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MisterBibs posted:It's Cameron himself that got us into the timeline chicanery in the first place by It's not a reach at all. Cameron had to cut a lot of material out of both films for budget/length concerns. He had a very elaborate story with Judgment Day, the aftermath, labor camps, and the war against the machines. It was never supposed to happen overnight. I don't why people can't accept the fact that Sarah is the true hero of the story. She doesn't need a man or cyborg to raise her son and make him strong. People are so caught up in the fact that it's a move, and Reese is supposed to be the father, but in real life poo poo happens, and not everyone finds their soul mate. The original John Connor could have been a rape baby for all we know.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:00
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ing his shoulders and tossing away the "the world is hosed, deal with it" tone from the first film in order to justify a second movie's existence.
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Pops Ghostly posted:People are so caught up in the fact that it's a move, and Reese is supposed to be the father, but in real life poo poo happens, and not everyone finds their soul mate. The original John Connor could have been a rape baby for all we know.  We know who the father of John Connor is, because there's only ever been one father of John Connor. The dude sent back to protect his mother is the same dude who impregnates her. That's the gimmick of the movie.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:08
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Pops Ghostly posted:I don't why people can't accept the fact that Sarah is the true hero of the story. She doesn't need a man or cyborg to raise her son and make him strong. People are so caught up in the fact that it's a move, and Reese is supposed to be the father, but in real life poo poo happens, and not everyone finds their soul mate. The original John Connor could have been a rape baby for all we know.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:09
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I think one thing that's sort of worth pointing out is Sarah went from waitress college student to a hardened, jaded survivor, but it doesn't mean that just meeting Kyle and hearing about John and the future are the only things that could have turned her life around in such an radical way. A timeline without time travel occurring still might have had things happen to have affected Sarah enough to unintentionally groom John into a resistance figure in the future. I don't contend that the films as we see them are not supposed to be some variation of a closed loop, but I sort of also believe there's a chance of there being some timeline that might have existed independent of that which created that loop.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:15
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JediTalentAgent posted:I don't contend that the films as we see them are not supposed to be some variation of a closed loop, but I sort of also believe there's a chance of there being some timeline that might have existed independent of that which created that loop. A closed loop by definition always exists/has always existed, that's why it's a paradox. If you take the Terminator films as a whole, it's clearly not a closed loop, because the events of T1 alter the timeline and so we get T2, which alters it further and we get T3. The discussion of closed loops vs a single altered timeline depends entirely on the scope of the discussion; T1 taken alone is pretty obviously a closed loop paradox but if you widen the scope to all of the Terminator films then that's no longer the case.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:22
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I can imagine few if any more inane ways to discuss the Terminator films than trying to nail down their time travel mechanics. Maybe it'd be more inane to just discuss the leading actresses' boobs, but I'm not even sure of that.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:22
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WarLocke posted:The discussion of closed loops vs a single altered timeline depends entirely on the scope of the discussion; T1 taken alone is pretty obviously a closed loop paradox but if you widen the scope to all of the Terminator films then that's no longer the case. I don't entirely agree with this either. It might not be a perfect closed loop, but T3 makes it clear that while some particular events might be different in style, they'll ultimately be the same events. There will always be a technological development that destroys the world, the survivors resist and fight back, and both sides send back units into the past to alter/prevent it.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:29
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God drat it who really cares about timeline logic. Deep down all we want are 2 solid hours of humans and robots battling across a nightmarish hellscape. Enemy at the Gates with plasma rifles and robo-tanks the size of apartment buildings and 747-sized drones and so many skulls that everyone will walk out of that theater with a thousand-yard stare and take individual initiative to stabilize their world.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:32
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Der Luftwaffle posted:God drat it who really cares about timeline logic. quote:Deep down all we want are 2 solid hours of humans and robots battling across a nightmarish hellscape.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:34
