I thought the trailer was entertaining. Probably a LOT more so than the movie will be. T III was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
And it’s lazy writing and doesn’t make sense. You need an actor with intelligence and agency to set things back to how they’re supposed to be. What is that? God? Magical fate fairies? If you were to say “oh, this happened because God willed it”, it’s lazy and bad writing, and “oh this happened because Magical Fate Fairies in charge of making sure what’s supposed to happen does” isn’t any better.
Now you could make a case that the characters are misinterpreting events, but that’s entirely too subtle for a movie of this caliber, and it seems reasonable to conclude that a key point of the plot is that things that were supposed to happen originally do happen, because some force or entity with agency and control over the fabric of reality.
They could simply have a movie where they say “we didn’t destroy all the work on skynet, the software development team was unharmed, so skynet was delayed and eventually took a different form” without making a plot point of “skynet was fated to be, so fate fixed it to happen” and change/leave out the wife subplot and any other fated to happen things.
In any case, it no doubt shits over the premise that T2 sets, which is that there isn’t fate. So even if you find that type of writing acceptable, and I certainly don’t, you can recognize that it’s not congruent with the franchise.
I hated the trailer. Here’s why : the trailer of this movie screams “the screenwriters have watched terminators 1 & 2 and thought they were awesome. Here’s their copycat remix”.
Terminator 2 especially had state of the art special effects that hold up just fine today. There’s nothing to remake - the original is an awesome movie. Trying to copy all the good stuff in the original movie doesn’t create entertainment, it’s just a series of boring knockoff scenes smushed into a movie. Worse, while the “shifting timeline” plot may be canon to Terminator, it means that no resolution is possible. It’s just a perpetual looping timeline/multiverse where skynet or the rebels are alternately winning and losing and sending stuff back to spawn yet more universes.
If they are going to remake terminator, they need radically new ideas. Who says skynet is a bad thing? Maybe there is a more cerebral solution to the problem that involves less shotguns and more coding. In a universe where anyone can tamper with the past all they like, how does anything get resolved?
Perhaps a remake could be made to subvert our expectations. Why would terminators ever miss? Why don’t they just go back in time to when their victims are infants and kill them then? If they can stuff a machine inside a flesh body, why not stuff a large bomb in their as well so they don’t have to go to such elaborate lengths to kill their victims?
The Terminator franchise is not tapped out, there’s many creative ways the story could be continued, but a movie with yet more liquid metal terminators and shotguns being fired is not really a continuation.
In the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Our Heroes tracked down people they believed were involved in Skynet’s creation - programmers and the like. Unfortunately, they were always willing to take permanent actions based upon flawed information - and, as a result, made inappropriate adjustments to the time line. But, the larger issue, fate, didn’t really seem to come up. They were never able to locate the “true” builders / designers / programmers behind Skynet. They were just running around in circles the whole time, without a chance to make the positive changes they’d hoped to make. Their quests were always completely independent from the “larger” storyline.
I had hoped that the female T-1000’s story arc would play out with spectacular results. She seemed to have many additional pieces of the puzzle. But, sadly, the show ended before she could put her plan into action. Just imagine if Kurt Sutter had been involved!
Regarding fate, may I quote Professor Farnsworth, “We’re Doomed!! Every year, we’re doomed!!”
There’s a rather neat scene in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where:
a human, and a central character at that, and a Terminator are both doing a house-clearing, they round a corner and meet each other unexpectadly, the Terminator simply snaps his gun up and shoots the human through the forehead before his opponent has even a chance of reacting and then casually continues his mission without even a pause
:I think my jaw genuinely dropped when I saw that, because thats exactly how a Human VS Terminator gunfight would really go. But of course that wouldn’t make for very fun movies.
The Terminators in general aren’t very good at the whole ruthless killing business for supposed specifically designed ruthless killing machines, witness John Connor being thrown around by the T-800 in Terminator Salvation, really it would go stomp stomp stomp grabs puny humans head and squishes it like a ripe melon end credits
But again, not great movie material I suppose…
I’d have to watch it again (and I no doubt will before Genisys), but I’m pretty sure this exact scene takes place in Rise of the Machines.
At least we can agree that Predator is amazing, right?
The reason that Terminators miss and can’t just become bombs is that it makes for a piss poor story. But the movies consider and reject those ideas in a plausible way. Because they’re well-written and self-consistent.
Note that Terminator 3 has the Terminator turn into a bomb. Because it’s badly written.
When I first saw the trailer I instead thought that the whole premise was the result of a producer mandate. When The Dark Knight was a huge success sources at WB were reported to have said that the reason why Superman Returns did so poorly was because it wasn’t dark enough. Years later Man of Steel comes out and it’s definitely the darkest film interpretation of Superman.
