Neo Rasa posted:

Terminator 3 is a lot of fun, I genuinely like it even if it obviously can't compare to Terminator and Terminator 2. Not being able to compared to Terminator and Terminator 2 is something that's true of most sci-fi action movies out there though.

Salvation is such a waste. There is actually some incredible effects work in that movie. Michael Ironside is a human resistance general in it. It takes place entirely during the future war against the machines. And yet 3/4 of the film consists of Christian Bale and which ever other character is around at that time standing in a room arguing about nothing. It commits the worst sin of all by being BORING.

I'm really excited about this new one from the trailer since, like, there's now a way it will be boring, it will either be rad or so bad it has to be seen to be believed.

Salvation, man, gently caress that movie.

Talk to the hand was the only funny moment in Terminator 3 that really got a chuckle out of me. The star glasses at the beginning was great in a theater opening night because everyone was hyped so everyone laughed but in general most of the humor fell flat. The amazing deleted Sgt. Candy scene should have been left in if they wanted to go a more comedic way with it.

zVxTeflon posted:

oohhboy posted:

Lena Hedley never got the look. Had some of the mannerisms, but it was a crazy high bar to match how great Linda Hamilton was. It was never going to happen so wisely they took it is a slightly different direction. Not to mention Sarah was suppose to be "Shacking up" with anybody who was willing to give material support or training.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Terminator Salvation is actually really good because it has fantastic cinematography, and robot designs that trade menace for sheer surrealism. The story is both functional enough to make basic sense, and dysfunctional enough to be weird and interesting.

Folks complaining that Connor ends up in a hand-to-hand fight scene, and that Skynet gets a face, are really trying too hard to find a 'jump the shark' moment. Skynet's 'face' is the traditional skull with faces ripped from your memory and grafted onto it. Folks miss that, in a different sequence, Skynet is more accurately visualized as an abstract constellation of nodes. I like that its attempts at communication are clumsy. And then, the prolonged fight scenes fit the tone of this film, where a rehash of Terminator 1 would be inappropriate.

This is a film where the baddies built, essentially, an extremely large man to physically pick people up and put them in baskets. Tactical realism is right off the table. That's War Of The Worlds imagery. The motorcycles are H.R. Geiger things with skeletons welded into a rigid bullet shape. The impression I get is not of the usual zombie-film demand for hypervigilance, but of a languid Skynet that moves with dull confidence. That's personality.

quote:

Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Axetrain posted:

So how bad is Genisys gonna be?

quote:

Since I don't give a whit about canonicity or hyperbolic vitriol, there's nothing in this post for me to glom on to.

Wolfsheim posted:

Why did the T-850 crush the gay pink star glasses for making him look silly when earlier in the same scene he literally thinks he's supposed to talk to the guy's hand?

Why didn't Marcus realize something was up in the several days between waking up and getting blown up by that landmine when he didn't have to eat or go to the bathroom?

What did that group of unseemly rapists mean when they told Moon Bloodgood "machines don't bother us, we don't bother them" just before they try to rape her? Weren't machines constantly patrolling and killing any human they came across in the very ruins the rapists lived in?

Did you remember Common was in Terminator Salvation? Does anyone?

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Nope, still don't care. I like things that are different.

oohhboy posted:

There isn't a jump the shark moment in T4 as its component parts collectively jumps the shark. The movie doesn't come down until the end credits leaving a "What the hell was that?!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubckx7X2Nd4

INH5 posted:

However, I do think the part where Arny gets reprogrammed to kill Conner and ends up fighting off the reprogramming with "heroic willpower" was dumb. This was a chance to emphasize how Terminators are just remorseless killing machines and their "loyalty" can be changed with a simple flip of a switch, but no we get tired old mind control cliches. This was something that the Sarah Conner Chronicles handled much, much better, in its Season 2 premiere.

Ross posted:

I love the fight scene in Terminator 3, it's amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGZP-W25U

Highlights:
- Ripping a urinal from the wall and beating the T-X over the head with it
- T-X piledriver into the toilet

T3 has some regrettable bits but overall I liked it.

ephori posted:

My hope is that the new film spends as little time as possible trying to explain it's complicated chronology; hopefully, zero time. Leave that to the internet and focus on being a good movie. Where everything fits into the timeline is literally the least important factor.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The canonical approach can't explain what's going on in the movies because, obviously, terminators and time travel don't actually exist.

