|
In my view, Terminator 3 was largely mediocre. Most of the writing was on par with your average B movie, with a few bright spots more than balanced out by groan worthy moments like the expanding boobs and the star sunglasses. The acting was okay for the most part, but they didn't have much to work with. Some of the action scenes were pretty cool, and the effects work was good for the time, but it is hard to get too invested in them due to the lackluster characterization. So overall it comes across as an enjoyable but shallow summer blockbuster that had the bad luck of following on the act of Terminator 2. Salvation was just godawful. Probably the biggest thing for me is how utterly forgettable it is. If I try really hard, I can recall a couple of different scenes and moments, but I have absolutely no memory of how they all fit together in the movie itself. The big thing that I do remember, though, is how awful Bale's John Conner was. I'm not sure if it was the writing, the acting, or the directing, but whoever was at fault it was a huge misfire in every scene. The only good bit is that part near the beginning where the soldiers discover the plans for skinned Terminators and say that things are happening "like you said they would." That suggests an interesting idea of how John's apparent knowledge of the future is perceived by others, but then the movie proceeds to do absolutely nothing with it. davidspackage posted:The thing with Terminator 3 I can not get over is Arnold's performance. He gets way too emotive, like he's a robot who wants to be human. The great thing about Terminator 2 is that Arnold's charm or likeability is almost entirely a reflection of what John projects on him. Aside from stuff like the final thumbs-up to throw in some ambiguity, he really is just a robot on a mission. Then T3 kind of ruins that in an attempt to follow up on that. A far more interesting take, I feel, would've been the robot firmly establishing that he's a different model than the other one and giving him a slightly different characterization. A minor point, but T3 does explicitly state that its Arnold is a different model than T2's Arnold. Specifically, it's a T-850, not a T-800, and has additional features like a basic understanding of human psychology. Hence the line where John puts a gun to his head and Arny analyzes his body language, heartrate, etc. to determine that he probably isn't going to pull the trigger. This was actually one of the movie's few clever ideas, and it's a shame they didn't do more with it. 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. Since the subject of personalizing Skynet came up in this thread, TSCC kinda sorta did this in its second season (at least, it showed an AI like Skynet as an actual character), and it also handled it way better than either of the movies in question. It did a really good job of presenting a complex AI character while still keeping it of a fundamentally alien nature. But you can say that about a lot of things on the show. The series had its fair share of missteps, but the writing team had a truly impressive ability to take the dumbest ideas imaginable and somehow make them work. This is the entry in the Terminator franchise that had Kyle Reese's brother's girlfriend bring a teenage girl back in time to date teenage John Conner in order to drive a wedge between John and his hot Terminator girl bodyguard. And the payoff to that plotline was awesome. It's a shame that show never got a third season. There are pretty strong rumors that Warner Bros. seriously considered making a direct-to-DVD movie sequel to the series, but couldn't go forward with those plans after Salvation failed, Halcyon went bankrupt, and the rights ended up with someone who wasn't interested in doing anything with TSCC. So that's another bad thing that Salvation is responsible for. As to the new movie, I have no idea if it'll be any good or not, but based on the trailer I'm probably going to see it because at the very least it isn't going to be boring. The story seems like the best kind of crack fanfic.
