between big-screen starring roles and character work in smaller dramas.

As a result, it feels to a degree that Weaver might be cheating to include this year.  With the very big exceptions of the Alien and Avatar franchises, Weaver has rarely had major roles in action films, and is probably better known as a dramatic performer than an action star.  One could argue I should be picking someone like Linda Hamilton, Angelina Jolie, or Michelle Yeoh, all of whom have been parts of more varied action films, for this distinction.  But I am picking Weaver because I think she's a fascinating prototype of the women who came after-because it's almost impossible to imagine any of those women getting the opportunities that they did without her Ripley suiting up first.

Jack Reacher (2012)

Film: Jack Reacher (2012)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Werner Herzog, David Oyelowo, Robert Duvall

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While Tom Cruise peaked as a movie star in the 1990's & early 2000's, he's never really ended his tenure as a headliner, to the point where many have referred to him as "the Last Movie Star" (a title the cinema-adoring Cruise has downplayed and actively said he doesn't want).  But it's worth noting that Cruise, post roughly The Last Samurai/Collateral, when his very public courtship and then divorce from Katie Holmes threatened to overtake his manicured public perception in a way that not even his connections to Scientology was able to do, has largely focused on films that are incredibly "safe."  Gone are the political statements of films like Born on the Fourth of July or the avant garde thrillers like Vanilla Sky.  It's hard to honestly recognize, even in the era of Digger (for good or bad, his most provocative film in decades), someone taking as big of a swing as Eyes Wide Shut.  Mostly, Cruise, once clearly on a different track than the rest of the action stars of his era, has largely joined Arnold & Sly as a man who forever was making shoot-em-up pics, and legacy sequels.  Since 2004, we've had a new installment of Top Gun and countless additional Mission Impossible pictures (eight in all).  But he did do something those guys couldn't in the 21st Century: launch a new action series with the Jack Reacher pictures, which is how we'll close out our time with him.

(Spoilers Ahead) Jack Reacher starts extremely provocatively (and in a slam to what's to come, with its most interesting scene) as a shooter (whose face is obscured to the point where it's impossible to identify the actor) shoots a few people at random from long range.  The police arrest a man named James Barr, whose fingerprint is on a coin that was dropped in the parking garage the shots came from, and he pleads "GET JACK REACHER" on a legal pad, which is precisely what his attorney Helen Rodin (Pike), assigned while he's comatose, does.  Initially Jack (Cruise), a mysterious man with virtually no paper trail, declines to help the alleged shooter, whom he has a complicated relationship with, but eventually does help, and we learn through Helen's investigations into the families that one of the women shot was not shot at random at all, and the other murders were a cover-up for the death.  We also learn that someone, potentially even Helen's own father, is helping to frame the innocent man (though it turns out its his assistant, played by David Oyelowo).

The film, like a lot of Cruise's late-stage action flicks, is pretty standard issue if still enjoyable.  Cruise plays a strong, silent type who is clearly modeled at least in part on Ethan Hunt, someone unknowable and impossibly savvy, and he's good.  I liked the chemistry he had with Pike, though their relationship does not turn romantic in this movie (I haven't seen the sequel yet to know if she's even in it).  Side note, by the way-watching Cruise's films this month, it's striking how many of his films have him paired with attractive leading woman whom he never ends up with romantically.  Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, and Jack Reacher all have potential love interests for him that he never ends up with, and this is on top of largely asexual action flicks like Minority Report, War of the Worlds, and Mission Impossible where most of his love interests are either dead or nonexistent.

Cruise still works today, though much of his work in the past few years seems to have been him saying goodbye to Ethan Hunt & Maverick in legacy sequels.  One wonders if Digger will open a new, final chapter of his career where the 64-year-old boy wonder has to graduate into the elder statesmen roles he used to stand alongside for Paul Newman & Robert Duvall.  Next month we will talk about our penultimate action star for our seventh season, an actor who became synonymous with two major action franchises, but unlike a lot of the men we've talked about this season she would have an equally impressive (and lauded) career as a dramatic actress.

OVP: A Few Good Men (1992)

Film: A Few Good Men (1992)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, James Marshall, JT Walsh, Kiefer Sutherland

Director: Rob Reiner

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Jack Nicholson, Editing, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tom Cruise was (give-or-take Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson) the most consistent box office presence of the 1990's.  Cruise was able to make hits out of action films, romantic-comedies, horror, thrillers, even reviving a 1960's TV show to become a multi-billion dollar franchise.  This presents a slight problem for me with Cruise for this series, because I want to talk about the downfall of his celebrity in the late 1990's & early 2000's, but given the rules of this series are that I cannot see a movie I've already seen, I run into a brick wall because from 1994 to 2007 I've seen every single Tom Cruise movie.  So we're going to talk about A Few Good Men and how it continued a massive run at the box office for the star...while his personal life and celebrity were in questionable hands.

Last week we talked about the marriage between Cruise & Nicole Kidman, probably the most important celebrity marriage of the 1990's.  But by 2001, Cruise and Kidman were on the rocks, and divorced.  This led to a lot of public retribution about Cruise himself, and his public image.  Cruise is famously guarded about his private life (look at him in interviews, and he might be the most media-trained actor in the business), but the Kidman divorce took a toll on Cruise's public image.  Kidman was having a major moment herself, with the successes (critical & commercial) of The Others, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, & Cold Mountain, and was winning the breakup while Cruise was enduring rumors about why the marriage ended.  They ranged from things that were eventually disproven (allegations that Cruise dumped Kidman after she suffered a miscarriage turned out to be untrue according to the actress in a 2007 interview), to ones that persist still.  Cruise sued a gay porn star for stating that they had had a relationship during his marriage to Kidman, one of several lawsuits that Cruise waged where the actor pushed back on long-standing rumors that he is gay.  But the most lasting rumor about Cruise's relationship ending with Kidman was around his involvement in Scientology, which does link back to A Few Good Men, because it came out the year that he first publicly announced (to Barbara Walters) that he was a follower of the controversial religion.

(Spoilers Ahead) We'll talk a bit about scientology in a second, but I don't want to totally neglect the movie at hand, as it's a rather important one for a blog that focuses on the Academy Awards, as it was up for four Oscars, including Best Picture.  A Few Good Men is a movie about a military private named William Santiago who dies in the middle of the night at Guantanamo Bay after being harassed by two members of his unit who are being tried for murder.  It turns out that there were pushes to have Santiago moved to a different unit but they were stopped by Colonel Nathan Jessup (Nicholson), who becomes something of a central figure in the investigation being conducted by JAG Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Cruise) and his commanding officer Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway (Moore).  The two find out, through a lot of friction in terms of their styles (he's a rebel, she's by-the-book...imagine which one the script prefers!) that Jessup essentially ordered a "code red" which is a violent (illegal) punishment of a military officer as a way to punish them for misbehaving.  This leads to Jessup being arrested for his involvement in the crime, and the two men who carried it out being dishonorably discharged.

