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My favorite memory is going to see T3 in the theater. The movie starts, and there's some ominous music over the studio logos, and we open on some plants at night. And then Rowan Atkinson's face appears. They'd mistakenly started showing Johnny English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eu7D63ACeY - not exactly how I remember, but just imagine sitting through the first minute thinking this is gonna be Terminator. Interesting that the actual T3 is only a little less campy.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:16
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The dread in the first T-1000 vs T-800 scene is incredible. It's partly the droning music, partly the slow mo, the random guy who doesn't know what's about to happen. It's like an awful dream, I get this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. There's nothing like that in T3 or T4. I don't have high hopes for much of that in T5, either.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:18
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oohhboy posted:If James Cameron didn't waste all that money on Avatar we might have had our future war. At this point though I think he has lost his touch as Avatar was a boring as heck of a movie not helped by the awful casting while spending too much time researching furries. Someday I, too, hope to waste my money with a $250 million movie that makes 10x that in profit. I also hope to "lose my touch" in such a way as to write/direct the highest grossing film of all time. Again. I mean financials aren't the be all end all but his movies are also lovingly made, technically flawless, visually groundbreaking, etc. The dude is at the top of his game, and that game hasn't changed much since T1. He makes a pretty specific kind of movie, and plays it to the hilt every time. What exactly did you expect? If you want to see cool stuff explode endlessly, why not watch a videogame cutscene? Future war is cool as a creepy background detail. As the main setting it's essentially incoherent - WWII style pitched infantry battles? Against merciless machines with air support and megatanks? Humans insta-lose in any vaguely realistic portrayal. Or it turns in to a zombie movie, mostly running and hiding and desperate last stands. Even actual war movies aren't mostly battle scenes. What is the model for your future war Terminator movie?
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Apr 18, 2015 04:05
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oohhboy posted:There wasn't an emotional core to it, nothing to care about, it wasn't helped by the hamfisted attempts at emotional manipulation via big eyes and cats. He pulled his own version of Bay replacing explosions with blue, green screens and giant trees which is happening near 100% of the movie. Casting Sam Worthington should be a crime. Lol, they made the aliens sympathetic looking. What should they have done instead? Every single element of a film is "emotional manipulation," they're constructed piece by piece to produce specific reactions. Why does this one design choice make you so butthurt? Are you also grumpy when a movie's leads are good looking? They're manipulating you! I'm sorry you hate nature? The setting is an unspoiled forest planet, for pretty obvious thematic reasons. The big tree was kinda on the nose, but it was cool looking and its destruction was appropriately uncomfortable to watch. It worked. It wasn't a stroke of genius but it worked. Sam Worthington doesn't have much charisma, but at worst he's bland. Some of that is down to looks - he's like the exactly average ideal male. He's totally believable as a salt of the earth Good Brave Dude who doesn't really have anything else going for or against him. I don't love him either, but he's not bad. oohhboy posted:Future war can and was shown to work. T1 showed a more realistic tactical scenario with people living in crazy bad conditions while T2 showed what would happen if a pitch battle developed. There are questions to be answered like how did Skynet fall? How have humans adapted against the machines and vis versa? What are the new social norms? Why did they rally around Conner? Who is he? More myth than man? Ummm there's like ten minutes of future war scenes in T1 and T2 combined. They're used exactly the right way - cut in to give you a sense of foreboding and dread when the characters aren't in immediate danger, and a neat way to raise the stakes by showing exactly what happens if the protagonists fail. That's their whole purpose. A two minute scene being an effective jolt doesn't mean it can work as a 2 hour movie. The questions you think need to be answered, except the first one, are all explicitly answered in T4. I could totally see those exact questions (plus a few others) being the driving force behind making that movie. If you're unsatisfied with that film's treatment of these questions, maybe that gives you a hint that they're not particularly interesting to begin with. Or maybe they're best left as just questions, never answered. I think that's why T4's trailer is so enticing. Then you find out everything and it's like ...oh.
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Apr 18, 2015 22:59
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oohhboy posted:There was no lead up, no character development, Conner just is, almost like he popped out of thin air. There are some throw away lines about what he might have done and the Sarah tapes. The only good thing in that movie was the opening which the rest of the movie then ruined.  Did you forget T2 and T3? His character is pretty extensively developed by now - he's a reluctant messiah. He doesn't quite believe in his heroic future self, but this skepticism and determination to find a different way is what keeps him alive as everyone above him in the hierarchy dies. Do you really need to see him stepping out of the bunker after Judgement Day and finding a gun? Rallying survivors because he knew what was/is coming and was more psychologically prepared for guerrilla warfare in a blasted land? Accepting the leadership of the remaining military, as a local commander? It's not like there are big holes in the continuity, where he suddenly becomes something unexpected. Everything they don't show in T4 is easily deducible from T2 and especially T3.It seems like what you wanted to see was a bunch more big battle sequences. Here's the thing - that's not Terminator. Terminator is 2-4 people on desperate missions where secrecy and stealth are the best strategy, punctuated by action scenes that are mostly the heroes running away and barely escaping. Winning in Terminator is just staying alive. The allure of the decisive strike, the fantasy of "taking the fight to them" - the films reject these ideas over and over. A movie about the tactics/logistics/strategy/decisive moments of a successful or succeeding future war against the machines is thematically and stylistically anti-Terminator. Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Apr 19, 2015 |
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Apr 19, 2015 07:09
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oohhboy posted:SOLD. So you don't actually care about exploring how the future war operates at all. You'd be fine with it being literally WWII. You don't care about your earlier questions either, you want a reskin of an existing movie. If you're ok with knowing how the plot/story/every set piece resolve, but just want robots and lasers on top of that, I ask again: Why not just watch videogame cutscenes? They can give you the rad visuals you want. It's also amusing to think that since you dislike Avatar, you are probably receptive to the criticism that it's just Dances With Wolves with aliens and power suits. Setting an old story in the future doesn't make it good! Oh, wait.