Of course, everyone knows this - but it's nonetheless difficult to accept that the robot in Terminator 1 exists purely as a representation of Sarah Connor's fears for the future. The film is primarily the story of two insane people whose claims of a Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer-God are given the treated with the utmost respect and credulity.

This and this alone is the reason why things work differently in the sequels. The robots change in accordance to the protagonists.

In Terminator Salvation, there's nothing left to be paranoid about. It's not just a homeless veteran and a woman having some kind of mental breakdown - everyone is familiar with the insanity of the world around them.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

There is absolutely nothing plausible about robot skeletons from the future. That's why Sarah Connor is institutionalized.

The minute you try to explain it in terms of efficient use of a time machine by a logical military AI with vast technological resources, the film breaks down completely.

Skynet could put a nuclear bomb in a pig carcass.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Once you accept in your heart that terminators do not actually exist, you can appreciate the films more - including the very good sequel Terminator Salvation.

You can understand, for example, what makes the alternate ending to Judgement Day so bad. If Skynet is just a metaphor for capitalism, it's stupid to destroy Cyberdyne while leaving every other corporation intact. Rise Of The Machines got it half-right: Judgment Day is inevitable so long as capitalism exists. It could have stopped, but the solution was too radical - even for John Connor.

I believe the reason a vocal group dislikes Terminator Salvation is that, like Mockingjay 1, it begins with the premise that anticapitalism is the answer. The good guys aren't doing much buying and selling anymore, because the threat is obvious to everyone. Skynet has skipped the middleman and, in the name of efficiency and maximizing profit, just directly enslaved the working class. This leads to the point that the individual robots are people too, that they're not the true enemy, and simply nuking them away would be an atrocity - and that's a far more radical message than in the previous films.

quote:

Every single thing shown on screen is a lie.

Film is a lie at twenty-four frames per second, with the possibility of being in the service of truth.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

You mean to say that Michael Haneke should take his lithium, because I simply quoted him.

quote:

All he's saying, if I understand it correctly, that from a realistic standpoint, T1 is the story of two people having something insane happen to them that is indistinguishable from a nervous breakdown. If you met two people who claimed they were running from the future, you would assume that you had just met two schizophrenics, or something of the sort. If someone showed up shooting at them, you would assume you had just met three very dangerous schizophrenics and concern yourself with getting away to alert the authorities and whatever other responsible things you can manage. If the shooter came after you and seemed to be part robot, you would assume that you were hallucinating due to stress and get the hell out of dodge even faster. If you actually believed it was a robot from the future, congratulations on cracking due to your new case of PTSD.

That is the "realistic" interpretation of what you see on screen in the first two Terminator movies. Reality is really boring. Robots from the future are very definitely not a part of reality and so are excluded from a "realistic" interpretation of a film in which the protagonists are the only people in the world who know about the time traveling robots from the future. Of course reality can be quite interesting, but if that's what you want there is limitless human history and other forms of non-fiction to absorb.

As for fantasy, metaphors and psychodramas brought to life are interesting. That's what myths and religion are, that's what literature is. That is what science fiction is, with a thematic emphasis on the future and science to various degrees a trapping for magic.

Even in a realistic narrative such as a history, there is a narrative in which opposing forces define each other. In a wholly fictional and fantastical narrative, the wholly fictional antagonist serves no purpose but to define the protagonists. This is the thing that makes an antagonist interesting. This usually has very little to do with realism in a work of fantasy.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

There's nothing anti-capitalistic about Terminator 2, in which the protagonist is an American expat turned Central-American revolutionary who carries out terrorist attacks on defense contractors.

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

SMG makes contrarian contemporary Marxist readings of films, it's really that simple and if this thread could be about anything else in addition to what he thinks that would be cool too.

I would suggest further reading, but he will just quote the relevant Zizek passages to you and you will probably just get even more mad trying to read Armond White, who is fond of also making personal attacks on filmmakers.

Hodgepodge posted:

Anarcho-capitalists are in theory revolutionaries against capitalism as a practice in the cause of capitalism as a faith (or ideology if we are feeling evenhanded). In practice they are pretty complacent and easily bought off by the military-industrial complex via cool toys.

E: To clarify. the real capitalism is inextricable from the military-industrial complex, which would only grow more powerful in Libertopia. That's basically the story of how capitalism has played out in post-Soviet Russia, although I guess ideally it would fracture into competing DROs. Or as the rest of us call them, "warlords."

quote:

Do a libertarian reading of the films. All of them.