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That's why in part I said some variation of a closed loop. It's sort of now like a computer program that has some bad code in it that got exploited that when you do something you weren't supposed to do. It accidentally throws you into some function that's stable but it keeps repeating and you can't get out of. From the perspective of everything in the loop, it looks completely self-contained, but outside of it you can see why it happened in the first place. Admittedly, that's going a long way for my stupid fantasy time travel tangent theory. JediTalentAgent fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 07:36
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Let us take perhaps the most basic form of the time-travel scenario found in science-fiction stories, the so-called time-loop or time-paradox. It is a story in which the time-traveller journeys into the future, writes down the plans for a time-travel machine, and then sends them back to themselves in the past so that they can then build one to travel into the future. What is the real enigma here? it is not simply that the scientist or researcher is able to travel into either the future or past, After all, this is what is 'explained' by the existence of the time-machine. Rather, it is the possibility that the time-traveller, by the very act of deciding to travel to the past, subtly alters the complex chain of causes and effects that led them to doing so in the first place. As a result, nothing in the past ends up being able to explain the decision - we can never exactly repeat events the same way - and yet this only because the decision has already been made. And in a good time-travel narrative, this 'indecision' takes place at every moment. Every moment on the time-traveller's circuit absolutely must have happened the way it did for it to be completed and is entirely open, a moment when events might have turned out differently. Indeed, it is only because the decision has been made, because events do repeat themselves, because the circle is complete, that we are able to think that the decision might not have been made, that everything might have turned out differently, that the circle might have been broken. The decision is at once necessary (everything has already happened) and impossible (always deferred), one because of the other. All this is what is at stake in that 'arrest' of historical time we see in [Walter] Benjamin's 'messianism'. This 'arrest', this act of grasping the hidden revolutionary potential in a situation in a kind of stopping of time, holds, to put it in terms of language, the place of a certain excluded diachronic element that allows the formation of a synchronic system (and, as with Žižek's discussion of this in For The Know Not, this fantasy of time-travel is fundamentally a fantasy of the primal scene, of seeing our own conception). That is, what we have in historicism, as in language, is a synchronic system, in which every part is dependent for its meaning on every other part: the past and the future are intertwined. This is the difficulty of thinking anything as the origin of such a system (for example, of capitalism), for as soon as we say what it is, we find that it is preceded by another, that it can only be understood in terms of the system itself. But precisely what Benjamin is trying to imagine is what is excluded to allow this. What does any historical explanation, which is ultimately only a fantasy of witnessing our own origins, stand in for? Is there not a kind of primal 'act' or 'trauma' that every named act takes the place of, which allows this 'fantasy' of entirely accounting for ourselves, of seeing ourselves from somewhere else? As Žižek writes: "The very emergence of a synchronous symbolic order implies a gap, a discontinuity in the diachronic causal chain that led up to it, a 'missing link' in the chain. Fantasy [the fantasy, we might say, of time-travel or indeed of historical explanation] is an a contrario proof that the status of the subject is that of a 'missing link', of a void which, within the synchronous set, holds the place of its foreclosed diachronic genesis." It is in this sense that Žižek speaks of what he calls, after Frederic Jameson, the 'vanishing mediator'. [...] The 'vanishing mediator' is not to be used to historicize an event, to provide a more detailed causal explanation for it, but - to paraphrase Benjamin - is a kind of 'arrest' or stopping-point that stands in for the excluded diachronic dimension of any historical explanation. That is, like the act itself, the vanishing mediator is not simply to be written back into the historical record, because it is also what must be left out for this record to be constituted. And if it testifies to a certain moment of 'undecidability' in the unfolding of events, a moment when things hung in the balance and could have turned out differently, it is an 'undecidability' that is only thinkable against the background of how events actually did turn out, an 'undecidability' that is not to be realized but haunts and makes possible every reality. It is an 'undecidability' - like Benjamin's 'revolutionary potential', like object a - that comes about only as its loss, that exists in the very from of its loss. [...] Far from vanishing, it is the one thing, in all its different guises, that always remains the same. It is what we eventually stumble over in any attempt to explain something historically, what resists when all else has been rationalized. To put it another way, in the time-travel story, everything is accounted for: the future explains the past as the past leads to the future. And yet there is one thing that cannot be accounted for - and that is the decision to travel back in time in the first place. And, again, if this decision is no sooner named than it is shown to be overdetermined, explained by a whole series of causes and effects, in another way this system is not