In my view, the most logical sequel would be the future war. If Judgement day is inevitable, then no matter what humans will always make an AI that rises to challenge humanity. This has been the one consistent message across all the movies, so why not use that. So to me, the best way to end the series is to show a movie about winning after Judgement Day. The plot should revolve around ending time travel once and for all. You could even have multiple timelines converging (or cooperating across the dimensions). I.e. a John Connor timeline and a Dani timeline working towards ending time travel. I mean I’m just spit balling here, but that would be a way to end the franchise. Humanity wins*, no more time travel** so we will have won forever.
Wins being pretty relative here since we’re talking about victory after the deaths of billions of people.
** - There would need to be some technobabble about how all the past timelines have been clipped. I.e. all Terminators ever sent to the past are definitively dead. That this is our chance to end it once and for all.
An even larger problem is that the Predator and Alien franchises contain no time travel. Whereas, as many have noted in the thread, the Terminator use of time travel as a plot device creates many problems on its own—let alone for any proposed crossover.
My suggestion was basically a facetious comment on the Hollywood propensity to try to milk franchises to death with unlikely combo-projects. A screenplay using all three franchises could be constructed, of course, but no one would expect it to be any good.
It would be easier to do a crossover of Terminator with some other time-travel franchise. So far* we don’t know a lot about how the human resistance came up with the capacity, after all. Could it have been Doc Brown who showed up one day, some time after Skynet took over, and set the entire Terminator plot into motion???
We know all about it: they captured the Skynet lab, used the time-displacement equipment to send back Reese (plus Sumner in at least one of Cameron’s drafts, but he/she “didn’t make it”), and zeroed the whole place so that nobody else come through.
My main complaint was that some of the special effects looked kind of fake, compared to the amazing special effects from T2. I particularly remember a scene of the lady terminator getting blasted through a tombstone (around 2:20 of this clip) as looking like obvious CGI in the theatre.
I saw the movie yesterday and really liked it. The callbacks to the previous films were amusing. (Like when Sarah Connors said, “I’ll be back.”) The first film ended in a mostly automated factory and then the second film ended in a steel mill. It almost seemed deliberate, as the steel mill seemed to represent the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while the automated factory represented the Robotics Revolution. So I was amused that the action in this film started in an auto plant in which humans were being replaced by robots. And then it ended in a hydroelectric dam. No idea how that figures into my theory, though.
I thought that they’d somehow use the vast amount of electricity in the hydro plant to overwhelm and short out the Rev-9. I also expected the Rev-9 to disguise himself as one of the other characters at the end, as the T-1000 did in the second movie.
I meant ‘how was time travel made possible?’–I didn’t recall that Skynet invented it, for some reason, mistakenly thinking that it had been a human invention.
But my point is, how did Skynet achieve time travel? Hence the idea of Doc Brown bringing the technology.
(The ‘humans destroyed the installation so that no one would get through after Reese’ idea was certainly vital to the plot of the first movie—otherwise there would have been 50,000+ Terminators after the protagonists, which would have been rather boring. But that plot development was pretty contrived: why would Skynet have been unable to rebuild? It’s not as though the plans would have been lost, given that Skynet was essentially one big brain.
(No doubt the installation was built with the one and only supply of unobtainium that could ever exist, or something along those lines. Which would have made the 2015 Genisys movie plot unworkable, of course.)
(At some point we are thinking about it more than the writers did— time travel inherently does not make sense.)
The relevant point in the first movie is that at that point in the future the humans had beaten Skynet. The war was all but over. The time-travel stuff was a last-ditch effort, there may not have been 50,000 Terminators left at all nor the resources to construct a second lab, and either way it barely had enough time to send one before the humans raided the place.