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2014 23:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:36 |
|
|
AlternateAccount posted:Terminator Salvation was entirely birthed out of a checklist of uncoordinated bullet point scenes that they then had to string together. All indications are that Halcyon had no idea what it was doing with the T:S production, at any level. I once read a document from their bankruptcy filing that listed the people and companies they were in debt to. The list was ten pages long, and included a cutlery company. And it isn't like Salvation was a legendary box office bomb, though it wasn't a hit by any means. The fact that a movie basically breaking even at the box office (after you take into account marketing costs, the cut taken by the theaters, and so on) brought its entire production company down says a lot about the state of the modern film industry. PriorMarcus posted:His rant was right and he makes millions of dollars so you have to listen to him. Basically. As childish as that rant was, I can't help but be impressed by how Bale's fake American accent never slips even for a second.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 01:56
|
|
|
Since the subject of practical effects vs. CGI came up, I just rewatched the first Terminator, and while all the animatronic effects looked great, several of the stop motion shots of the Terminator endoskeleton near the end were absolutely cringeworthy. Especially the blue screen shot where Sarah and Kyle were closing a door while the Terminator approached, which combined both bad compositing and incredibly jerky stop motion. Even in 1984, there is no way that looked good. So it goes to show you that fake looking special effects didn't start with the CGI era. I also think that people sometimes underappreciate how much freedom CGI offers. It is very, very hard to make a full-scale anamatronic, puppet, or stop motion effect walk in a way that looks natural. So in the climax of the original Terminator, they gave the endoskeleton a limp and kept full body shots to a minimum, and as I said previously even that looked fake at times. On a side note, having lightning shoot out when the Terminator got crushed by the hydraulic press was just silly. Having it start sparking would be cool, but bolts of lightning flying everywhere like it was a tesla coil? Come on. Full Battle Rattle posted:If only cameron had left the 'good future' ending in Judgement Day. It wouldn't have made a difference. T1 was very clearly intended to be a standalone film, and Reese even says at one point, "Nobody goes home. Nobody else comes through. It's just him and me." Then Terminator 2 happened and either there was something he didn't know or the future got changed somehow. Anything could have been written around. INH5 fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Dec 7, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 06:09
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:In T2 (the script), I think it was 'We sent Kyle back, then the others went back and then we blew up the time machine' or something like that. But that raises more questions than it answers. Okay, so Arny goes back, then Kyle goes back, then Robert Patrick bursts into the room and hops in the time machine and so they send the reprogrammed Terminator in after him... The reprogrammed Terminator who was standing there the whole time, without anyone questioning why John didn't want to send it in to rescue his mother? Don't get me wrong, Terminator 2 is a great movie, but trying to reconcile it with the continuity of its predecessor creates a lot of headaches. Though the TSCC characterization of future!John as a lying, secretive dick did go a long way towards answering these sorts of questions in that particular continuity.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 10:25
|
|
|
GoldStandardConure posted:I think the novelization of Terminator 2 covers how all the different terminators/Kyle Reece got sent back in time (I haven't read the book in over a decade so I might be wrong here): I guess that makes some sort of sense, though the fact that these sorts of narrative contortions are required to reconcile the two stories does not suggest a well maintained continuity. And this is without even touching on the giant mess of how exactly does time travel work in this universe, and if time travel changes the past* who was the father of the John Conner that sent Kyle Reese back "the first time around," and oh no I've gone cross-eyed. But these kinds of questions actually make me a bit more interested in seeing Terminator Genysis, because further messing around with time travel in a continuity this tangled can only lead to cool stuff if it's done well, or a hilarious trainwreck if it's done badly. * And for the record, T3's "Judgment Day is inevitable" doesn't fix anything. To quote a semi-acquaintance of mine, "if you can delay it you can stop it, the only question is how."
