Android Apocalypse posted:

Back in college for a comics writing class, I wrote a pitch idea for a Terminator story where Skynet learns that Kyle Reese is the father and starts sending Terminators back in time to end that bloodline.

One such mission has the Resistance sending a guy back to 1943, where we find out one of Reese's ancestors was a guard at Dachau (and a particularly nasty one to boot). I liked the idea of the moral dilemma where Reese's lineage came from something pretty horrible, but the future of humanity seemed that this shitheel needed to survive.

My professor gave me a B, but said "Dark Horse isn't going to take a solicitation for a licensed property."

quote:

Prior to Terminator 2, not only had Edward Furlong never acted before, he had no ambitions to become an actor either. That was until he was discovered by casting director Marti Finn at a Boys' Club in Pasadena, California. Several child actors had auditioned for the role of John Connor, but none had felt "streetwise" enough for the part. That led Finn to try and find a non-professional, which she did in Furlong. When she approached him, Furlong gave her the kind of too cool for the room attitude she had been looking for.

To top things off, Furlong's personal story mirrored John Connor's in some notable ways, in that he had grown up without a father and had been separated from his mother. Furlong's casting hit a rocky patch, when his first reading alongside Linda Hamilton went poorly, apparently due to him being intimidated by the veteran actor. James Cameron came close to moving on, but Finn convinced the director to give Furlong another shot.

Owlbear Camus posted:

Apparently we were very close to having an actual actor in the part, but alas

Wa11y posted:

Technocrat posted:

I really didn't like Dark Fate's conceit of "we defeated skynet and its terminators, but then a *new* supercomputer with the exact same modus operandi appeared, right down to the humanoid robots called terminators."

Xenomrph posted:

I think that was sort of a necessary conceit of bringing in a “new” John Connor equivalent who has no knowledge of her apparently apocalyptic destiny, which is a novel way to spin what’s otherwise an aging franchise constant.

The thing I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was Carl’s dedication to Sarah Connor after he killed John as a child, more specifically the nuts and bolts (no pun intended) of his actions. Like okay I guess I can understand an assassin robot developing a conscience after completing its mission and acting to retroactively subvert its creator, that’s a pretty novel idea for the franchise. Likewise, having time travel “orphans” divorced from their originating timeline is a neat idea that hadn’t been explored before. The thing is, how did it know where and when those other Terminators were going to arrive in the “past”? And more specifically, how could it know about the Rev-9, which wasn’t sent by Skynet and didn’t exist when Carl was presumably sent back?

The one thing Genisys foreshadowed right from jump was that you weren’t viewing the “original” timeline from ‘The Terminator’ and that timeline fuckery was afoot: the T-800 endoskeleton designs are subtly but intentionally different from the “classic” model from the prior 4 films. The ones in the future war prologue are different, Pops is different, and the “1984” Arnold is different.
What would have caused this branch/change isn’t explored, and given that John Connor gets mugged in the future war bit right as Kyle goes back in time implies that no other time travelers are sent after him (such as Pops) which either begs the question of where Pops came from, or if it means time travel doesn’t just create branching timelines, but that there’s a system in place for picking your destination timeline - either Pops was sent to the one that we see play out in the movie, which contained whatever Terminator killed Sarah’s parents, the T-1000 in 1984, revised 1984 Arnold, and Skynet John Connor, or Kyle was sent to a timeline with Pops, the other Terminator, 1984 Arnold, and the T-1000 and then Skynet John followed Kyle to that specific timeline (as opposed to, say, the original one seen in ‘The Terminator’).

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

I get what you're saying, but, who loving cares? Maybe it's time to take the concept and do something new with it instead of rousing the former Governor of California awake with signs of money. Or maybe just make a new idea, hold on, with the same concepts, but new characters

Quote-Unquote posted:

The Terminator and T2 work in the same way that Alien and Aliens work. And none of the sequels do.