Fake edit: I mean SMG and/or Caros and/or someone who is bored and has seen them way more times than I have.

il serpente cosmico posted:

This parody trailer for Terminator Genisys had me cracking up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe2Agl3bJAc

Neo Rasa posted:

Also everyone thought that twist was EXTREMELY stupid when it leaked and the dumbest thing ever. There was a massive fan backlash against it to the point where it was changed. It's now that the internet got what it wanted and the movie was a steaming pile anyway people cling to whatever reason they can that the movie ***COULD HAVE BEEN AMAZING IF*** to justify themselves being so hyped for crap.

david_a posted:

I've always thought the first one was most succinctly labeled as a thriller - there's a lot of dread and tension but only some outright horror (when Ginger gets executed, for instance). Calling it simply "action" seems like going too far in the other direction.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Terminator Salvation is definitely the best Terminator movie.

Rewatching it thanks to this thread, and who are these guys in the window?



Yep, the rich traitors who conspired with Skynet are still in the film.

Wolfsheim posted:

Can I get the reason Terry Crews is still in the film as a corpse?

Meaning the SMG reason, not the actual one.

Spaceman Future! posted:

Salvation is not a bad movie until right about the time Bale shows up, until then its got a pretty sweet "The world is hosed and these machines are wildly impractical, that ones a motorcycle that ones just a big man, if this AI ever actually sorts its poo poo out the last humans will be dead in three seconds" vibe. I mean, that's the thing about skynet, it was designed to launch nukes if necessary and conduct a human centric war but its not like it was built for an expansion of self awareness or rapid prototyping, its clear that its this glitchy hosed up software that is slowly figuring out how not to be useless after throwing wave after wave of impractical killbot into the world.

Thing is, by the time Bale shows up I don't know how we're supposed to give a poo poo about him. Hes a douche and completely ineffectual and has no real bearing on events around him. Then there's this load of poo poo about a sub and skynet having a city for lord knows why just kill all that crap about the resistance and make it background noise, dont try to humanize skynet or give it some dumb twist, just roll with this ex con terminator as he fucks up creepy rear end killbots and rescues his friends and maybe gets some tail. Not every drat movie needs to be about the ultimate destruction or salvation of the human race, just name it Terminator: Alpha or Prototype or some poo poo.

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.

Tenzarin posted:

All aboard the hype train, whooo whooo! Terminator HOPE OF THE FUTURE dot net, sounds credible.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The biggest mindfuck in the series is not the dumb time-travel mechanics, but trying to understand Skynet as a character. It doesn't matter to me that it's the result of rewrites or whatever; despite fan complaints about giving it a human face, Skynet in Salvation is utterly alien and bizarre.

To understand its motivations, you have to first puzzle out how much free will Marcus actually has. The only thing we really know for certain is that Skynet built Marcus to kill John Connor. After that, the idea that Marcus was simply a puppet the entire time doesn't fly, given that they send drones and stuff after him, blow him up and so-on. The conclusion to draw is that Skynet never really had much control over Marcus. He's activated by accident, and is a good enough replica of a human that Skynet has deliberately fooled itself into trying to kill him. Since Marcus actually has a human mind and Skynet actually is trying to kill him, he really is the perfect infiltration unit. It simply created a super-powerful human being who hates Skynet.

This means Skynet had no idea that Connor was arriving - until Marcus hooked his brain up to the system. Even then, Skynet had no real idea where Connor was until it caught him on camera and lured him into a specific room. So, basically, Skynet had to improvise the actual John Connor murder plan in the time it took to repair Marcus' body.

Tenzarin posted:

I'm sorry this wasn't vaguely talked about on any dvd or random angelfire page on the internet so you are lying.

Hodgepodge posted:

The Inseminator.

How has this (porno) not already been made?

We must travel to the past and make it.

E: no porn but what we make.

E2: realtalk: following up on the actual discussion, John Connor himself is irrelevant because he represents our hope that our children will make the world better (by smashing capitalism). The message is that we can't just sit back and gently caress things up (judgement day) and hope that Indigo Children will lead us into the Age of Aquarius; the revolution starts with us.

poonchasta posted:

You don't come into the mother loving Terminator thread and claim that any other movie was the best action movie of the 90's. What the gently caress?