The producers want a big return on their money, and seeing that Salvation didn’t do so great they probably compared and contrasted that film to the previously successful installments and saw that the first three had 1) Arnold Schwarzenegger and 2) time travel, where as the last one had neither of those. I would argue that Salvation wasn’t that great because due to the acting, script, unimaginative transformer-like designs, average looking battlefield landscape, etc. But anyways, to put more insurance on their investments, the producers probably wanted everything that made the first two wildly successful. So you another T-1000 again, and again, impersonating a cop, the entire story and cast from the first film, and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising his role as the protector T-800.
On top of that, it can be viewed as a remake and simultaneously as a sequel. I’m sure the producers noted the success of that approach in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. So you get both, fans who want a proper continuation, and fans who will go to see it just to compare it to the originals.
I agree with you’re first sentence. James Cameron recycled the structure and premise of the first Terminator film for T2 but it worked because it flipped certain expectations. This time the T-800 was the goody guy. This time we saw a whole new breed of infiltrator, radically different in design. It served as the perfect flipside to the first film. Two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, the director of T3 ruined that symmetry by recycling the structure yet again, not understanding why it worked for Cameron and not so much for his film. There were no significant surprises, and recycling the plot served no real purpose.
I think you have to tread carefully with that approach. It can work but it also turn off many fans. I felt like T3 ruined the Christian allegory by having John Connor be assassinated in the future and his wife and kids carrying on for him. The crux of humanity’s survival/salvation rests on John Connor, no one else.
They did a similar thing in the second season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles which I feels dilutes the established some of the core mythos of the first two films.
I liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles because they explored the implications of what we saw in T2. We got to see in TSCC the effects on human morale when John Connor begin relying more and more on Skynet creations to dwell within his ranks and fight his battles. We got to see a reprogrammed terminator protector who wasn’t human like, but kept reminding everyone that she truly had no emotions. We got to see, for the first time, direct results of altering the time line. And we got too see continuations and repercussions of the first two films. Instead of Silberman being reduced to a comedy relief cameo, in the TV series he becomes a convert to the convictions of Sarah Connor’s prophesied future.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles would have been better had more of the T-800’s been as ruthless and efficient as the one you mentioned. Their threat didn’t seem to great when considering they seemed to dust one every other episode. In T2, the threat was so great that they just wanted to run to Mexico and hide rather than face it.
I didn’t get the fight in Salvation. Why would their even be a fight. The terminator isn’t supposed to be a dumb slasher or monster. It’s an advanced AI that works in the most efficient way. Killing humans in close contact should take less than one second.
Let’s not over praise TSCC’s treatment of terminators. Most of the time the Terminators paused to kill their targets to deliver oneliners and let the targets escape. The aforementioned realistic terminator scene was the exception, not the rule.
Edit: Woops, misread your last post. You’re right.
In TSCC they were indeed dusting T-800s seemingly every episode, but you can’t compare that to the T-1000 they wanted to hide from in Mexico during T2.
Why not? Because it was also, if not mostly, about trying to get away from the blast sights of the future nuclear bombs? But aside from that, both Reese and “Uncle Bob” were never intending to destroy the Skynet-sent terminators. They were just trying to rescue the Connors and avoid the terminators just so they can live long enough to fulfill their destinies. The fact that one Terminator could tear through an entire police department definitely enhanced the horror aspect of that film. Making them more common and prevalent, and having more people able to survive them diminishes them.
Cameron came off pretty unstoppable for the most part except for that one scene when she does something very un-Terminator like. Actually Chromartie did the same thing, and it really hurt the integrity of the show.
Because the T-1000 model is an order of magnitude more dangerous and unstoppable than a T-800 model.
Good point. But both models were deemed dangerous enough by the resistance as being better to run from then to confront. I know they’ll probably explore this in Genesis but I’m surprised that neither T3 or Salvation explored the use of T-1000s more. THAT would have been great, to see a future war where the battle was not going according to prophecy, where it looked like the resistance would fail because of the Skynet developing an army of polymimetic alloy infiltrators.
The T-X was a step back in design and imagination.
I completely agree with this, and this was my biggest complaint about T3. The concept of the timeline course correcting never did and still doesn’t bother me, but the big step backward in the bad guy power level was disappointing.
I don’t even understand it conceptually from the writer’s point of view. She can turn her hands into guns! This is way more powerful than just picking up an actual gun because…
If T3 tried to honestly simulate on camera the way an encounter with a terminator might go, especially one that gets to bring back futuristic weapons, it might go something like this :
The target is walking down a crowded street. Suddenly, his head explodes. The camera zooms back and back and back and the T-X is standing at the window of a building kilometers away, her gun-hands still smoking.
Sure, honestly, you could probably make the same shot with a large rifle and superhuman aim, but it means the terminator has to find a gun shop, show ID, doesn’t California have a waiting period…
Also, futuristic weapons might include some kind of guided bullet or miniature missile so that non line of sight shots can be made.