Start with a sci-fi horror premise.
Do enough world building that makes us want to know more.
Genuinely menacing sequences of the killer stalking the prey.
Characters we like get killed off.
Protagonist just barely.
Protagonist learns a lesson and is fundamentally changed as a person.
SEQUEL TIME!
Ramp everything up. Multiply the number of baddies*.
Protagonist now has a motherly instinct for child character and turns into a badass momma bear.
More action, more guns, more shooting, more quips.
Protagonist gotta learn to work with things that she hates because of the first film.
Protagonist and child character barely survive.
Protagonist learns a lesson and is fundamentally changed as a person.

*okay so T2 only had one major baddie but factor in the police, the hospital guards etc and I think it counts.

Alien 3 is the only sequel to either franchise that I at least kind of like. It's deeply flawed but it took our protagonist from 2 and put her back into what should have been a horror film. What could possibly be a scarier premise than 'Alien, but now you're trapped with an Alien as well as any number of rapists and murderers, try to get them to cooperate with you because they will all die if they don't but they might just be monsters that don't give a poo poo if they die'?
Except it's largely an action film, like all of the Terminator sequels.

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

Terminator is a good movie and so is Alien, but their sequels suck, and are are boring

Quote-Unquote posted:

T2 and Aliens are both very good films but both are inferior to the Terminator and Alien respectively.

040224 posted:

these people and the easy button. good lord talk about robo-addicted

Quote-Unquote posted:

T2 and Aliens are both very good films but both are inferior to the Terminator and Alien respectively.

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

who loving cares?

Montague Tigg posted:

I have watched and enjoyed all of the Alien and Terminator films multiple times and I think this is the reason why

TIP posted:

both versions suck

in dark fate they do something very similar to the one you wanted though

arnie is going to leave his house and then he sees his own sunglasses sitting on a table, so he stops and looks at them, then picks them up, and after a moment puts them back down and walks out

I hated it

Quote-Unquote posted:

The crane chase is loving brilliant. I think it's probably the best extended action sequence in any of the Terminator films, even, that's how much I think it rules. Watching T2 the other day I forgot how short the LA river chase actually is, even though it's extremely exciting. Buuuuut I think this is where they spent most of the budget because holy gently caress so much of this film looks really cheap. Loads of the sets are barely decorated at all and this is really poorly disguised by having only a couple of camera angles focusing on more or less the same spot.

MakaVillian posted:

I know Sarah is supposed to be very embittered and a bit unhinged but Linda Hamilton was a bit too over the top with it.

Parkingtigers posted:

Alright, I got one. Why did the Terminators invent guns that can kill Terminators? When the T-800 is in a 1984 gun shop and asking for a plasma rifle, and in the future war sequences you see all sorts of high tech pew pew.

We know that stuff wasn't invented before Judgement Day. Presumably humans, nearly wiped out in a nuclear war and surviving like rats trying to fight robots and the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust weren't in a position for any weapons R&D programmes. So it had to be the machines deciding to create better weapons, which in turn gave humans weapons they could steal and use to kill machines. If things had stayed at bullets level, the Terminators would have been able to kill humans while being almost indestructible.

redshirt posted:

What tha hell??


*lightning strikes an old man's dumpster

Parkingtigers posted:

Alright, I got one. Why did the Terminators invent guns that can kill Terminators? When the T-800 is in a 1984 gun shop and asking for a plasma rifle, and in the future war sequences you see all sorts of high tech pew pew.

We know that stuff wasn't invented before Judgement Day. Presumably humans, nearly wiped out in a nuclear war and surviving like rats trying to fight robots and the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust weren't in a position for any weapons R&D programmes. So it had to be the machines deciding to create better weapons, which in turn gave humans weapons they could steal and use to kill machines. If things had stayed at bullets level, the Terminators would have been able to kill humans while being almost indestructible.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

Skynet, being a military computer made by Americans, just loving loves guns.

Xenomrph posted:

That and when you really get into it, Skynet just isn’t that smart. It had a massive first-strike advantage and then spent the rest of the war developing increasingly impractical ways to hunt down individual humans instead of making, like, nerve gas and just gassing the entire planet.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

Personifying Skynet was a dumb move. Obviously the first AI humans invent won't be a masterpiece with human like thoughts or desires. It's a poorly optimized human killing machine made by a poorly optimized military to kill humans. That's what's great about that line in the first one - You can't reason with these things. They're just machines programmed to kill humans.