Something I was wondering about during the movie. Could it be that John Conner is also a Terminator?
He took an inordinate amount of beating from the Terminators, knocked into walls, computers, over railings, etc. Most people’s bones would’ve been turned to Chiclets. :dubious:
It couldn’t just be an unrealistic “the hero takes a licking and keeps on ticking”, but it probably is.
“(Un-)realistic” isn’t a word I would ever use when an action movie is involved. 
But seriously, it looked stupid; on the other hand, the whole movie was stupid, so it fits.
Despite all the warnings I had received, I still went to watch it and it was even worse than feared.
Sam Worthington did alright, but Christian Bale was far less convincing than I would have ever expected, i.e. “not even a little bit”. Moon Bloodgood is nice to look at but that’s already all the praise I can give her.
The story … bah, there are no words to describe the mess.
I wish, they would have given TSCC a crumb of Salvation’s budget, so that I could continue to enjoy a truly clever approach to the terminator universe. Sigh.
I heard that the script went through several writers and a last minute redraft, and you could really tell. Many parts of the story don’t make a lick of sense. I’m not usually one of those nitpicking types that has to question the motivation and logic behind every plot point, especially when it’s a time travel story. Hell, I thought ID4’s computer virus deus ex machina was believable enough. But T4 really went beyond the realm of absurdity.
As the beginning scene shows us, Marcus was commissioned by Cyberdine pre-Judgment Day. And the Skynet face at the end told Marcus that he was made because the other terminators failed. So that means they were planning this elaborate scheme before the first terminator was sent out? How does that work? How did they know the previous – er – future terminators would fail? Did they send a terminator back in time to build a terminator that would wake up twenty years in the future? And why did they not just kill Kyle Reese? No Kyle Reese, no John Connor. We’ve established that Skynet knows who Reese is.
So they build a terminator with a soul in order to trick the humans. That’s almost a really cool idea and an interesting new take on the franchise. I heard that in the original draft Marcus ultimately ends up betraying John and finally kills the bastard. That would have been an amazing ending with a powerful commentary on human nature. Except the studio monkeys once again underestimated the viewing public and took a hacksaw to the script so that we’re left with this mess. As we’ve already noted, Skynet would never allow Marcus to fully override his computer half. I don’t care how powerful the human heart is. And speaking of which, fuck that metaphor. Oh Marcus, your HUMAN HEART IS SO STRONG. Poor John, his HEART CANNOT TAKE IT. Marcus thank you for giving John your STRONG HUMAN HEART. It sounded like something a high school student would write and feel proud that he’s so smart for writing it.
Logic holes aside, we’re never shown why John is such a great leader. We’re just told he’s the prophesied leader of the resistance because… uh… he says he is. This was the film we were supposed to see John finally stop whining and become the leader that Reese described in T1. But he does absolutely nothing. He’s just some soldier that fights real good. We’ve spent three movies hyping this guy up to be the ultimate leader. We’re given one little montage of him speaking over the radio, but it’s not enough. I still think that one of the most powerful moments in the Terminator series is the scene at the end of T3 when John picks up the radio after the nukes go off. The world is scrambling for a leader, and he answers the call. Where were those scenes of him rallying the troops in T4?
For all the hate that T3 gets, I’m starting to appreciate it more and more, especially after this. They really did the best they could without Cameron at the helm. It had the balls to put a twist ending on the formulaic Terminator story. It also had heart, humor, and most importantly it was FUN. T4 is bleak, cynical, mean spirited, and morose. You almost get the feeling that it hates itself. I know it was supposed to be the darker side of the story, but that doesn’t mean it has to completely lack a sense of humor.
And the score sucked, but I guess that’s to be expected. Elfman is a good composer but he phoned this one in. Like T3 I can’t remember a single hook.
In conclusion… barf. McG is a competent director – it looked good, the action flowed well. No shaky cam thank God. The story just lacked integrity.
I tend to see your point, though I’d say that we have simply reached a new low: T3 looks better from the hole they have dug. Still, Nick Stahl’s Connor is unforgivable.
Btw, the name “John Connor” was mentioned so often in Salvation that I soon started to replace it with “Steve Holt!” … improved my mood, didn’t help the movie.
[aside]
Haven’t seen the film, don’t particularly plan to.