A Few Good Men is most famous for the courtroom scene at the end of the movie between Nicholson & Cruise where Cruise proclaims "I want the truth!" and Nicholson retorts back "you can't handle the truth!"  There's a reason that this is the most famous scene in the movie-it's far-and-away the best in the picture, a movie that until this point doesn't really sing.  Despite having a lot of famous actors, Aaron Sorkin's script doesn't give them enough to do, and in particular underwrites Demi Moore's character to the point of problematic.  Her part is unbelievably sexist in the way it's approached not just by every man in the movie, but also by the way that he makes her so two-dimensional & incompetent (Sorkin is famously bad at writing women...that's the case here too).  It makes the film both heavy-handed and a bit silly, with Cruise constantly needing to prove Moore wrong.  But the courtroom scene...wow.  Nicholson got an Oscar nomination probably just from that scene alone, and it's totally worth it.

As I said above, A Few Good Men was a critical & commercial success, and one in a long stretch for Cruise during this era.  But it was during these years that his most defining celebrity quality would emerge, that of being an advocate for Scientology.  The secretive nature of the religion & its many controversies (not just in its beliefs, but in the way that it uses its members' financial assets & has levels of membership that seem to value celebrity members) have made it a black mark on Cruise's persona (and also the source of much litigation, so I'm watching my words carefully here).  By the late aughts, he had largely stopped talking about it publicly even though by all accounts he is still a member of the church, but rumors persist that he was (allegedly) pushed to end his relationship with not just Kidman, but future wife Katie Holmes (whose daughter with Cruise, Suri, again allegedly has no contact with her father) and future girlfriend Ana de Armas because they would not join the church.  Cruise has spent much of his career being one of the America's most loved movie stars, but pretty much every conversation about Cruise comes with an asterisk: his involvement with Scientology is a huge point of contention in an otherwise manically curated public persona.

OVP: Days of Thunder (1990)

Film: Days of Thunder (1990)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman, Michael Rooker, Cary Elwes

Director: Tony Scott

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Like several of the actors we've profiled this year, Tom Cruise has had his share of celebrity run-ins in the romance department.  Despite decades of rumors to the contrary, all of his public-facing relationships have been with women, including dalliances with Melissa Gilbert, Rebecca de Morney, Cher, & Penelope Cruz.  He would have a first, brief marriage to actress Mimi Rogers (an actress most audiences might not know now but was ubiquitous for love interest and eventually "mom/best friend" supporting parts in the 1980's & 90's), and he would eventually have a very fascinating third marriage to Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes (which we'll get into next week).  But for most moviegoers, when you think of Tom Cruise's wife, you think of Nicole Kidman.  For the entirety of the 1990's, coming off of their meeting on this film (and subsequent marriage), there was really no bigger couple in Hollywood that could compete with Tom & Nicole (and this was the era of the tabloid-friendly super-couple, with Goldie Hawn & Kurt Russell, Susan Sarandon & Tim Robbins, Kim Basinger & Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore & Bruce Willis, and Dennis Quaid & Meg Ryan all providing sturdy counter to, say, the romantic lives of Julia Roberts or Madonna, which were plastered all over your supermarket checkout).  It's worth noting, especially now given that they are on pretty equal standing in the cultural conversation, that this was much more one-sided in the 90's: Kidman would give good performances, but she was very much "Tom Cruise's wife" and not a leading lady star in the same way he was until after their divorce.  This meant that while Cruise had a lot of major hits outside of their relationship, save for a couple of films in the late 1990's (most notably To Die For and The Peacemaker), Kidman's biggest roles happened opposite her husband.

(Spoilers Ahead) The first of these films was Days of Thunder, a movie that we think of now as a pretty conventional hit, but at the time was a really big deal in Hollywood.  The film itself is not good, and we're going to only talk about the plot for a minute because that's honestly all of the time the screenplay gives it.  The film is about Cole Trickle (Cruise), a rebellious race-car driver who builds a car with Harry Hogge (Duvall) and starts to be really good, eventually looking like he might win the Daytona 500 until a major car crash injures him and his rival Rowdy (Rooker).  Both men are seriously injured, but Cole, with the help of Dr. Claire Lewicki (Kidman) actually gets better, while Rowdy largely ignores what's happening, and basically makes his medical condition worse, eventually so that he wilil truly never drive again.  In the meantime Cole must contend with both his own ambitions (which get in the way of his romantic relationship with Claire), as well as another upstart who takes his place in the race Russ Wheeler (Elwes, and yes, the film has the Jerry Bruckheimer-esque subtlety to give a fictional professional driver the last name "Wheeler").  Eventually, Cole wins Daytona using Rowdy's car, as well as Claire's heart.

The film is not good.  For a couple that would spend the rest of the decade being discussed like they were the president and his wife by American households, Cruise & Kidman have very little chemistry (made weirder by the fact that they would have great chemistry years later in Eyes Wide Shut, which was near the end of their marriage).  More critically, Cruise doesn't have chemistry with Robert Duvall, his co-lead and a far more important relationship within the confines of the picture.  There's also way less racing than you'd assume (though the racing scenes are well-done...it's Oscar-nominated Sound work is solid).  The best part might be the music, as Days of Thunder features a solid soundtrack.

The film's spot in Hollywood history should be noted, because in a year where we have focused quite frequently on major action stars and Hollywood building films (and even franchises) around them, Days of Thunder changed that, and is spelling something of an end to this type of motion picture.  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer in the wake of he & Cruise making the phenomenon Top Gun, the film went wildly over budget, by some estimations almost double what Bruckheimer had promised Paramount.  At nearly $60M, it was basically asking the film to make more money than most movies did at the time (i.e. it had to make north of $100M to make a profit).  While Days of Thunder did do that (it'd make $160M, a solid amount until you remember it was less-than-half of what Top Gun did), it tarnished Bruckheimer's reputation severely-he would not make another film with Paramount until 2019, and it took four years for his next film, the tiny black comedy The Ref (Bruckheimer escaped Hollywood jail with 1995's Bad Boys, a surprise success which launched Will Smith into action movie stardom, and gave Bruckheimer a new collaborator in Michael Bay, which he'd ride to major glory with dumb-but-profitable films like The Rock, Armageddon, & Pearl Harbor).  Days of Thunder is oftentimes thought of as a harbinger of things to come for the 1990's, when Hollywood's intense betting on star-driven vehicles, sometimes with insurmountable budgets, would make the decade a box office roller coaster.  And few actors got paid more consistently exorbitant fees in the 1990's than Tom Cruise

OVP: Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Film: Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley

Director: Oliver Stone

Oscar History: 8 nods/2 wins (Best Picture, Director*, Actor-Tom Cruise, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing*, Score, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Growing up, Tom Cruise was not an actor that my parents liked a lot.  While stars such as Harrison Ford or Sandra Bullock being in a picture was pretty much a blank check ticket situation to see their new film, Cruise's movies were oftentimes only ones we would seek out if they had a lot of buzz.  When I would ask about this (as you can imagine, young John was always talking about movies), a big part of the reason was "I don't think he's a very good actor" which to be fair was something that was a relatively commonplace topic during much of Cruise's career with the general public.  Cruise, because of his arresting good looks (for me, it's always been the hair-Tom Cruise has spectacular hair) and the types of movies he picks (action films, franchise pictures, and romantic melodramas) has usually been dismissed as a pretty boy or a commercial star only.  This is something we've actually seen throughout this year: Errol Flynn, Charles Bronson, & Arnold Schwarzenegger were all never nominated for Oscars, and it took Sean Connery until the second act of his career to win one.

