I saw Terminator Salvationwith my 18 year old about 2 weeks ago and he was picking it apart before we even got out of the parking lot. I decided to let my impression of the movie settle in a while, and after considering for the lat week or so it I have to agree that it was pretty disappointing effort. More so than even the negative reviews suggested because IMO so much more could have been done, but they settled for a very mediocre, borderline incoherent script (even for speculative sci-fi) and the direction was nothing to write home about.
So much was lifted from the previous Terminator movies it was like the director was phoning it in most of the time. Character development was an insult to cardboard. How can you have that much money and technical expertise at your disposal and settle for such poor writing and scripting?
So, would you send the cinematographer back in time to interfere with John Connor’s line of sight causing an outburst of profanity from the actor playing John Connor which becomes public and ruins the publicity of the movie, thus causing the studio to rewrite it all?
I’m no example of how a human being should be, but I would work that until it cried “Uncle!” Bale is a dork, and has longs been one. Publicists exist to USE these facts, not ignore them. That is the core of spin: anybody can spin the odd statement by Mother Theresa into something positive. To move from Calcutta to LA you have to twist a several-minute rant by Christian Bale into something that promotes his next flick.
I must be the only person who actually liked this movie. It had plenty of great action, and I enjoyed the various callbacks to older movies. I don’t know what people were expecting, because for me it delivered.
I just had this conversation with a friend of mine, though, and we’re both big Terminator fans who really liked this movie. For my money, it was a lot more fun than Star Trek and I think it handled its in-jokes and references much better.
I’m annoyed with it because Terminator 2 was, like Toy Story 2, the rare sequel that exceeded the original. And T3 and T4 make T2 look like a fluke and cast the whole series in a poor light.
Well, at least they didn’t have a chick terminator. That was my only beef. Loved the movie, btw.
Question: Why doesn’t a terminator just dismember a human instead of tossing it around? I mean, he could easily crush whatever appendage he happens to grab, right? Just grab John Conner’s face and pop his head like a grape!
Er, because the franchise would die when John Connor dies? DUH?
The first Tremors was great. The second, not so great, if only because Fred Ward stopped wearing his Alumax-Yankton cap (I used to phone my counterpart at the Yankton, SD, plant to get the weather and how it would be here 16-hrs later. Much more accurate than what I got from TV.) And because Kevin Bacon wasn’t competing with him to see who could play a bigger moron.
As long as they have Bert, I am happy. I even tried to convince my kids last night to watch “Tremblores Dos,” though they and I don’t speak Spanish. Wife, who does speak Spanish, said the movie sucked, but that’s because she always sleeps through it. Can’t understand that. By all rights, she should LOVE it. Monsters? Check. Things getting blown up? Yep. Monsters blowing up stuff? IIRC, yeah, but otherwise you have Bert shooting a .50cal through a cinderblock wall.
That only works on Bill Paxton.
The same problem kinda ruined the movie for me, too, namely why keep certain humans alive at all? Skynet can effortlessly fake video and audio recordings, so why is Kyle Reese kept alive? Why are any humans being taken prisoner instead of being terminated on the spot? For that matter, why does Skynet care about John Connor, since he hasn’t done anything yet? I thought the whole point is that Connor leads the remains of humanity to some awesome final victory and only then does it occur to Skynet to punch his ticket retroactively.
And this grungy improvised field hospital run by a pregnant former veterinarian’s assistant is set up to do heart transplants? What the hell…?
I think you mean Brian Campbell, but I may be wrong.
Yeah, I could suspend disbelief about the giant walking robots putting people into giant baskets, but not doing heart transplants in an improvised hospital. And J. C. surviving and doing all this miraculous hero shit after having a heart transplant in an improvised hospital.
It helps to tell yourself that all the time travel has messed up the continuity, i.e. Skynet knows about J.C. because they have access to police records of Kyle Reese’s statements and what Arnie-bot did in T1 & T2. So they know that they sent a T800 or T101 or whatever back in time because they have records of 1984 & 1991.
You’re being whooshed. The Second Stone is trying to retroactively get the movie canceled.
I liked the movie. It was fun, it was energetic, and it had heart. (Ha ha). I thought the heart transplant was a bit much. Blood type? Rejection? Heart transplants are a tricky matter now, I can’t imagine trying to survive one in that future scenario.
The other little thing that bugged me. Early Kyle Reese says they don’t want to travel at night because the terminators have infrared and can detect them more easily. So then later the two characters build a fire to keep warm. Um, hello. Bryan Ekers said:
The joys of time travel. Once you have time travel, Skynet can travel into the past and tell itself that “John Connor” is the bad guy. Then it can learn that “Kyle Reese” is John Connor’s father.
That’s the concept that the TV show explores - what happens when time travel is a tool Skynet has available. In Terminator, we are lead to believe they made the time travel device, executed it once in a last minute ploy, then John Connor and his team captured the base, sent Kyle Reese through, and then destroyed the device. It makes for a good closed loop story. But somebody wants a sequel, so you postulate that Skynet didn’t put their eggs in one basket, they made 2 attempts on John Connor’s life. So now John Connor made two attempts at saving himself.
But it starts to get fuzzy to maintain that this was all executed at one time. Why did Skynet have two different terminators? 3 Different terminators? N different types of terminators to go after JC n different times, all launched at once? And why did John send n different responses - first he sends 1 man, then he sends a captured and reprogrammed T-500. Oh wait, the third time JC was dead and his mom sent a T-500 to save him. See, it starts to get unwieldy. So then you get multiple time travel devices, and then the battle becomes multifaceted in time.
Now you have to worry about the complexities of time travel paradoxes and the possibility alternate timelines and what it all means. Arrgh.
Oh, I just confirmed Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese) was also Pavel Chekov in Star Trek.
And while I realize they did not have a lot of options, but considering that Marcus Wright died by lethal injection, was stored for 15 years, reanimated as a robot, killed again by being *punched in the heart *and jump started back to life, is he really the best candidate to donate a heart? Even in the unlikely event that the types did match?