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 10:51
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:I've literally never understood this criticism of time travel. John Connor was always fathered by Reese because Reese always went back in time. Nothing was ever really changed. The whole criticism that there must be an original timeline where John had no father (what) is purely because we see the film from an outside perspective, I guess? I was talking specifically about T2 and the problems its story creates in regards to reconciling it with T1. T1 by itself has consistent time travel rules. It's the other parts of the franchise that bring up awkward questions. A lot of which goes back to the original movie being written without any intention of ever creating sequels.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 12:31
|
|
|
Ross posted:I feel like reboots don't work well with Terminator or any iconic Arnold-character movies. The movies are so ingrained with Arnold playing this character. Contrast this with something like James Bond where there's been successful movies / Bond actors after Sean Connery, since there's nothing really unique to Connery or his portrayal that defines Bond as a character. Personally, I'm not so sure about that. Every other important character has been recast at least once. At this point, John Conner has been played by 6 different actors in various parts of the franchise (7 if you include an infant used in one scene of T2). The fact that Arnold's characters have never been recast makes him exceptional, more than anything. On the other hand, the failure of Salvation and TSCC might suggest that Terminator really does need Arnold to succeed. I certainly imagine that it would have been difficult to get people to invest in the new movie if Mr. Schwarzenegger hadn't been on board.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 01:58
|
|
|
Shadoer posted:A point in its favor was that it was handling the whole "Mysterious Conspiracy Mystery" really well. It really did seem there was a genuine plan to the show and wasn't rear end in a top hat writers drawing things out of a hat. I've recently been rewatching Season 2, and I can confirm that at the very least, Riley being from the future must have been planned from the beginning, because they were dropping hints from the very first episode that character appears in. Rewatching Season 2 after you know about the later reveals is a very different experience because of things like this. Shadoer posted:However I agree, it's main problem was the plotting and that it came in a bad time with the writers strike. That period in Season 2 where there was like 3 poo poo episodes in a row just killed ratings, somewhat undeservedly as a bunch of pretty good episodes came right afterwards. That's a common misconception. The string of navel-gazing episodes happened after the show was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot (which means the writing was already on the wall by that point), and they did not appear to cause exceptional rating decreases. A TSCC fan once did a detailed analysis of the ratings and concluded that the series showed a steady decline in ratings throughout its run, that this was because it just wasn't the sort of show that could succeed on network TV, and that the writer's strike is the only reason the show got more than one season, because it left it with virtually no competition when it started out. But regardless, I don't think those episodes were a good move on the writers' part. They must have known that the show's future was in jeopardy at that point, so those episodes would have been better spent actually developing the plot and hopefully wrapping things up before the end. Not that anything actually was wrapped up in the end.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 12:59
|
|
|
I don't understand why anyone ever gets mad at SMG. He is by far the most entertaining poster at SA.Xenomrph posted:The Terminator franchise is a legal clusterfuck because James Cameron sold the rights to it before 'The Terminator' was even made - it's how he financed the movie's production. Certain details of the franchise have been retained by certain owners, while others have been sold or passed around. The term "T-800", "endoskeleton", and the actual classic design of the endoskeleton from the first movie is actually owned by a specific group (Canal+, if I remember right), so any time anyone wants to use them, they have to license it from them - that's why the Terminators in T3 were "T-850s" (and they're technically cosmetically different from old-school T-800s, albeit slightly). It's also why the ones in the TV series were "T-888s" (and were also cosmetically different). Likewise, the term "T-1000" is owned by someone different. Lots of Hollywood legal rights situations are weird, but the Terminator franchise is truly something else. I remember that, about a year after Salvation opened, some company announced plans to make an animated Terminator movie, claiming that they had obtained the animated movie rights many years ago, I believe before T2 had even been made. Apparently this was disputed and even led to threats of legal action by either Halcyon or Pacificor; I can't remember which of them owned the rights at that point. I don't know if anything more ever came of that. Also, at one point during Halcyon's bankruptcy, some media outlets reported that there was a possibility that the Terminator rights could have ended up being split up among everyone that Halcyon owed money to, which as I've already talked about was a lot of people, and would have effectively killed the franchise. And finally, the rights are going to revert to the ownership of James Cameron in 2019 anyway, and he's repeatedly stated that he has no further interest in the franchise, so who knows what he'll do with them at that point. As such, don't expect this madness to end even if the new movie is a success.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2014 09:21