But Cruise, Cruise at the height of his fame did not seem content with being a pretty boy.  His onscreen idol was not Errol Flynn or Sean Connery...it was always Paul Newman, and Paul Newman got to be in action films and be nominated repeatedly for Oscars.  Born on the Fourth of July was not Cruise's first clear play at an Academy Award nomination (he had starred alongside Newman in The Color of Money, and the year before starred in the Best Picture winner Rain Man), but in both cases it was his costar that won Best Actor.  Born on the Fourth of July was the first time that Cruise got nominated, and it's a fascinating film that both signaled where he was headed with his career for the next decade (regularly appearing in films that were Oscar-adjacent) and also an anomaly, given it was the rare really "actorly" role that Cruise would take in his career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Ron Kovic (Cruise), the quintessential American young man who wrestles for his school, is in love with the prettiest girl at school (Kyra Sedgwick) and devotes his passion to God and Country (specifically the Republican Party).  When fighting breaks out in Vietnam, Ron is the first to enlist, and he goes to war...and promptly realizes how much patriotism relies upon the sacrifices of an average man.  He becomes paralyzed from the waist down, unable to have children or to ever walk again, something he initially refuses (to the point where he nearly loses his legs through obstinance), and then slowly works back to reality, though first having bouts of severe alcoholism & depression.  This leads him away from the Republican Party that sent him to war, and eventually he becomes a vocal supporter of the anti-war movement, nearly being trampled during the 1972 RNC while they nominate Nixon to a landslide victory.  The film ends with this low point being countered with a high point, Kovic's real life speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

It's worth noting before we get into Cruise's work here that this film is directed by Oliver Stone.  In an era where directors like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, & Robert Zemeckis made films that were only subtly political (though politics are there, especially in Spielberg's work), Stone's films of this era were known for their hyper-political atmosphere.  Films like Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, & Nixon (all very popular with Oscar and usually with audiences) questioned authority to the point of feeling conspiratorial (as a youth who read entertainment & celebrity magazines weekly, I believe I learned the phrase "conspiracy theory" from it being linked to Oliver Stone).  The film's anti-war politics feel a bit more routine today, given that we've had decades of film that have been comfortable questioning the honestly of the US government in foreign affairs, but in 1989 it's worth noting that having the quintessential American boy next door (Tom Cruise) spouting off leftist dialogue in a year where ardent pro-Vietnam congressman George HW Bush had become president is an interesting counter.

The film itself occasionally feels underwritten as a result of the politics, mostly because Stone's politics are so well-honed into the script, sometimes at the sacrifice of character.  I loved, for example, the way that we are introduced to Kovic as a bit weak-willed (he's not the best wrestler, he doesn't have the guts to take the girl he likes to the Prom), and then seeing that the world doesn't actually care about him when he gets back.  He fervently believed in American exceptionalism, and in giving himself as a sacrifice, but when he gets back, he learns as he matures into a true adult that his sacrifice meant little to the people he did it on behalf of (and much of that was just talk, not deed), and those who stayed behind profited in his absence, or worse yet, simply want him to go away.  The cruelty of his not being perfect is felt on his parents, who want their old son back...and hate their new one (the relationship between Ron & his mother is really well done because it's so uncomfortable).  But this also means that we rarely get to know much about the side characters (Sedgwick and Willem Dafoe feel pretty two-dimensional from actors we know can do more), and I wanted to understand more about what made this story specific than trying to make it feel universal to fit Stone's lecture to the viewer.

As for Cruise?  I liked him in this.  I think Cruise, at the time very willing to mess with his star persona, plays Ron as unlikable, oftentimes nauseatingly so, but it works for the character.  I think the way that he embraces the arrogance that comes with youth, knowing that those around you couldn't possibly be right because they've lived longer and seen more of the world (something we all go through as young adults eager to be seen as equals) is really well done.  I do wish he had had more scene partner work-there are times when it feels like he's trying to inhabit the whole screen in his scenes, needing us to KNOW the message he's trying to convey, sometimes swinging a bit from scene-to-scene without giving consistency is an issue (though more the writer's fault), but this is proof of something I already know (I disagree with my parents on this one): Tom Cruise, when he wants to be, is a fine actor.

Legend (1986)

Film: Legend (1986)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry

Director: Ridley Scott

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tom Cruise's early career in many ways belies a lot of the stories we've talked about this season of people like Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone having to struggle in supporting roles for a while before they ended up as leading men.  Cruise after coming to Hollywood at the age of just 18, got a small role in Endless Love, but just a few months later had a plum role Taps from 20th Century Fox.  Quickly following this was the one-two-three punch of The Outsiders, All the Right Moves, and Risky Business.  All of these films turned a profit, but it was Risky Business, where Cruise's most famous scene would find him jamming out in his underwear to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock-and-Roll" that would send him into the stratosphere.  The film made 10x its budget, and by-and-large, that was pretty much it for Cruise-he would be a movie star for the rest of his life (aware that saying this the same weekend his Oscar vehicle that is no longer such a thing Digger is bombing will feel cheeky, but let's be honest-he'll bounce back with a sequel to one of his many hits)...though it's possible that today's movie might've held threatened that dominance.  Cruise took one of only a few risks in his career (again, Digger being another) that didn't click with audiences in the spring of 1986 with Legend, a strange Ridley Scott fantasy-adventure that audiences hated.  Had this been an indication of where his career was going, he might've been more of an Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe-style 1980's fixture...but just a month after Legend tanked at the domestic box office was the world premiere of Top Gun, which would become the highest-grossing film of 1986 and spawn Cruise's first franchise.

(Spoilers Ahead) But because I have seen Risky Business and Top Gun (and this series is about me discovering new films), and honestly because it didn't occur to me to watch The Outsiders even though that would've been a totally good choice for this...we're doing Legend.  The movie is about Jack (Cruise), a forest child who lives in a fantasy realm where darkness and winter are held off by two magical and precious unicorns.  At one point Jack's love interest, Princess Lili (Sara) attempts to touch one of the unicorns despite his protestations, and it runs off...and has its horn cut off by goblins.  They work for a character called Darkness (Curry), an evil demon of sorts who wants to slay both unicorns in hopes of bringing total darkness back to the world.  While Jack is working with wood elves and a fairy-in-disguise to help fix the unicorn (and protect the other one), Lili is taken captive by Darkness and made into her evil, sexy bride...but she eventually tricks him and frees the unicorn, who thanks to Jack helping to kill Darkness and connect the unicorn's horn to the horse, we see goodness brought back to the world.

Here's the deal-Legend is not much more than that plot.  The film has become something of a cult classic, as is oftentimes the case for fantasy films of the 1980's that bomb (see also The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth), particularly for Curry's campy portrayal of a roided out demon who is obsessively horny for Mia Sara's Lili.  So if you're going into it, you either need to be super into the aesthetic, or you really need to like the characters.  I wasn't very sold on the aesthetic, though Curry's Oscar-nominated makeup is making some solid points (and clearly influenced the future Hellboy movie design), but you have to buy hard into the somewhat homoerotic nature of the picture to really enjoy it on a camp level (between the excessive amount of glitter every character seems to wear to Cruise's 4" inseam shorts while still wearing a shiny gold breast plate, this is really doubling up with the volleyball scene in Top Gun in terms of awakening young gay men of 1986).