possible until after this decision; this system is nothing but the infinite attempt to take the place of, explain, this decision. If this decision is infinitely predicted, must already have occurred for a symbolic order to exist at all, is is impossible to explain; it comes about only through an extraordinary act of will. For the true enigma of time-travel scenarios - from the Terminator series through to Groundhog Day - is why, if the future has already been determined, if future events must already have happened for the present to be the way it is, do we nevertheless have a sense that events could go astray at any moment, that things could turn out otherwise? At once - as revealed in Zeno's paradoxes and Benjamin's 'messianic' history - there is no difference between any two moments (the future is already in the past) and we can never get from one moment to the next (an infinite distance lies between them). At each moment ... the circle is closed, the decision has already been made, no act is necessary, and the future is uncertain, no decision has been made, only an act of supreme will can get us from one moment to the next. The circle is what does away with the will, what means that there is no need for a decision; and the circle is possible only because of a decision, is the one thing that demands that there must be a decision. And we see in all this ... that repetition and the act are not opposed, but that each implies the other, each is possible only because of the other. -Rex Butler, "Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory"
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Dec 21, 2014 10:11
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Pops Ghostly posted:If it aint Cameron, it aint Terminator. As far as that quote, you have to remember that the war did not start immediately. Skynet nuked the planet, and those that survived went underground. Skynet began manufacturing the cyborgs so they could engage the human survivors on a personal level. Some were put into camps, and others were killed on the spot. When Kyle says that Sarah trained John before the war, he didn't mean she had prior knowledge of Judgment Day. He meant that after the nuclear holocaust Sarah went underground with her son, and taught him to be a survivor. The quote in the post you are quoting specifically says that she was in hiding before the war. Also, John gives Kyle her photo months in advance so that he can obsess over it, Kyle isn't just randomly picked at the time of the time displacement device capture. The photo is also taken at the very same age that Sarah was when Kyle met her, with a distant look of loss on her face, riding a jeep in the desert. Are we to believe that in some "original" timeline that this waitress bought a Jeep and headed to Mexico, without prompting of a Terminator/Kyle, and had that exact look on her face? Even when T2 retcons the closed loop somewhat, afaik the script does not say that the T1000/T800 are sent back in response to an altered timeline. Instead, it retcons T1 to say that they were both sent back minutes after the T800/Kyle all along, but Kyle wasn't aware of it. AdmiralViscen fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 15:40
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ruddiger posted:Are you going into the new Star Wars movies with the same opinion? This mindset is almost as childish as xenomrph's "EVERYTHING IS CANON AND ANYTHING WITH TERMINATORS/ALIENS/PREDATORS IS A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH, INCLUDING MY SELF-INSERTED SLASH FIC AND THE BIG TITTY ANIME STATUES WITH TERMINATOR/ALIEN/PREDATOR HEADS SWAPPED ONTO THEM WHICH ADORN MY SINGLE BEDROOM APARTMENT." It's mostly that the other movies are bad and don't follow themes of the originals. It;s really not childish and is actually completely opposed to the "everything is canon" mindset because it requires looking at the material on its own merits. Although I guess you just mean the guy simplifying it to "if it's not Cameron it's not Terminator" when he probably meant what I said. Snowman_McK posted:But you don't get the idea that he was an optimist. That he looked at it, and all he could see was the good. It just adds a nice "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" element. His first reaction to hearing the future is that he's going to be sick and immediately agrees to their plan to destroy it all. The scene with his family isn't a bad scene, but it is extraneous. AdmiralViscen posted:Even when T2 retcons the closed loop somewhat, afaik the script does not say that the T1000/T800 are sent back in response to an altered timeline. Instead, it retcons T1 to say that they were both sent back minutes after the T800/Kyle all along, but Kyle wasn't aware of it. The Terminators are sent back at the same time (in the original script for T2 the soldiers move on to the next room after Kyle is sent through and see it also sent back an experimental Terminator to 1995 and they pick an Arnold off a rack to send back to protect John). Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 15:47
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Groovelord Neato posted:The Terminators are sent back at the same time (in the original script for T2 the soldiers move on to the next room after Kyle is sent through and see it also sent back an experimental Terminator to 1995 and they pick an Arnold off a rack to send back to protect John). Yea, that's what I said. T2 at least makes some effort to maintain a closed loop. The T1000 is not sent back in response to the events of T1, it was always sent back. Gotcha, my mistake \/ AdmiralViscen fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 15:52
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Yeah I'm just backing you up because a bunch of people seem to misunderstand that part of the movies.