But, sure, if Skynet was clever enough to come up with the whole scheme and construct a time machine from scratch like Doc Brown, who knows, maybe it had the foresight to construct a second (and third…) installation while it still had the time and equipment (as Cameron implies in the first few seconds of Terminator 2.). Also, it’s only “one possible future” according to Reese, so maybe there are 50000 others, which could certainly account for all the extra Terminators running around in all the sequels, including the latest one, unobtanium or no.
I just watched the first one yesterday. In the words of Reese “Their defense grid was smashed. We’d won”
The original still holds up as a great movie. The only thing I didn’t like, watching it yesterday, was at the end. Perhaps my opinion has been jaded by watching the morons on The Walking Dead, but after Sarah and Kyle blow up the semi, the Terminator is dragging a leg and walking slow.
Now, they could just walk a little faster down the street until police and other government people arrive. Instead, they try to hide in a factory.
Tip - if somebody chasing you walks slowly, just walk a little faster into a heavily populated area.
The Hollywood Reporter says that the movie made only $29 million domestically, at 4000+ screens. That’s considered a bomb and means that any future sequels are on hold.
But… the action leads are female, the big female star is over 60, and Arnold is in his 70’s and no longer looks sexy. Middle age to elderly actors don’t bring in the crowds.
And given Arnold’s age I didn’t expect him to be in any sequels to this, and the Terminator movies without him tend to attract even fewer viewers.
FWIW I would rather it not be renamed but I agree spoilers here should be hidden. Another “Seen it” thread is a good idea for spoiler discussions of the new movie but spoiler free reviews (and discussions of the franchise in general) are what I was looking for here when I bumped it. .
Saw it at the weekend. Agree with the general concencus that it’s pretty good. Mackenzie Davis is the best thing in it. In fact I enjoyed the first half more before the inevitable arrival of Linda Hamilton and Arnie. I think cutting them out would have made for a better movie. Even so, some great action scenes and if you don’t see it in the cinema, definitely worth a rental/buying later. Best Terminator film since 2.
I saw it last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m surprised at some of the more negative reviews. I mean, it was no masterpiece of cinema, but it was a fun ride.
Unlike DeptfordX, I liked seeing Arnie and Linda and liked both how Sarah was wrong about Dani’s importance and the way that turned the story around a bit and how Arnold’s terminator sought purpose after it ran out of mission.. I’ve had a lot of fun thinking about the idea that a single minded killing machine out of T1, given time, could turn into the gracious host we meet later.. And I got a giant laugh out of the moment we got the rug yanked out from under us when we realize that Arnold’s not discussing ambush tactics, but the appropriate choice of fabrics for the window treatments for a little girl’s bedroom.
I agree with this ranking, although I think T5 and T6 are very close, and there’s a big gap between 3 and 4. T4 is really the only very bad one of the series.
I find it hard to square this idea with the text of any of the Terminator movies. Going to a heavily populated area just means more people dying, and cops don’t stop Terminators, but they do arrest our heroes and keep them in cages for the Terminator to come kill. Literally every Terminator movie requires the heroes to escape from the cages that authority figures have put them in while trying to establish order.
Also wasn’t Sarah helping Reese to walk at that point after he’d been shot? They’re not going to outrun even a slowly-walking Terminator unless Sarah leaves Reese behind, which she’s not willing to do.
I liked the new one a lot.
[spoiler]Mackenzie Davis is the best thing in just about everything she’s in. The action sequences were great, and the plot moved along well with reasonable purpose and without any characters having to do anything really stupid. Her need for drugs and a refractory period worked well and was much better than having two robots fighting the whole time.
The reveal was well-foreshadowed, but it still worked well.
The Terminator was legitimately cooler and more dangerous than the one in T2, which I think T3 sort of failed at. Liquid metal plus a hard skeleton, capable of acting independently was awesome.
Feels like having open turbines spinning on that floor has to be an OSHA violation.
None of the time loop inconsistency inherent in the franchise bothers me. I see each movie as being a scene out of a separate iteration of the loop. Each movie, in my opinion, merely has to be internally consistent, not 100% consistent with other movies.[/spoiler]