I have to admit that I agree. Hell, I started that other thread about how crappy the plot sounded. The trailer made the story seem kind of interesting but the acting was awful all around.
Hell, I’m down. Why not? Can’t be as bad as the tripe the 4th movie was, could it?
Now, we have the television Sarah Connor playing a role on Game of Thrones. And another actress on Game of Thrones taking the new role for Sarah Connor. Game of Terminatrix?
Also, agreed with GuanoLad about Reece… Just doesn’t carry the same smoldering grit Biehn did.
how bad would it have to be before you won’t watch it? i’ll watch it anyway, it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Mother of Dragons vs Terminators! it’d be worth if just for having something to complain about.
Jason Clarke as John Connor also seems like really poor casting, though that might just be because I confuse him with John C. Reilly.
I don’t think I like any of the cast members except Arnold and Lee Byung-hun as the Terminators.
How can anyone not love this trailer? This movie looks like it it going to rock. I hated T3, but liked the one with Batman. Of course, the first one is classic, and T2 is amazing. This looks slightly tongue in cheek, but in a way that I think will work great.
It has naked mannage. Worth the DVD rental, anyway. At first I thought the trailer was fan made with snippits from the other movies. It seemed more of a celebration of past movies than anything original. But, it’s got a twist. Why not? There will probably never be another T2. Now it’s just a franchise.
I miss TSCC also.
This. In the future, humans are starving and on the verge of extinction. And yet they all look like they do Cross Fit six times a week. The original Kyle Reece looked like a strung out meth head.
"I’ll be back.
I’ll be back never changes.
The original was made to explore an original concept, unless you knew about Harlan Ellison, that sawed-off little fuck. The sequel made a VFX empire from its original concept of a liquid metal man with knives fucking everywhere. Terminator 3 shaped the franchise into another stupid summer blockbuster, but by then it was an economic powerhouse.
But I’ll be back never changes."
Uh, yeah. Anyone who whines about “canon” in the Terminator 'verse is not quite getting the underlying concept. Terminator time travel explicitly resets everything, past and future, and only the in-jokes survive. No Fate. It was explicitly in the second film, which was one of the best sequels ever made, and it’s been kept because it’s a great concept, from a creative standpoint. Writers and directors are free to explore new concepts without being bound to what the previous films did.
No Canon. Carve that into your favorite pic-a-nic bench, Baba Boy, and let the screenwriters do some thinnin’ around here.
The tongue-in-cheekness is what ruined T3 for me, I absolutely hated it when it came out but rewatched it recently and its actually an OK movie, but the smarmy wink-wink nudge-nudge of the directing annoys me immensely.
But yes, not taking itself 100% seriously can be fun, but its a difficult balance to strike.
Regarding Terminator Genisys, yes that is a stupid name, the trailer actually looks OK but I do worry that it’ll be overly self-referential, the acting doesn’t seem particularly good and the special-effects are weak.
But Lee Byung-hun does look awesome as the new T-1000, he has that same blank but sinister and threatening look which Robert Patrick pulled off so well.
I do think they need to move away from Arnold Schwarzenegger and stop shoe-horning him into the franchise. But I do think his apparent role in this movie as guardian and instructor of Sarah Connor does have potential.
So, not getting my hopes up but I’ll give it a fair chance.
Personal opinion of the Terminator franchise
Terminator - great concept, excellent dark and gritty atmosphere, good pace and story, some weak acting and occassionally very un-Terminatoresque Terminator
T2 - awesome all round, but then I did see it at a formative age so that may have shaped my opinion
Terminator 3 - actually a decent movie ruined by tongue-in-cheek directing and silly self-referential in-jokes, a rather weak John Connor who I never really believed in as the future leader of the human resistance, but I surprising and well-done ending
Terminator Salvation - kind of liked this one actually, again a nice atmosphere, some great scenes, likable characters, but an overly convoluted storyline and a very very silly ending
The Sarah Connor Chronicles - a strange mix of excellent and awful, occassionally within the very same episode, I liked the actors used for the various roles and it was interesting to explore the strains placed on Sarah and John Connor by the roles forced on them by destiny, I’m also disappointed that it was cancelled
edited to add, I didn’t like the actor chosen to play Kyle Reese, Michael Biehn had an intense and unstable air about him, like the psychologically scarred combat veteran he was supposed to be, most of the other Reese actors look like they’ve just stepped off the stage of a shampoo commerical. I did think his brother Derek Reese was an interesting and well-done character though.
You literally could not be making a worse argument. “No fate” means the exact opposite of what you think it does: it means that humanity is not doomed to create Skynet and that Judgement Day can be avoided. Terminator 3 is shit because it directly rejects this premise, and this premise is necessary to make the bittersweet ending of the original duology work.
“No fate” means “No more Terminators” - the only thing the franchise had to offer after the original two movies is a “prequel” set in the war with Skynet before Terminator 2 wiped that timeline out of existence.
