Like I said, at the end of T1, the Terminator has been injured, and can only walk slowly towards Sarah and Reese. It has no weapons left. Instead of just walking quickly away, they decide to hide instead. That part doesn’t make any sense.
At least if they stay on the street walking away just ahead of the Terminator, eventually cops will show up, and see an futuristic robot walking around, verifying Reese’s story.
But what if the Terminator starts killing passers-by?
I just watched that scene again, and I disagree with your interpretation.
The Terminator and burning wreckage are on one side of them, and there’s a brief reverse-shot where it shows Reese’s reaction to the Terminator rising up out of the flames that shows loading docks behind him. Their surroundings, and the streets shown on the chase coming in look like a vaguely industrial office-park kind of area. The camera never shows us that the road they’re on actually continues and those kinds of areas often have lots of dead-end roads that lead to industrial facilities. They run directly away from the Terminator when they see it get up, and directly away is toward a building. So I don’t think there’s anywhere else for them to go.
And they don’t hide. They keep moving. They’re clearly trying to go through the building and out the other side, not hunker down. But they get stuck.
Reese is definitely seriously wounded and only makes it ~100 feet before falling down. It’s not clear that they’re moving much faster than the Terminator is. Even if the road did continue, how long until they make it to a public place? How long until the police get there? How long until the police come up with an effective method of interacting with the Terminator (I mean, six movies in, they haven’t figured it out yet)?
If I had a murderous, scary-as-shit-looking skeleton lurching at me, I’m sure I’d be composed and collected and able to debate the relative merits of survival options…
“Lawsy, mama, dey’s a robo-skellyton a’shufflin’ after me! Gits out da way, ah gots to find me a hidey hole in dat fack-to-reee!”
How? By slowly limping up to them and killing them for no reason?
They get stuck because they act stupidly. At this point they could just be on one side of a large lathe or whatever is there, and the Terminator can be on the other side and it couldn’t get them. Instead, they slowly go up stairs, and then Sarah just continues to stay on the stairs needlessly staring until the Terminator is right upon her.
Who knows how long it will take? Throw Reese back into the dumpster and then just jog away.
And i LIKE the movie, one of my favorites. I think I mentioned, maybe I’m jaded now by watching years of The Walking Dead where they can’t even outrun slow, shuffling zombies on friggin’ horseback.
[Moderating]
Since it seems like discussion in this thread inherently depends on spoilers, I’ve added a spoiler warning to the title.
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I think I may be the only person who thinks that T2 was bad, and that T3 was the movie that 2 should have been.
Why do you think it was bad?
I will admit that I disliked T3 a lot on initial viewing but rewatching it a few years ago thought it was pretty good.
Basically, I thought it leaned too heavily on the golly-gee-whiz special effects, which aged poorly: By the time the movie actually hit theaters, they were using the same effect on Star Trek every week.
When a movie is based on “Come check out these awesome special effects that you can’t see anywhere else”, those special effects had better not be anywhere else.
I half agree with you.
T2’s faults for me were, as I noted above, it’s just a long chase. And even more, it doesn’t know when to stop. The T000, and the movie, should have ended with the liquid nitrogen bath. but NO! we need another ending! Let’s make it hot instead! Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The T1000 not only is centuries beyond regular mechanical T800. but one should theoretically be unbeatable. For example, the small piece left behind in the car should immediately go under its own control and flow into John’s head. Mission accomplished.
T2 missed an obvious bit by not having a central control computer inside the T1000. If every nano-bit of the machine is capable of independent action, then the thing is unstoppable. One drop can get inside you and destroy you from within.
T3 on the other hand I agree, was really the next step after T1. But the trouble with it as a movie, is its inherent fatalism. It gives all that action, all that destruction, for 3/4 of the movie, and at the end, it means nothing. Guns, bombs, more guns, random deaths that we should care about, but it is all in service of the inevitable Judgement Day. Who cares who lives or dies in the first 3/4 of the movie, because everyone dies at the end. This is your last day alive, and you spend it cleaning up after a crane went through your office. That’s depressing. T3 is bomb porn, nothing more.
And really, anybody that creates an all controlling militarized AI should be forced to watch Colossus: The Forbin Project. Never make anything you can’t turn off! Sheesh.
It’s pretty strongly implied that individual bits of the T1000 do not possess independent intelligence. If they did, it should have just taken the form of 10,000 individual wasps and the good guys would have never had a chance.
Presumably its intelligence comes from some neural net that requires sufficient processing power, and it has a certain amount per bit of nanotech, or whatever.
But still, even if one can make a nanoswarm that way with sufficient AI, surely it would be both easier and more practical to make a robot like the one in T3, with a solid endoskeleton surrounded by the nanotech stuff. The only reason they didn’t do that in T2 is because they wanted the spectacle of things like it reshaping into facing the other direction without turning around. The TX can still disguise itself very effectively, or turn its hand into a sword, or whatever, but it can also bring back plasma cannons and the like, which you’d think would count for something.
I’ll grant the fatalism of T3, and can see how someone might consider it an inferior movie because of it. I don’t happen to agree with that argument, but it’s a matter of taste, about which there can be no argument.