I wonder how they’ll kill the T-1000. Extreme heat and cold were done in T2. In T3 they used an industrial magnet on the T-X, slowed her down but didn’t seem to do any permanent damage after she escaped. Dunking it in acid might be too similar to melting it in a smelter. A powerful electrical or energy discharge could scramble it. Maybe lure it into some exotic physics experiment. Throw the sucker into a black hole!
Or maybe not kill it at all, but trap it somewhere and then throw it into the ocean or an abandoned mineshaft or shoot it into space.
Are you talking about Cameron? Because she was the most emotional terminator by a significant margin. Her relationship with John in particular was pretty weird. Fanfic writers had a field day with that one.
I did like one implied aspect of those encounters though, Cameron is a learning machine, every time she fought another Terminator she got better at it, because she was able to draw on her experiences from the previous fights. It was kind of like a newbie boxer going up against an experienced heavyweight champion.
She was depicted quite inconsistently though, however I really liked the episode where she befriended the crippingly ill guy in the library, the outcome of that showed that, no, she really really isn’t human, just a machine doing a (generally!) good job at pretending to be one.
But the episode where she was apparently having some sort of psychotic breakdown and thought she was the human original (which was actually an interesting and rather chilling story) didn’t make sense on the face of it, how can you forget that your a machine when you’re walking around with an integral HUD and targetting information in your vision? Might that not seem a little odd?
I suspect I may have been misunderstanding something about that episode though.
The scene where John Connor asks Derek Reese about how long he would survive in a hostile encounter with Cameron was quite well done:
“OK, what weapons do I have?”
“None”
“…that’s not even a fight…”
And he’s right, despite plucky human spirit and a can-do attitude going hand to hand with a Terminator should really be a fast one-way-ticket to squishville.
What scenes are you thinking off re the un-Terminator-like actions?
Someone mentioned in another Terminator thread here that going by the timelines established in the movies all the time-travelling shenigans are actually making things worse for humanity, in the first movie Kyle Reese says that Skynet was basically defeated and sending the Terminator back was a desperate last-ditch effort at survival, in Terminator Salvation humanity is being pushed back by a resurgent Skynet and things are looking grim. The fact that John Connor seemed genuinely spooked by advanced models of Terminator appearing before they should have was one of the better parts of that movie.
Re the T-1000 I recall reading somewhere (fan-wank or canon I don’t know) that it was a one-off experimental project and that Skynet itself was wary of using it as it didn’t really understand how it worked or if it could be controlled satisfactorially.
Re Re that, the ‘third faction’ introduced in TSCC was an interesting idea.
The T-X did have some capabilities the T-1000 didn’t have though, like remotely controlling electronic devices, but yes it wasn’t much of an advance. Though how really could you have a more advanced Terminator without things getting utterly ridiculous?
The writers of the show beat them to the punch when Cameron asked John to feel around her shirt…
and jiggle a component inside her endoskeleton that had come loose. Pervs!
With the exception of Alison from Palmdale, any emotion displayed by Cameron turned out to be a trick. When she touches his hand it’s to measure his temperature, when she tells him she loves him it’s only so he won’t take deactivate her, when she tells him it again on the phone pretending to be Riley she later reveals it was only to add realism to the conversation. I read an interview with the show’s creator who said he didn’t want to make a machine more human like they do on so many other SF shows. He said he wanted to explore a machine who wasn’t becoming human.
When [spoilers]Cameron goes bad and has Sarah and tells her to call for John and when Sarah doesn’t Cameron leaves her alone to go after John. Usually it’s the MO of terminators to terminate their victims and impersonate them to get close to the target, either through speech or assuming their identity, like the T-1000 did. But importantly, Cameron knows how capable Sarah is, and would do anything to save John. She would have made her mission successful had she completely eliminated John’s allies.
Same thing with Chromartie. He had Sarah in his grasp but doesn’t kill her, instead kidnaps her and sets a trap like a stereotypical bwahaha-type villain.[/spoilers]
Re the T-1000 I recall reading somewhere (fan-wank or canon I don’t know) that it was a one-off experimental project and that Skynet itself was wary of using it as it didn’t really understand how it worked or if it could be controlled satisfactorially.
Re Re that, the ‘third faction’ introduced in TSCC was an interesting idea.
I didn’t like the nano-technology being introduced but it made logical sense. But a T-1000 that has its stealth and movement limited by an endoskeleton seems like something a human would create, not something an AI that learns at a geometric rate. The T-X did look ridiculous. It had the mimetic alloy skin of the T-1000, endoskeleton like a T-800, could transform its hand into a plasma rocket launcher, it could manipulate other machines via nanotech, it could create buzz saws out of its hands…that damn thing ended up looking like a Rube Goldberg invention.