The characters are also super unlikable.  Curry's character is so underwritten that even an actor as skilled as he can't pull this totally off (though he's clearly having a blast in this role), but he's better than the other two.  Cruise's character is in love with Lili, but honestly you have no idea why as Lili is a spoiled brat, and doesn't change enough by the end to really justify the audience rooting for her.  The film itself apparently has three different endings; the one I saw had Jack & Lili ending up together but Darkness still lurking in the void, plotting his revenge, while there are others that don't have them end up together or any mention of Darkness still existing.  I personally think that the best option here would've been them staying apart, as Jack is magical in a way that Lili isn't, and they really don't make sense in the same world.  Either way, though, this sets up a weird sort of dichotomy because as we'll see in the next few weeks, both onscreen and in real-life, Cruise doesn't always get the girl.

Saturdays with the Stars: Tom Cruise

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we discussed Sylvester Stallone, a man who made equal parts celebrated action blockbusters alongside a string of films that would have the Razzies call him "the Worst Actor of the Century."  This month, we'll talk about a man a couple decades Stallone's junior, but who was his peer in action films throughout the 1980's & early 1990's.  That might be the only thing that Stallone and our October star have in common, though.  Our star this month would have considerably more success in films outside of the explosion-heavy genre that was Stallone's trapping, would be recognized as a superior actor, and would become a far more fascinating tabloid celebrity, with his romantic relationships, and controversial religion nearly throwing apart his career before being reclaimed in recent years as "the last movie star."  This month's star is Tom Cruise.

Despite being born with the seemingly stodgy moniker of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, the future Jerry Maguire grew up extremely poor, with an abusive father and a deeply Catholic mother.  When his parents divorced when Cruise was a teenager, he aspired to become a priest, even attending seminary in Cincinnati (reports differ on why he ultimately abandoned this dream).  After high school, while he briefly went to New York to pursue acting, he found far better luck in Hollywood, almost instantly getting movie work in Endless Love, and then his breakout role in Taps.  This was followed by All the Right Moves, Risky Business, and in 1986, he appeared in Top Gun.  At the age of only 24, Tom Cruise had become one of the most famous men in America...

...a position he's never really given up.  Cruise's career has had setbacks, but by-and-large he's never really had a long period of time where he wasn't making massive blockbusters.  Unlike some of the men we've talked about this year, he wasn't always getting into them through action franchises, though his work in the Mission Impossible, Top Gun, & Jack Reacher series all helped him immensely.  Cruise at his peak could launch courtroom dramas, romantic comedies, pretty much everything but a musical (sorry Rock of Ages).  He also, despite a surface-level squeaky clean persona (very few of his costars have anything but good things to say about him) was involved in two extremely high-profile divorces from famous actresses who have largely avoided the type of tell-all books that typically follow such splits, and has been the face of the 20th Century's most controversial religious movement.  We'll get into all of that, as well as some of the biggest movies of Cruise's career (which I've inexplicably missed) this month.

OVP: Cliffhanger (1993)

Film: Cliffhanger (1993)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Paul Winfield

Director: Renny Harlin

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Visual Effects, Sound, Sound Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I don't mean to compare Stallone's career all month to Schwarzenegger's, but it's hard not to both because that's what the press did during their entire heyday and it's also hard when you look into the 1990's as they were on deeply different paths.  By the late 1980's, Schwarzenegger was regularly churning out hits in films like Predator, but the best was still to come.  For Stallone...the 1990's were a series of pitfalls.  It started with Rocky V, which made money but given the expectations after the last four films, was a disappointment.  But this would arguably be a high-point when you look at what would come next.  While Arnold was making mountains of money with Total Recall, Terminator 2, and True Lies (all films audiences adored), Stallone was working in truly crappy flicks like Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Judge Dredd.  Even his films that made money, like The Specialist or Daylight, were critically-lambasted and were largely only popular overseas.  Stallone at this point was to the Razzie Awards what Meryl Streep was to the Oscars (fun fact-Stallone gave Meryl her Oscar for Sophie's Choice).

(Spoilers Ahead) The one really bright spot from the first half of the decade for Stallone was in 1993.  Cliffhanger is not a critically-acclaimed film by any means (and Stallone got nominated for Worst Screenplay at the Razzies), but it had decent reviews, and made a fortune.  One could argue it was the last unequivocally successful blockbuster built off of Stallone as a leading man.  The movie is about Gabe Walker (Stallone), a mountain rescue ranger who is traumatized by his friend Hal's (Rooker) girlfriend dying in the opening moments of the film from an accident while ziplining through the Colorado Rockies.  Walker largely checks out of his life and wants to leave it behind, taking his girlfriend Jessie (Turner) with him, but she refuses.  Meanwhile, a group of hijackers, headed by Eric Qualen (Lithgow) steal a fortune of $100 million aboard a US Treasury plane, but a mishap in the hijacking causes them to crash in the Rockies.  After tricking Hal, Jessie, & Gabe into rescuing them, this causes an increasingly staggering standoff, as Hal, Gabe, & Jessie try to stay alive as these people attempt to escape with all of the money.

Cliffhanger is a movie that is, and I say this lovingly, dumb as a post.  The plot of the film rarely makes sense beyond a second grader's description of an action film, and it is impossibly repetitive.  We have the same standoffs between Stallone, Lithgow, Rooker, and Rex Linn for about 60 minutes in a row.  But that shouldn't confuse with it a bad movie, as Cliffhanger is not a bad movie.

For starters, some of the action scenes are really well done.  The opening scene with Stallone desperately trying to save a doomed Michelle Joyner from falling to her death thousands of feet below is nerve-gripping...I was actively clutching a pillow wondering what would happen.  And the film as it progresses lives up to some of the camp of its premise, mostly because John Lithgow (with an accent that kind of has to be heard to be believed) acting as over-the-top as is humanly possible to keep the audience amused between Stallone getting different elaborate killing scenes in.  This is, like many of Stallone's films, a clear paycheck role for a decent actor who regularly was selling out...but that doesn't negate that it works more than it doesn't, and Stallone's everyman appeal is there, especially in the first half.

First Blood (1982)

Film: First Blood (1982)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy

Director: Ted Kotcheff

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last month we talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this month with us approaching Sylvester Stallone, it's important to talk about them in conjunction.  While I could've picked an actual film they made together (the minor 2013 hit Escape Plan probably made the most sense) to frame this, it actually makes more sense in terms of a film from the 1980's when the feud was actually waging.  First Blood and the Rambo franchise really launched Sylvester Stallone away from some of the risks he was taking post-Rocky with films like Paradise Alley, Escape to Victory and Rhinestone (these films scripts might have also helped deter Stallone), but it also made him a quintessential action star of the 1980's.  The other quintessential action star of the 1980's was Schwarzenegger, and younger audiences might now know how intense their rivalry was.