That’s how I’d write it, but it looks like there is no central processor. Take the scene where the T1000 flattens out and imitates a floor. A small bump where the processor would be would have been easy to do.
Or the liquid nitrogen should have shattered the CP, if it had one. But the T1000 reassembled from only little liquid bits.
I mean, I wanted such a central processor, but the movie seems to say there isn’t one.
But the 10000 wasps is what I was implying - a true nanobot terminator could not be defeated. Obviously the movie didn’t want that. But to me it seemed the movie failed to consider the full ramifications of the terminator’s construction.
Ok yes this is definitely true. They should have moved faster once they saw it and Sarah should have kept moving not waited as Reese fought it. But to me it works because they are acting like terrified people at their physical and emotional limits, not Monday morning quarterbacks analyzing the situation from a distance.
There’s also useful characterization. Reese keeps urging Sarah on because he considers himself expendable, but she’s unwilling to leave him behind. She doesn’t stop on the ladder while he fights the Terminator to be dumb, but because she’s terrified and hopes he will defeat it and then come with him.
I don’t consider myself a stupid person, but I doubt I’d have the nerves to stay in close proximity to an unstoppable murder skeleton robot because I thought it probably couldn’t get me. But let’s imagine that they analyze the situation as you have and decide to slowly circle a large piece of machinery until the police arrive. There was after all a giant explosion outside and an obviously broken door so it shouldn’t take that long. I believe that the next thing that happens is that there are now some dead police and a Terminator armed with their sidearms. Probably better to have more than a lathe between you at that point.
Chronos I see what you’re saying, but I have to disagree on the special effects. I think they still hold up well. Not because they’re impressive in their own right but because the monster they created with it is so cool. I’m ok handwaving away the fact that an infinitely divisible Terminator would be unstoppable by imagining that there’s a critical mass of Terminator-stuff required to do a thing. Smaller pieces just have enough smarts to seek out other small pieces. There is a deleted scene where the liquid metal Terminator is glitching out after freezing/thawing, so they did consider that that process would do serious damage but it got left on the cutting room floor.
I’m not sure I understand the complaints about T2 being just a long chase. There are multiple chase sequences, but on par with all the other Terminator movies. And all driven by legitimate and non-stupid character-driven choices. John’s not willing to abandon his mom to death, and Sarah tries to destroy Cyberdyne to prevent Judgment Day.
The things I didn’t like about T3 are:
I felt that they got the character of John Connor all wrong. He’s a loner with no friends or particular charisma. He’s whiney and unimpressive. This is not a man who leads a human resistance. Eddie Furlong was a rebel and a charmer, fighting the man, inspiring friends to help him flee from the cops, etc. Nick Stahl had a hard time talking his way out of a dog crate.
It leaned a bit too hard on comedy for my tastes.
Plot-wise I thought it was good, though. And the above two bother me less on rewatches.
As long as we’re listing things we’d rewrite, I’d have changed the ending of T3 to have Arnie crush himself and the bad Terminator by closing the giant blast door on them. What a great callback to the original!
I agree that this could be a probable outcome. At least after Reese pipebombed the Terminator and it was just an upper torso and one arm, they had Sarah with a deep leg wound so in-movie, she just couldn’t move as fast.
I also agree with this.
With all due respect, I don’t. JC in T3 had just been in a motorcycle accident and treated himself with horse tranquilizers he stole from a vet clinic. I think it was well established why he was not at his best in that movie.
Really the problem with the Terminator franchise is that they created this interesting concept of the “future war with the machines”, but never figured out how to transition from the small story of Sarah and John to that larger story. So basically they just keep regurgitating the same pattern of:
Your clothes…give them to me.
Are you Sarah/John Conner?
Are YOU Sarah/John Conner?
Come with me if you want to live.
I’ll be back.
Let me tell you about the future.
You’ll be safe here with these 40 cops.
It…won’t…stop…EVER…UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD!
Let go into this steel mill or whatever and crush/melt/freeze/acid bath it.
There’s no fate but blah blah.
I came across that scene when I was channel-surfing a few nights ago. I hadn’t realised it took place in a factory with giant cauldrons of white-hot metal in the immediate background. What would have happened if Arnie had scooped up some of the mercury puddles of defrosting T1000 and thrown them into the furnace?
Do individual bits contain specific elements of data so the T1000 would now be reformed minus its left leg, or could it recreate itself at 80% complete, so they’d just hire a shorter actor in a cop uniform?
msmith573 that is an apt criticism. That said, when they do it well it makes for a compelling movie (to me).
I think that’s sort of answered by the movie. When they shoot off one of his little grabber hooks on the back of the car, John grabs it and throws it on the ground. The T1000 then walks up and it absorbs into his foot. If that piece was anything, it was part of his hand. But he has hands when he walks up, and the piece just goes into his foot. So each piece is totipotent/holographic.
And I suspect that an incomplete T1000 would just leave a hollow space inside so that, superficially, the disguise would continue to hold.
Considering that the T-1000 took multiple different human forms with significantly varying volumes, including the somewhat bulky Don (or Dan?) Stanton, it must either be able to change its own density, or have voids inside it’s structure.