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Dec 21, 2014 15:58
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Der Luftwaffle posted:God drat it who really cares about timeline logic. 
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Dec 21, 2014 18:00
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Sasquatch! posted:Getting too serious about events in the Terminator series usually eventually devolves into someone saying "You DO know we're having an argument about cyborg assassins sent back in time from the future, right??" There should be a name for that, like "Connor's Law" or something. It's not that I think the Terminator series is too ridiculous to argue about; it's that I think "time travel mechanics" is a ridiculous thing to argue about regardless of the series, and the Terminator series (or at least parts of it) are too good to argue about something that ridiculous. Argue about themes any day, or quality of different installments. But time travel mechanics are stupid, because people get into their heads their own ideas about how it "should" work, when in reality we have no idea because there's no such thing as time travel in real life.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:44
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Groovelord Neato posted:
This is true, but this just suggests he hasn't thought it through. The extra scene turns him into a similar character to Hammond in Jurassic Park. A good man, an optimist, who accidentally dooms us all.
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Dec 22, 2014 06:28
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Snowman_McK posted:This is true, but this just suggests he hasn't thought it through. The extra scene turns him into a similar character to Hammond in Jurassic Park. A good man, an optimist, who accidentally dooms us all. Yeah. I really like the scene for that reason. I'm also pretty sure I've never seen the original cut of T2, only the Director's Cut.
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Dec 22, 2014 06:55
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exquisite tea posted:Six Feet Under & the Sopranos did that, what, fifteen years ago now? Not saying TV writers don't love to use that trope, but it has been a thing for a pretty long time. Who on Sopranos had an imaginary head character?
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Dec 22, 2014 11:28
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Pops Ghostly posted:T3 is not cannon. The only thing that matters are the first two films. Whatever Cameron intended with the T1, he had a different outlook with T2. That's all that matters. Pops Ghostly posted:If it aint Cameron, it aint Terminator. Thats like, your opinion, man. Cheer up.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:20
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Groovelord Neato posted:The Terminators are sent back at the same time (in the original script for T2 the soldiers move on to the next room after Kyle is sent through and see it also sent back an experimental Terminator to 1995 and they pick an Arnold off a rack to send back to protect John). Terminator 2 script " Skynet, the computer which controlled the machines, sent two terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human Resistance... John Connor. My son. The first terminator was programmed to strike at me, in the year 1984... before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself, when he was still a child. As before, the Resistance was able to send a lone warrior. A protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first... " No talk about another room, no insurance policy poo poo, take your fanfiction back to GBS! Terminator 2, a sweet movie, was just wedged into the movies like every single sequel, shut the gently caress up already.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:39
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That's from the final draft, pal.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:19
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Tenzarin posted:No talk about another room, no insurance policy poo poo, take your fanfiction back to GBS! Terminator 2, a sweet movie, was just wedged into the movies like every single sequel, shut the gently caress up already. So simmer down Bevis, before flying off the handle and making a fool of yourself.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:18
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Tenzarin posted:No talk about another room, no insurance policy poo poo, take your fanfiction back to GBS! Terminator 2, a sweet movie, was just wedged into the movies like every single sequel, shut the gently caress up already. You weren't good at this in GBS and you aren't good at it here - you're not quoting the original script.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:27
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final draft is the canon, not your lovely fan fiction.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:38
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I'm pretty sure the canon is the old and new testaments.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:41