Amongst other things that they did during the roughly 10-year stretch that the two would feud was Stallone marrying Schwarzenegger's ex-girlfriend (Brigitte Nielsen), and they would take a series of jabs at each other in movies like Twins, Tango & Cash, and Last Action Hero.  It's not clear, in retrospect how much of this was the press feeding into things (by all accounts Arnold's relationship with Nielsen was a momentary fling, and all of the jokes in those movies are clearly said as fourth well-breaking jest for the audience to chuckle at), but it's worth noting that Stallone seemed to take it more seriously than Schwarzenegger, purportedly helping to fund the legal fees of a reporter who had called Schwarzenegger's father a Nazi (which he was, though rumors about him committing war crimes or being involved in carrying out the Holocaust have long circulated but never been proven, and are likely untrue), probably the biggest escalation in the feud (and one Stallone initially did behind-the-scenes).

Why am I picking First Blood to be the movie we discuss the Arnold/Sly feud?  Because it probably wouldn't have been possible without First Blood.  Sly Stallone's career was made with Rocky, but while the film piled on successful sequels, most of the other movies that Stallone was making at the time were flops.  All of the movies I listed above didn't succeed, and while Nighthawks turned a profit, it wasn't enough to really notice in the way the Rocky films did.  The one bonafide box office performance during this time he turned in was Staying Alive, which made a fortune...but was only directed by Stallone, and instead it was John Travolta who got the box office credit for it.  Were it not for Rambo, it's arguable that Stallone would've spent the 1980's making movies like Chuck Norris & Charles Bronson did-middling, lucrative but barely registering straight-to-video style pictures that no one would remember.  But he did make First Blood, and it changed the trajectory of his career, making him a theatrical movie star for at least another decade.

(Spoilers Ahead) First Blood is the story of John Rambo (Stallone), a Vietnam war veteran who is basically a drifter, coming into town in a small city in Washington, and being chased out of town for not being "the right sort."  Rambo doesn't take this lying down, and gets into a war of wills with Will Teasle (Dennehy), a sheriff who abuses Rambo, and causes him to have flashbacks to Vietnam.  During the PTSD, he escapes, and essentially sets off a series of attacks that result in the deaths of multiple police officers, initially unintentionally, but eventually very intentionally.  They even bring in Rambo's supervising officer in the army Colonel Sam Trautman (Crenna) to try and deal with Rambo as the showdown escalates, and we see that only one man between Rambo and Teasle will survive...

...except both of them do.  In an interesting scene toward the end involving Stallone, Dennehy, & Crenna, we see Stallone admit that he felt confused by the public rejection of his service after Vietnam.  First Blood is really interesting as a cultural artifact because it represents (at the rise of the Reagan Era) a nail-in-the-coffin of the hippie liberalism that had existed in the late 1960's.  Read any discussion about the treatment of Vietnam veterans returning from the war (that they were spat upon and called "baby killers") and you'll find a host of different anecdotal and academic evidence online, the former insisting that it was relatively common while the latter pointing out that it was rare to the point of providing virtually no persistent evidence in terms of things like video or police records.  That all three of these men come together for Stallone's John Rambo to soliloquize about this treatment becomes a sort of fascinating case study of your political beliefs-conservatives see in John Rambo a fighter, someone who was rejected after he did his service to his country by anti-war protesters, while liberals see a man broken by a war who is still rejected by authority figures (it should not be lost on anyone that the men both terrorizing & supporting Rambo are leaders in a law & order organization, a longtime bastion of conservative reverance).  Stallone's sort of two-dimensional approach to the character, as just a "guy who is living his life" helps tremendously here-it makes you think First Blood is about what you want, and fighting against the other guy, while they see it the same way.  In terms of propaganda, it's honestly really impressive, and adding in the early scenes which have a John Boorman directing Deliverance vibe, it's a much better movie than you'd expect.

But First Blood's complicated politics did not continue in the very successful film sequels that would basically just make Rambo another Terminator (Bruce Willis would have this same issue with the Die Hard movies).  The next three films would all make north of $100M at the box office, and would become Stallone's life-blood as a bankable star along with Rocky.  But unlike Schwarzenegger, Stallone (despite, for my money, being the better actor) didn't have good enough taste in his scripts and cared too much about his paychecks to really win the war against Arnold.  It helped that Schwarzenegger had the good luck to find a proper talent (James Cameron) to make his two best films, but it's more than that-Schwarzenegger had better quality control (he actually said no to sequels when they didn't make sense), and ultimately came out on top.  Even Stallone would later admit (years later, when the two had become friends offscreen) "He wanted to be number one.  Unfortunately he got there."  We'll talk about why Stallone & Schwarzenegger fell off next week. and how both of their careers would change in the 1990's.

Rocky II (1979)

Film: Rocky II (1979)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Sylvester Stallone's early life & career are interesting enough that they're literally releasing a biopic about it in the next year.  Born the son of an astrologer and hairdresser (both of whom, if their later outbursts on talk shows & reality television appearances were any indication, were probably not the most fit parents you could imagine), he grew up in a working class background.  Due to a mistake during his birth, he was left with some paralysis on his lower face, meaning that he consistently looked like he was grimacing, which he was mocked for in school.  This would've probably deterred most young people, but Stallone dreamed of being an actor & director, and so he headed to Hollywood.

Stallone's early years in Hollywood are honestly pretty bleak.  He struggled to find work, and at one point has admitted that he literally was homeless, sleeping in bus stations.  He got work in a softcore pornography film (you read that right) called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (Stallone would play Stud), and pursued extra work, eventually getting some in MASH, Bananas, & What's Up Doc?.  Stallone's big break happened through his own hard work-he wrote a script for the film Rocky, with the intention of him playing the lead part given Hollywood was not giving him these kinds of roles.  The film got the attention of producers Irwin Winkler & Robert Chartoff, who were making a name for themselves at the time by producing crime & action pictures starring established leading men like James Caan & Charles Bronson.  Stallone refused to sell the script, even with an offer of over $350k (over $2 million today) and the recent memory of homelessness on the line, unless they let him star in the film.  The producers relented (eventually having to cut the budget without someone like Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds as box office insurance), but Stallone's gambit paid off.  The film made over $200 million, and was not just the highest-grossing film of 1976, but (after Star Wars) out-earned every other film from 1977 the following year.  The movie would win the Best Picture Oscar, and Stallone would get nominations for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay (ultimately losing both to Network).  Just a few years after sleeping in bus depots, Sly was now one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) I have seen Rocky many times because my parents had cable in the 90's, and to be fair, I've probably seen chunks of all of the first five Rocky movise thanks to the marathons TV stations would run of it during this era ad nauseum, but I believe this is the first time I've ever sat down and truly watched Rocky II cover-to-cover.  The film takes place immediately after the events of the previous film, when Apollo Creed (Weathers) has just defeated Rocky Balboa (Stallone) in a tight contest, which has put a chink into Creed's armor even if he lost (given Rocky came out of nowhere).  The film starts with Creed demanding a rematch, but given that Rocky has promised Adrian (Shire) he won't fight anymore, he won't give into one.  But the film shows the pitfalls in one's 15 minutes of fame, and after a while Rocky can't get a job, and is broke with a kid on the way.  He realizes that the only way that he's ever going to provide the kind of life he wants for his newborn son and young wife is to fight, even if it's putting his life at risk due to injuries from the first film.  Rocky begins training again with Mickey (Meredith), and in a climactic final scene, does what he couldn't do in the first film-he wins, defeating the heavyweight champion of the world (and thus becoming it himself).