|
|
|
mr. stefan posted:The face transplant ending is loving idiotic and the only reason people whine about it not happening is because they misidentify why Salvation was an unenjoyable movie. Oh, I definitely agree that the face transplant ending would have been awful. But if would have been awful in a fascinating, schlocky, "oh my god, what the hell were they thinking?!!?" way. It would have changed Salvation from "a tiresome slog of a movie with nothing redeemable about it" to "a tiresome slog of a movie with a final 10 minutes that are so crazy that you have to see it to believe it." People would have talked about it for years, instead of forgetting it completely within a month. And personally, I'll always prefer an interesting failure over boring mediocrity. OneThousandMonkeys posted:I was confused as to why they were still using conventional firearms in Salvation. Pretty much everything the movies teach us about terminators is that contemporary firearms do nothing to them. It would have been nice to see some lasergun designs or really anything that looked like James Cameron's 40K-style future war. For the record, Salvation was set some 11 years before the Future War flashbacks/flashforwards in the first two movies took place. Presumably the laserguns seen in those flashbacks haven't been invented yet. The Terminators we see are all also, with the exception of Arnie at the end, explicitly stated to be less advanced models than the T-800s+ we saw the last 3 movies, so presumably that is why they are vulnerable to conventional firearms. If that isn't enough, you could also handwave that the Resistance is loading their guns with anti-material armor piercing explosive tipped rounds, or something. Still, I agree with the general point that Salvation didn't have much to connect it with what was already established about the "Terminator future," and that ultimately hurt it. Even if there are legitimate in-story justifications for why the movie failed to meet audience expectations, the end result was that it felt disconnected from the rest of the franchise.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2014 20:44
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:I'm sort of surprised they haven't just taken the chance to fully reboot Terminator through a more modern lens. Well, there was this one time... Rhyno posted:Did the internet even exist in the good movies? Technically yes, since T2 is supposed to take place in 1995. Though given the state of the internet during the movie's production (the first website was created in December 1990, while T2 started filming in October 1990), it is highly doubtful that anyone in the production crew anticipated what it would look like four years down the line. Fortunately, there aren't any scenes where its absence is particularly conspicuous. Though I have to wonder how many arcades had After Burner machines in real life 1995. INH5 fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Dec 28, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2014 05:59
|
|
|
Esroc posted:Just thought of something. John Conner is the result of Kyle Reese and Sarah Conner sleeping together in the first movie, creating a predestination paradox. Which means if those exact events don't happen exactly as they did in the first film then John Conner as we see him would never exist. Even the smallest change in events would render the future John Conner nonexistent simply because the chances of the same sperm impregnating Sarah are like 1 in 250 million or something. I'd be really reluctant to apply the "different sperm" logic, since there is maybe one time travel or alternate history story in the entire world that doesn't completely ignore that. Mostly because it's really boring, as it renders any attempt to make a change further than, say, about 20 years in the past pointless, because at least one human generation is going to be wiped out of existence and replaced with a new randomly generated one anyway. Though if you want to get really technical, as long as the conception happens on the same day, and the same egg is ovulated that day as in the original timeline (I have no idea what determines that) and the fertilized egg still gets implanted correctly (I don't know what the chances of that are, either), then the resulting John Connor will still share half the DNA of the original one, ending up as a "semi-identical twin" of the Ur-John Connor. But the half of the DNA that gets reshuffled is the half that determines sex, so there would still be a 50-50 chance of getting a "Jane Connor" instead. And even leaving aside human reproductive biology, you'd still have to deal with things like Chaos theory. I don't know the exact science, but I'm pretty sure that a time traveller's mere presence would result in totally different global weather patterns within a few weeks, and who knows how many things that would change. And then you get into quantum uncertainty and... Now I'm starting to get a headache. This is why I hate time travel discussions. I think Pop Arena has the best advice on this subject: "Here's the key to writing good time travel: don't write time travel." INH5 fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jan 4, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 07:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:36 |
|
|
WarLocke posted:This doesn't necessarily follow. The T-800 (and variants) just seem to be the most-produced Terminator chassis (or at least the ones we see more of that aren't "the old plastic-skinned ones that couldn't pass a visual check"). The reason that Terminator media keeps making tiny changes to the T-800 chassis is that the rights to the term "T-800" are held by a different company that the rest of the terminator rights, so they can save money by changing it to T-850 or T-888 or whatever.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2015 20:23
|
|