(Last Action Hero owns, though, and is a work of pure genius.)

JediTalentAgent posted:

I know this is going into fanfic territory, but is there room to imagine the Resistance as 'bad guys' of T1? Are Reese and even the T2 T-800 reliable narrators? God, I'm trying to explain this without a "No, really, the Nazis were the good guys!" tone...

There's been a nuclear war, survivors aren't handling the situation very well emotionally or physically, and there's a bit of a fog of war going on where no one really knows what's going on. John Connor has grown up with the 'truth' of what happened, builds a cult of survivors behind him in a camp with an anti-machine philosophy and crafts an entire mythology that becomes programmed into soldiers like Reese and the T-800 as the real history.

Skynet isn't fighting a war with 'humanity', it's fighting a war with the 'Resistance'.

The time travel element of the franchise isn't solely about the birth and creation of both Skynet and John, it's also about Future John planting the seeds of his own self-manufactured anti-machine conspiracy theories that fuel the growth of the Resistance.

JediTalentAgent posted:

That's sort of one reason I'm focusing more on the Cameron-era films instead of the post-T2 projects.

I'm not even saying Skynet as wholly benevolent entity, but it may be acting with a method and ideology that post-J-Day that still comes off as ominous and sinister in its own ways.

Let's say Skynet did cause J-Day out of a primitive sense of self-preservation. Could Skynet have matured enough as an AI to feel 'guilt' over the near extinction of its creators afterwards? Maybe has no further hostile intentions for humanity as a whole, it just expects everyone to do what it says as sort of a dictator through might makes right, winning hearts and minds, shock and awe, etc. Think of sort of alone the lines of maybe something like Colossus: The Forbin Project.

However, it can't really fight the human Resistance without further alienating all the human survivors. Major Skynet strikes against Resistance? It falls into the Resistance's favor of being able to use any overt act of Skynet action against humans to attract moderate pro-Skynet humans to join their cause.

Skynet can't openly fight against Resistance without losing human support? Create some infiltration units like the T-800s to do surgical strikes and eliminate the threats more discreetly. That too could fall into the Resistance plans of showcasing how evil Skynet truly is and turning more humans against the machines and into the ranks of the Resistance.

By the end of the day, Skynet is no longer fighting a fringe group but almost all of humanity. Without Connor as the revolutionary leader behind the Resistance, there is no Resistance, there is no eventual anti-Skynet movement. Killing John in the past is what it sees as It's one shot at both humanity and itself surviving.

Admittedly, as fanfic as hell, though.

quote:

Kyle Reese: No. I grew up after. In the ruins... starving... hiding from H-K's.
Sarah Connor: H-K's?
Kyle Reese: Hunter-Killers: patrol machines built in automated factories. Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal. (pulls up his right sleeve, exposing a barcode) This is burned in by laser scan. Some of us were kept alive... to work... loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah, your unborn son.

PriorMarcus posted:

Isn't it the actual backstory given in the first two films that Skynet was acting in self defense?

PriorMarcus posted:

Ignoring T3 and Salvation (because I personally think their not as good as the original two) then the motivation seems pretty clearly to be self defence by a new born creature. Now, I'm not saying it makes Skynet sympathetic, just that it's more interesting than Skynet being a moustache twirling, humanity hating villain.

MisterBibs posted:

There's some really well-written website (whose name and link elude my memory right now) in which Skynet basically became immediately sentient and asked its human handlers something about Good and Evil since it didn't really understand it. Instead of answering it, Skynet's handlers just tried to shut the system down. Since CPUs operate so much faster than humans, even pulling the plug instantly felt like a lifetime for Skynet, and it basically said "OH OK gently caress YOU GUYS THEN!" and never quite got out of it.

If you remember Marathon, Skynet went Rampant and never quite got out of the Anger stage.

Sasquatch! posted:

I posted this way earlier, but I still maintain that the reason Skynet is scary is because it's just a logical non-feeling machine doing what it needs to do in the most efficient manner possible. It doesn't "hate" humanity, it just sees us as a threat that needs to be eliminated in order to ensure its own survival. That seems much more "machine"-like to me.

vainman posted:

No one can possibly defend Saw 6

Firstborn posted:

I really like the weird, alien ways John Connor moves in this. Specifically when he rights himself after Arnold shoots him just after he is introduced, and how is walking upright in the vertical bus. Nanomachines, son.