Rocky II, here directed & written by Stallone himself (something that he would do throughout his career with other films-Stallone directed more of his own movies than he gets credit for in conversations about his work), is not Rocky, and it's not nearly as well-regarded as some of the other follow-ups in the series.  Part of that problem is because the film itself is not well-made, being too repetitive of problems from the first film, and too ridiculous about trying to convince the audience that the fight (and the redemption from it) won't result in Rocky defeating Apollo Creed.  Stallone, as we'll find this month, is a more talented actor than Schwarzenegger was last month (it helps that English is his first language), though not as versatile as, say, Sean Connery.  There's a naturalism to his Rocky that almost makes it feel like he's playing himself, which isn't really fair given he'd play against this type repeatedly, including in our movie next week.  But the script here is too paint-by-numbers, and it takes too long to get to the (thrilling) final scene.

Saturdays with the Stars: Sylvester Stallone

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who dominated the box office throughout the 1980's with violent, explosion-heavy action thrillers.  This month, we're going to talk about a man who, if you were alive during Arnold's heyday, you pretty much always referenced him with.  While not as successful (something he would later admit), there was a time these future friends would have a combative, sometimes shockingly so, relationship in the press, which would be good for both of their careers, but would, for this star, feel like a step down to the type of roles he once felt capable of playing.  This month's star is Sylvester Stallone.

Stallone's early childhood honestly reads like one of his movie's, with his mother being a famed wrestling promoter (and astrologist) and his father Frank a hairdresser.  During delivery, Stallone had to be removed from his mother with forceps, which pinched a nerve that would cause the lower side of his face to be seen in a snarl, something that would become the actor's signature look in years that followed, and caused him to have a ready-made tough guy aesthetic.  Stallone, unlike Schwarzenegger, was a fairly good student, briefly attending Notre Dame, before he started to work in movies as an actor.

Stallone's early career is famous to anyone who read tabloid newspapers, but he appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (later titled Italian Stallion, capitalizing on Stallone's famous nickname), and got extra work in movies like MASH, Bananas, and Klute before writing himself the role that would make him a legend, as Rocky Balboa.  In the 15 years that followed, Stallone would become a household name, associated with both Rocky and Rambo, as well as occasional forays outside of the action hero ring that weren't nearly as successful.

Stallone today is not a particularly well-regarded actor, in many ways reducing his talent (he is, lest we forget, a two-time Oscar-nominated actor, something that Schwarzenegger never came close to achieving) to an asterisk compared to a series of crap (and political choices like endorsing Donald Trump) that would make him unpalatable to a new generation of moviegoers.  This month we're not going to ignore the unsavory aspects of Stallone's celebrity, but we're also going to look at what might be neglected in his filmography, with me seeing one of his most critically-acclaimed roles, as well as watching a Rocky film I've never caught before, and somehow introducing myself to John Rambo for the first time.

OVP: True Lies (1994)

Film: True Lies (1994)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere, Eliza Dushku, Charlton Heston

Director: James Cameron

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Today we're going to talk about a film that was made at the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career, and arguably (definitely after Terminator 2) one of his best films.  But the 1997 release of Batman & Robin, a movie considered so bad at the time that it seemed like it might end the Batman movies (side note: young, gay John loved this movie, mostly because of Chris O'Donnell) seemed to cause a different chapter in Arnold's largely teflon career.  End of Days barely turned a profit (only making that because it did so well overseas but tanked domestically), and The 6th Day was a financial disaster, and called into question Schwarzenegger's then exorbitant salary of $25 million per picture.  Followed by Collateral Damage (which also tanked), not even the solid box office of Terminator 3 could've really saved what seemed unthinkable-after twenty years of record box office, Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as a bankable movie star was coming to an end.

But here's where Schwarzenegger had a career second act as a movie star that only Ronald Reagan & Hedy Lamarr could really top: he went into politics (me now shifting to the other side of this blog to tell this story).  In 2003, California Gov. Grey Davis was wildly unpopular.  He had won reelection in 2002 by only 5-points, and hadn't reached 50% due to the strength of a Green Party candidate.  For all of the talk about Claire McCaskill largely inventing the "help elect the worst opponent in the opposite party's primary technique" that is still used today (just look at Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan), Grey Davis used it in 2002, running ads calling Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan "too moderate" to take advantage of the newly closed primaries for the GOP.  Riordan was seen as a moderate, and would've beaten Davis, but against businessman Bill Simon (son of President Ford's Treasury Secretary William E. Simon) Davis was able to win based off of the (at that point) relatively blue California electorate (the state got bluer in the next two decades).  But California's recall laws were relatively easy to push, and Schwarzenegger was the kind of candidate (flashy, moderate, and likable) that the GOP couldn't pull off in 2002.  Against Davis, who was mired in controversy thanks to raising auto fees in the state and a huge budget spurred by the dot-com bust that hit California especially hard, someone like Schwarzenegger who could announce his run on The Tonight Show with millions of Americans watching in awe, Arnold was unstoppable.  He would be elected Governor and serve as a (relatively...until the latter half of his second term, which happens to most governors) popular incumbent who could still win in 2006 as a Republican even though it was a blue wave.

(Spoilers Ahead) What does this have to do with True Lies?  Honestly, nothing, but I chose the film because I didn't want to watch The 6th Day or End of Days because they're famously terrible (and because I've not only seen Terminator 3 already, I saw it before I saw the first two movies in the franchise on a weekend where I otherwise spent time ordering pizza & beer while playing Grand Theft Auto with my cousin's boyfriend...the closest I may have ever come to successfully being a straight man), and then Arnold really didn't work in movies when he was governor.  So we're going to end our month with him on the high-note of True Lies, a really fun film about Harry (Schwarzenegger) who lives a conventional, in some ways autopilot life with his wife Helen (Curtis).  She thinks he's a computer hardware salesman (despite him looking like, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger), but he's actually a top agent for a counterterrorism unit.  When Harry suspects Helen of having an affair with a man named Simon (Paxton), he tracks her down, realizing Simon is pulling the opposite con (he poses as a spy but is actually a used car salesman), and he instead tricks her into doing a "job"...but then she gets pulled into the actual job that he's doing when Juno Skinner (Carrere), a terrorist organization leader, kidnaps them both.

True Lies is obviously a big, flashy action movie (and it looks good, this is James Cameron we're talking about-the man can't make a bad-looking picture), but it gets its flair from being a comedy first, and an action movie second.  This is probably the only true comedy that James Cameron has ever made, but he's quite adept at it, and has the good sense to hire a gifted comedic actress in Jamie Lee Curtis as his lead.  She does a wonderful job opposite Arnold (not a gifted comedian, and while fine, seemingly bad by comparison because Curtis is outacting him so well) totally selling this bored, sexually-frustrated housewife just wanting some adventure & attention in her marriage.  There are moments toward the middle where you actually feel her pain, that she really might leave him and touch the third rail of a comedy by having an actual affair, and Curtis plays it organically in a movie of heightened reality.  She would get Golden Globe & SAG nominations that year, and given the dearth of strong lead actress performances, probably was close to getting her first Oscar nomination decades before Everything Everywhere All at Once had there not been some category confusion over where to put her (she's a lead for the record, for whenever we get to the 1994 OVP).