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It is not cannon, but it is the text. One of the funny things about Not Getting Theory is the idea that it has no objective standard of truth. But look: one of you is quoting the movie, the "text" we are discussing, and the other is citing an unused script as if it is somehow a more authentic than the movie itself. The former is making true statements about the movie, the later is not. That is the difference between discussing "cannon" and discussing movies which SMG likes to try to point out. Feel free to discuss cannon, which is itself a bizarre and fascinating genre, but don't confuse that for discussing the movie. e: I can't remember the username, but there is a poster who is a huge loving Alien fanboy and makes great posts on the comics and so forth. They're a good example of how you can talk about cannon without it getting in the way of thinking about the movies in other ways. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 22:54
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It's not really discussing canon at least from my perspective - it's kind of easy to figure from inference that the Terminators were sent back at the same time. That's just some text to back up what Cameron intended.Hodgepodge posted:e: I can't remember the username, but there is a poster who is a huge loving Alien fanboy and makes great posts on the comics and so forth. They're a good example of how you can talk about cannon without it getting in the way of thinking about the movies in other ways. Xenomrph
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Dec 22, 2014 22:59
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Groovelord Neato posted:That's just some text to back up what Cameron intended. Well since he left it on the floor, and you picked through it like garbage. If its not there in the movies, that's pretty much fan fiction land. It got cut for a reason and it was for necromancy.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:04
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Tenzarin posted:Well since he left it on the floor, and you picked through it like garbage. If its not there in the movies, that's pretty much fan fiction land. It got cut for a reason and it was for necromancy. On the other hand nothing in the film itself contradicts it and while it might have been cut for time, berevity, theme or a bunch of other reasons it does give us a glance into what the people who were writing the film thought of the plot when they were writing it. Edit: Even just look at the concept art. The concept art designed for this scene that was ultimately cut is currently being reused for the time travel scene in the new film.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:12
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Tenzarin posted:Well since he left it on the floor, and you picked through it like garbage. If its not there in the movies, that's pretty much fan fiction land. It got cut for a reason and it was for necromancy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwjojvRNI4
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Dec 22, 2014 23:33
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The reason why that was brought up is because someone is trying to claim that there is some "original" timeline that precedes the events of T1 where John Connor has a different father. We are talking about scripts to refute that claim, which is way more imaginary than the simultaneous Teminator concept. T1, at the least, is a closed loop. T2 was written in alignment with that - the T1000 event is not said to have been set into motion due to the timeline of events being altered by the events of T1. That was the conversation leading up to the script talk.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:37
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They should of sent back the terminator like in the civil war, there's like no way they could of stopped it.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:40
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I think Skynet doesn't want to risk killing so many humans that it never gets created. Obviously if its goal was just to kill all humans, it'd go back to like caveman times and kill every ape it sees.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:48
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Lurdiak posted:I think Skynet doesn't want to risk killing so many humans that it never gets created. Obviously if its goal was just to kill all humans, it'd go back to like caveman times and kill every ape it sees. I wanna see Terminaper so bad
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Dec 23, 2014 01:58
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McSpanky posted:I wanna see Terminaper so bad 
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Dec 23, 2014 02:00
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I've thought a Western-themed Terminator would be quite good for some time. The Back To The Future Part Three of the Terminator franchise.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:12
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So in Salvation Skynet activates a single T-800 to chase after Conner in the factory where they are building T-800s. I know this is minor in a film with so many flaws but come the gently caress on.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:42
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LaughMyselfTo posted:I've thought a Western-themed Terminator would be quite good for some time. The Back To The Future Part Three of the Terminator franchise.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:44
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