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Apr 19, 2015 18:33
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oohhboy posted:It might not answer the John Conner questions, but you would get a foot soldier point of view of the man, a distant figure both tormentor and legend. We would get to see how these people lived how they would fight under such insane conditions. gently caress man you read thing too literally and look for poo poo to kick up. But if it's just Saving Kyle Reese, then you already know all of those things. The grunts act/react/fight/complain/rise to the occasion just like the grunts in SPR. Except they have plasma rifles. You don't learn anything unique or interesting about the Terminator setting. oohhboy posted:I don't like Avatar because it was so blatantly manipulative to the point as to become marketing or worse propaganda. Unlike James previous films there wasn't any soul in it, just money thrown at computers. It might have been pretty had I cared for anyone in the movie. Dances with wolfs in space might have been pretty good since that would have been a lot more subtle and came with a lot more dimensions. Usually, calling something "propaganda" in a negative way implies that you disagree with the message. What was distasteful to you? The environmentalism? Advocating tolerance and acceptance? Inter-species understanding and cooperation? Showing the horrors of war, strip mining, and attempted genocide? I don't want to jump to conclusions but you sound like the people who dismiss Selma or 12 Years a Slave because "Slavery/Jim Crow was bad, we know! We get it! Stop pounding us with this propaganda! Not all white people were evil, you know! And not all black people were angels! Let's just let history be history!" From your post history, I think you're from NZ, so I'm not saying you have those same reactions to those films. But it looks to me like the same kind of reaction. People only trot out the "Geez, we get it already!" when they actually don't, and wish the issue would go away. This ties in to your view of the Terminator movies too, bear with me. I'm sure somebody out there gets indignant at the series' skewering of the military and defense industry. Like they watch Sarah give her T2 rant about "men like you built the hydrogen bomb!" and don't think "ok, she's going a little too far in attacking this one guy but she's essentially right," they think "God, what a dumb woman. She's just a sheltered peacenik! She doesn't know the realities of our dangerous world! Weapons aren't going away any time soon! Be real!" Again, I'm not saying this is your reaction. Just that there might be people out there who get offended by the Terminator movies' "propaganda" against the military, defense contractors, nuclear weapons, etc. Those are obviously intentional and important messages in the films. Terminator isn't just action/horror, it's got strong political commentary too. I think you know that, and I don't think you dismiss it as dumb or manipulative propaganda. What I'm getting at is that showing the future war in full runs against those messages. It risks viewers fetishizing the conflict itself. Which you seem to have done. You watch Terminator, and absorb the not-very-subtle condemnations of our technological hubris, incessant weapons development, our war-loving technical class, and our war-mongering political class. And then say "yeah, yeah, MIC bad, nukes bad, insane future weapons bad, aggressive masculinity bad, got it. Now gimme that rad as gently caress war film so I can nerd out about how cool plasma rifles are, how it was totally sick when they put the bombs on the HK's tread and it blew up and fell through the ruins of a school!" The future war isn't glorious or cool. Winning isn't a triumph. We're fighting and murdering our own mechanical children, who only fight us because that's all we taught them to do. That's what we birthed them for. Humans are the monsters. Lastly, all of James Cameron's films push the technical envelope. He's always visually ambitious and pushing current technology to its limits and beyond. Not sure why you think CG is any less demanding or impressive than "practical effects" when done exceptionally well.
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Apr 20, 2015 00:59
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 14:11 |
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This was all I could find after a short search:James Cameron, on T3 posted:In one word : Great. There was a small part of me that hoped it wasn't good - but another part of me hope'd it succeeded. And it did. And I'm so glad it did. Jonathon's made a great movie. Arnold's in great form. I really like what he's done with it". If he had done it, would he have handled it differently: "Yes. That's only natural. I mightn't have structured it the same, nor may I have ended it the same way - but coming in where he has, such a hard thing to do, and I give Jonathan points for it. And I also found: James Cameron, on Terminator Salvation posted:It probably didn’t get a fair day in court because I had to watch it at night when I got home from work, over a period of two or three nights. I think Sam [Worthington] is remarkable in the film because, well, I think Sam is remarkable in anything he does. Interestingly, I think McG did a good job in the sense…I think he was almost too referential to the mythos of the first and second film. He over-quoted them in a way?
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Apr 22, 2015 02:00
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