I liked the books based after T2. In one series they have Sarah running around Central America with the contras learning about military stuff and avoiding Terminators sent to find her. Along the way she meets a CIA operative who believes her and helps her along. They set up a whole network of underground resistance cells so that when/if Judgement Day happens they will be ready.
You can also go to “Fan Fiction.net” and see a whole bunch of great stories based in the T2 universe.
Terminator 3 doesn’t reject it, but Arnold’s T-800 believes it. There’s nothing that says Judgment Day can’t be avoided completely (which is what I think Genisys is going for).
Terminator 3 does reject it - Terminator 2 already avoided Judgement Day completely, and it doing so is necessary for the end of the movie to be at all satisfying. Then they retconned it, because who needs closure when there’s a franchise to run into the ground?
“One possible future. From your point of view… I don’t know tech stuff.”
-Kyle Reece. Low level non-commissioned officer from the future.
“The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
-Sarah Connor, Los Angeles waitress who got knocked up by a time traveler sent back by her own son.
Fact of the matter is that none of the characters in the Terminator films are Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. So their musings on fate and the practical applications and effects of time travel on the time space continuum are largely a matter of conjecture. Given that the events of the first film are a textbook predetermination paradox, I would surmise that:
A) The future can’t really be changed significantly.
B) There may not be actual “fate” in the mystical / supernatural sense…but…
C) After 5 films, I am reasonably certain that there are no amount of Terminators and Kyle Reece’s or anyone else traveling through time that does not result in:
- Kyle Reece going back in time and getting it on with Miss Conner
- Skynet becoming self aware and starting Judgement Day
- John Conner saving the human race, even though he is consistently portrayed as the worlds biggest tool by a different actor in every film.
msmith537 writes:
> . . . none of the characters in the Terminator films are Stephen Hawking or Albert
> Einstein . . .
They will both be characters in Terminator 6: Would Someone Please Explain the Mess We’ve Created?. You’ll be in it too. John Connor goes back in time to interview everyone, including people who posted to SDMB threads, who might be able to understand the time loop they’re in.
If nothing else, Genisys finally proves that the Terminator timeline is made up of multiple alternate timelines and that actions in one don’t necessarily change the outcome of another.
I don’t think that Terminator 3 is bad because it rejected the premise. It’s bad because it was poorly written, a little to cheesy, and John Connor was poorly cast and/or directed.
I think Eddie Furlong was a great John Connor. He was scrappy, he was independent, and he was charming and confident and cocky as a pipsqueak teenage hoodlum in a way that implied future leadership potential.
All the other ones sucked.
You forgot to mention that Terminator 6 is retroactively scheduled for release in 1983.
I can’t wait to have already seen it!
That’s not true at all. The worst part of T3 - the thing that absolutely shit on the whole franchise - was that at its core it was a movie about magical fate fairies. Oh, so you blew up the stuff that was necessary to trigger the creation of Skynet? No matter. Fate finds a way. Now skynet is an AI program on the internet. You were destined to meet your wife but your prevention of skynet and changing the future totally changed that so that it never happened? Don’t worry, the magical fate fairies will change the entire nature of reality to set up a series of coincidences so that it happens again that way. Because it was fated to, and there’s some sort of concious, supernatural power affecting reality in infinitely complex yet subtle ways to make sure that, somehow, the universe will make sure that fate creates the correct overall result.
It’s a lazy way to write time travel stories, it basically assumes perfect, supernatural forces with agency and a goal of making sure things happen the “right” way. It’s a weak way to think about the world in real life (“everything happens for a reason”) and it’s an absolutely shitty way to write fiction that totally invalidates time travel stories.
T3 actually did some things right. The practical stunts and effects were nice to watch. The terminator, when not going way over the line with references and jokes, actually acted a lot more like a terminator. None of the T2 sentimental shit, he’d kick John’s ass and drag him kicking and screaming to accomplish the mission if necesary. But without a doubt, the basic premise, and the basic plot, both absolutely shits all over the terminator franchise’s take on fate and time travel and is simply bad writing.
“Time course-corrects” is a well-worn trope in time travel stories. T3 was neither the first to do it, nor did they handle it the worst. And also, the people making these leaps are people who don’t have the knowledge to be making them. What does John Connor circa 2003 know about time travel? Nothing. So him telling Kate they were destined to be together because they knew each as kids is ridiculous. And Kate even shoots down his theory a second later by telling him he was memorable because his foster parents were murdered and he was kidnappped the very next day.
And the Terminator saying, “Judgment Day is inevitable” means nothing. It’s inevitable from his point of view because he exists. Nothing more. And besides, the idea that blowing up one building completely destroyed all the AI work Cyberdyne was doing is absurd. A “delayed” Judgment Day makes perfect sense with what happened in T2.