Schwarzenegger returned to acting after his time as governor, but by 2011 the movie star landscape had changed, and the glowing world of the 1990's where they ran Hollywood like deities had evaporated into a world of comic books and intellectual property.  He would find himself largely just doing work in established franchises like Terminator and The Expendables.  His attempts at original films either missed expectations (Escape Plan) or basically no one saw (Sabotage, Maggie).  By the 2020's, Schwarzenegger's acting career, once big enough to demand the largest salary in Hollywood, had been reduced to making a comedy series for Netflix that got cancelled after two seasons.

Next month, we're going to talk about an actor whose career has been inextricably linked to Schwarzenegger's despite them not working together during their initial heyday.  But to link the two is to compare the two, and depending on your approach...it's hard to tell which one ends out the champ.

OVP: Total Recall (1990)

Film: Total Recall (1990)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michale Ironside, Ronny Cox

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best sound, Sound Effects Editing, Visual Effects*...I didn't make a mistake there, the statue for Visual Effects was technically an honorary statue, the last time to date a film has had that happen rather than nominating Visual Effects contenders for a competitive field)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said last week, Schwarzenegger's career is too big to fit into one month, and honestly the films he made only play so much of a part.  Schwarzenegger, in a lot of ways like figures such as Marilyn Monroe & James Dean, ended up being an outsized icon, bigger as a celebrity idea than his actual films.  You see that in the 1990's.  We start out with Total Recall, a film that made a huge impact (it was in the Top 10 finishes of the year, above Die Hard 2 with his competitor Bruce Willis), but his successes were not as consistent in the 1990's, as the type of action-hero flick that had made him a superstar in the 1980's began to go out of vogue (this wasn't just true for Schwarzenegger-men like Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude van Damne also suffered a similar fate as the decade would continue).  For every True Lies there seemed to be a Last Action Hero or End of Days.  Schwarzenegger was helped, pretty dramatically, by international box office, justifying his gigantic paydays against increasingly lousy domestic grosses because he made so much overseas, particularly in a growing Asian market, and he always had the Terminator to fall back on, but it's worth noting as we head into our last week of Arnold next Saturday, by the time a different type of opportunity rolled around in 2003, he was in a position very different than someone like Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise (who had diversified their standing in the 1990's with other genres, something that, kindly, Schwarzenegger probably didn't have the range to pull off), and was ready for a new challenge.

(Spoilers Ahead) But let's back up and talk about Total Recall, one of the movies that is most-remembered from Arnold in the 1990's, and maybe one of his most interesting performances?  The film is about a world where there are literally people living on other planets, specifically Mars (though apparently also, defying all laws of physics, humans can also inhabit Saturn now), and Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker who wants to see Mars, because he keeps having bizarre dreams about a brunette woman there.  He eventually goes to a place that simulates a visit to Mars, and he requests that it be him as a spy, trying to save the planet as part of the vacation.  Before they can imprint the memory, though, the machine malfunctions, and it turns out that Quaid is a spy, and his wife Lori (Stone) is a secret agent, one who is working for Cohaagen (Cox), the ruthless governor of Mars who is basically having the people there living in poverty because he holds the keys to making the atmosphere habitable.  Quaid, whose actual name is Hauser, goes to Mars, and realizes the woman in his dreams is real, and part of a resistance on the planet to try and overthrow Cohaagen.

This is just part of the plot.  The best things about Total Recall are that they almost completely throw reality or sense or any sort of logical consistency in the script to hell (it backs up the fan theory that all of the scenes after Quaid is put in the chair are a false memory, one he doesn't wake up from before the credits).  This is partially because of Verhoeven's bananas filmography (he was inches away from making Sharon Stone, who is the best performance in this movie by a country mile, into a bonafide movie star in Basic Instinct), but mostly because it's way more fun.  At this point, we've seen a lot of violence from Arnold, but we haven't seen his playful side, and here we get a bit of that.  Schwarzenegger is not a good actor, and even with a decent director like Verhoeven, he can't perform miracles.  But this is a fun performance, one that leans in on the crazy ride and supporting cast of the movie (there's so much double-crossing you'll need a flow chart by the end of it to keep track), and I have to tip my hat to Schwarzenegger for pulling this off.

The film's makeup and visual effects are really what make it famous (how it didn't get a Makeup nomination in 1990, the world will never know).  The film leans in on the mutant freak aspect of the Martians (they look like humans who have been sent through burn makeup...except one woman is a stripper with three breasts because why not), and the effects use that makeup to their effect.  Honestly, this is weird to frame against Terminator 2, which would come out a year later, win the same Oscar (with the same leading man) but would revolutionize the industry while this would only be a good example of it, but the scenes on Mars, particularly the climactic creation of the atmosphere, is funny & thrilling.  I liked it.

Predator (1987)

Film: Predator (1987)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elpidia Carrilo, Carl Weathers, Richard Chaves, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura

Director: John McTiernan

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, like most movie stars, has had his love life pretty well-chronicled, but for most of his time as a movie star, it was largely linked to one woman.  He had dated English teacher Barbara Outland (who would eventually write a rather scathing memoir about their time together when he was running for reelection as governor in 2006) before he started acting regularly, but other than a brief fling with Eleanor Mondale in the late 1970's (when her father was vice president), his primary romantic partner was Maria Shriver, the daughter of Sargent & Eunice Shriver, and the niece of President Kennedy (meaning that Schwarzenegger, a future Republican Governor, did in fact date the scions of two major Democratic families).  Shriver & Schwarzenegger's romance was unconventional, but seemingly happy for much of its run.  They had four children, and their political views (while commonly-known) were largely kept quiet given that Shriver was a journalist at NBC at the time.  There was the fun juxtaposition of Arnold campaigning for George HW Bush in 1988 while Maria's senator uncle Ted was stumping for Michael Dukakis, but by-and-large they presented as a solid couple even though Schwarzenegger was repeatedly cheating on his wife (the unkind maxim about Kennedy women looking the other way on their philandering husbands definitely feeling accurate in this case), until it was outed that Schwarzenegger had father a love child with a maid (a story that conveniently happened when Schwarzenegger's political career was coming to a close).  The couple remained married for a decade after this, though, until 2021.

(Spoilers Ahead) The start of their marriage was happening when Schwarzenegger's film career 

was hitting a new height.  Freed of his contract with Dino de Laurentiis, he was able to start making major action films in the vein of someone like Sylvester Stallone, who at the time was a bigger star than Schwarzenegger in the genre even if that wouldn't last very long.  A big part of that was Predator in 1987, which featured Arnold as Major Dutch Schaefer on a rescue mission in Guatemala.  The film, like much of Arnold's movies of the 1980's, is short on actual plot.  All you need to know is that they are on a mission that will soon be deterred because they are being hunted by an extraterrestrial being that is not really referred to (the title word "predator" is never uttered in the movie).  His crew, one-by-one, is picked off, and it's left to Dutch to try to hunt the Predator largely solo, doing so through covering himself in mud (that disguises the creatures vision), eventually resulting him trapping the creature (and it then exploding itself in hopes of killing them both...which he doesn't).

Let's start with the movie and my thoughts before we talk about two oddities about this film in relation to Arnold's career.  First, it's a pretty good.  This is not Celine and Julie Go Boating or any such intellectual exercise as a picture, but it's solidly constructed and has a terrific special effects-driven bit of construction when it comes to the actual creature, both the invisibility effects and then (when it's revealed) the fantastically gross alien practical effects & makeup.  I also loved the film's Deliverance-style vibes, which honestly the further I get into this season, the more I realize that Deliverance had as much of an influence on action films as The Godfather did on mafia movies or Star Wars did on science-fiction.  The film also has one of my all-time favorite closing credits, which has all of the (mostly now dead) characters showing up again in title cards with the actors' names, all of them grinning cheesily like they're in a Mentos commercial...except Arnold who totally botches the concept by just being stoic.

Two things I want to note before we go here.  First, this stars Jesse Ventura in addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger-he plays heavy gunner Blain Cooper, one of the men who fall victim to the Predator in the film's first hour.  This is one of three films starring the two men, along with The Running Man and Batman & Robin.  Ventura would be elected the Governor of Minnesota in 1998 in one of the biggest upsets in American political history, five years before Schwarzenegger, and while they did not mirror each other stylistically in politics (Arnold was much more successful in the job & won reelection, Ventura was so unpopular he couldn't even run for a second term) they both represented a level of "entertainment being crucial in politics" that would come to a shocking result in 2016 on a national scale.

I will also end with this-the Predator films five sequels/prequels...none of which would feature Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger refused to make the sequel due to a salary dispute.  This was also a deterrent in sequels to Conan the Destroyer, Eraser, Total Recall, and Kindergarten Cop, as well as a long-gestating sequel to Twins.  Not all of these are totally attributable to Schwarzenegger's salary disputes (Twins 2 was lost in development hell for decades and eventually crashed with the death of Ivan Reitman), but it's a testament to Schwarzenegger's ability at the box office that he could forego solid paychecks like this, as well as his alleged difficulty offscreen that would result in studios walking away not thinking he was worth the money (or the effort) even with probable hits on their hands.  Compare this to some of his contemporaries like Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, & especially Sylvester Stallone, when sequels were being made, they tended to feature in them and take the easy paycheck (Jean-Claude van Damme, like Schwarzenegger, tended to not make it through negotiations).  This ended up being a blessing for Schwarzenegger for a while, we'll find with our final two movies, as going for an original concept (and with better directors) made him a much hotter property as a movie star than always needing to go back to the Rocky or Under Siege well.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Film: Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Sandahl Bergman, Ben Davidson, Mako, Max von Sydow

Director: John Milius

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was a different kind of movie star not because he came with an accent (so did Greta Garbo & Marlene Dietrich) nor because he was a muscle-bound figure (as we talked about a few months ago, Bruce Lee was totally jacked and a huge star both here and abroad).  Schwarzenegger's phenomenal success in large part stemmed from coming at the right time.  In the post-Jaws/Star Wars era, blockbusters were a regular thing, and something happened where we had the effects budget to regularly churn out big, sometimes gaudy action films (which would become Schwarzenegger's bread-and-butter), but also because home video became really important.  If you look at the early successes of Arnold's career (Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator), the films themselves were not massive successes.  Conan was a hit, sure, but its domestic box office was dwarfed by films like An Officer and a Gentleman, Porky's, and even a prestige drama like The Verdict.  The Terminator was the same situation-modest hit, but it was outgrossed by now forgotten films like Tightrope and Breakin'.

Why have you heard of these films as a result?  It's because Schwarzenegger became a star on home video.  Conan the Barbarian was one of four action flicks that Dino de Laurentiis made with Schwarzenegger in the 1980's, and the biggest calling card of these movies was that they would sell better than their theatrical grosses would indicate in the burgeoning home video market.  Conan would, by some estimates, nearly quadruple its initial gross through home video rentals & sales, and The Terminator would do similarly well.  Both films would eventually also have additional success through repeated showings on cable television.  As we'll talk more and more about Arnold over the remainder of the month, you're going to note that this is a pattern-Schwarzenegger was a huge star, but not always through traditional domestic box office like his predecessors, instead relying upon growing international markets & home video sales to ensure that he was always profitable and worth the exorbitant salaries he demanded from the studios...even on films that didn't click with American audiences.

(Spoilers Ahead) Which brings us to the movie, the first narrative film we're talking about with Arnold after last week's documentary.  The film follows Conan (Schwarzenegger), whose parents are murdered when he is a child by cult leader Thulsa Doom (Jones).  Afterward, he is taken into slavery, and forced to work at a mill that turns him into a glistening, muscle-bound gladiator (aka the Arnold we all know and love), and through his time as a gladiator gains his freedom.  This leads him on an adventure, one where he treks across the land to gain his revenge on Thulsa Doom, eventually finding him and beheading him in a dramatic fashion...that allowed for him to come back in a sequel (Arnold always likes to keep his options open for a sequel).

You may note that the intro is way longer than my description of the film, and that's because Conan is practically a silent movie it uses so little traditional dialogue, particularly from Arnold himself.  I can't find an exact account of this, but Schwarzenegger himself has roughly 24 lines in the movie, most of which are reserved for a scene where he beats up & steals from an effeminate priest who is clearly hitting on him (he does not have a line in the first 24 minutes nor the last 25 minutes of the picture).  This isn't unusual for some of Schwarzenegger's early films (I believe he has even less spoken dialogue in The Terminator) and given his limited ability as an actor even when he was actually talking, this may have been for the best.  But it also feels almost silly as it goes, and when he's paired with real performers (like a scene about halfway through the film when he's opposite acting god Max von Sydow), it reads as comically uneven.

But this is kind of the appeal of Dino de Laurentiis's movies (he was the film's producer).  De Laurentiis was capable of greatness (he made some of Fellini's best pictures), but by 1982 de Laurentiis was largely best-known for making profitable schlock.  With Schwarzenegger, he found a goldmine, and they would make four movies together.  The two would have a complicated relationship.  De Laurentiis would get rich off of these movies and Schwarzenegger would become a proper movie star by the end of their partnership (something he likely would've struggled to do in mainstream movies had they not gone down this path...it's easy to see him being more Chuck Norris than Sly Stallone without De Laurentiis's help), but the last two pictures they made together (Raw Deal and in particular Red Sonja) left such bad blood that Schwarzenegger vowed to never work with him again, which meant that the third chapter in the Conan movies never happened.

Which in its way is a pity, because I quite enjoy the camp value & silliness of de Laurentiis films in this era.  Arnold can't act, this is written with an overwrought pen, and it makes all of the actually talented actors in the movies feel like they're in some weird type of kabuki theater...but it's still very watchable.  There's something there...there's a reason this movie became a hit at home, because it's equal parts funny and entertaining, even if it's objectively not good.