But I somehow keep reading this thread title as “I saw Terminator Salivation” and getting this image of Arnold going RAAAH NOM NOM NOM
[/aside]
Here’s an interesting read on the development of the script. I don’t know how reliable the site is, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
I thought the movie was enjoyable , but the end was a mess. As discussed above, there were way too many coincidences to believe this was all part of a master plan. It would have been better to have Marcus as an experimental Terminator programed to explore the world and infiltrate the Resistance until he was made, then return with that intel.
The heart donation was the worst bit of the ending mess. It would have been better to have Marcus choose to die to detonate the nukes or destroy the Young Arnie rather than donate his heart. I think it would have been dramatically appropriate if he stayed dead and John never shocked him back to life.
A more minor point, but I hated how hard they worked to work in the classic lines. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself naturally, leave the line out.
In short, there was potential, but a weak script may have terminated the franchise.
One thing I did like, was the sounds the Terminators and other robots made when moving around. It seemed like in the past, the cliched sound effect for robots moving was this high pitched “VREEE VREEE VREEE” sound, but the terminators had a much deeper, ominous, ‘pulsing’ sound when they moved.
Also, call me a sissy, but “Legless T-600 grabbing you by the ankles and trying to choke your life out with its gangly robot skeletony fingers” just freaks me the hell out. I knew that scene was coming because I saw the legless T600 crawling in the trailer, but it still really startled me. :eek:
I thought the movie was fine if all you were expecting was blow-em-up-smash-em-up action and noise. As an inheritor of the mantle of T1 and T2, though, it was a big disappointment.
Perhaps the most amazing case of this was when John Connor was finally caught inside SkyNet.
We have the SkyNet computer, in the form of Helena Bonham Carter, telling Marcus how Marcus’ whole purpose has been to succeed where all the other Terminators have failed, and to trap John Connor so he can finally be disposed of.
This master plan works, and there’s John Connor on the screen, running around oblivious to the fact that he’s been trapped like a mouse in a cage. And what do they do then? They send a single Terminator after him, rather than just blowing up the room that he’s trapped in.
And why not kill Kyle Reese straight away? Even if he’s dead, he still serves his purpose as bait for John Connor, because Connor has no way of knowing, before he actually arrives at SkyNet, whether Reese is alive or dead.
And part of the whole time-travel paradox is that killing Kyle Reese will, in and of itself, prevent John Connor from existing. So why not just do away with him straight away?
Just saw T4 yesterday. Before I offer my comments, I wanted to add that I recently watched the first three movies with my 12-year old son. I don’t recall being too impressed with T3 the first time around, primarily because of how John Connor was portrayed, but on rewatching it actually held up pretty well, overall. On rewatching, I especially liked the twist at the end.
My observations regarding T4:
This movie was simply not very scary. I found the first three movies to be terrifying. I think this is primarily because the action in the first three movies revolves around a unstoppable Terminator chasing after the protagonists. T4 should have been scary, but even when the humans were brought to the detention center, it was mostly pretty boring. The overall feel of the first three movies was one of dread–T4 was more ho-hum.
I was really aware of how unrealistic the hand-to-hand battles were between the various terminators and humans. A terminator should be able to kill a human basically instantly. All it has to do is punch someone through the chest or crush their skull. Instead, the terminators keep wasting time tossing people around.
The movie-makers don’t know anything about submarine communications, sensors, etc., but that goes without saying for most movies involving subs.
The heart-donation scene reeked, as others have mentioned.
The hydro-worm-bots could have been a lot more scary.
How the heck are the humans maintaining combat aircraft (and submarines)? Keeping a warplane flying is a tremendously difficult endeavor. I think that even in 2018, the resistance is more likely to be akin to third-world insurgents. After a large-scale nuclear war and the collapse of civilization, I can’t imagine anything much more advanced than insurgent-type weapons would remain (e.g. small arms, man-portable missiles, explosives, etc.). There’s a reason that insurgents and third-world countries don’t have top-of-the-line warplanes and submarines. It takes the industrial capability of a modern industrialized nation to maintain such weapon systems.
All in all, the movie wasn’t terrible, but it could have been a lot better. In this respect, it was a lot like the latest Star Trek installment.
Of course, this discounts the fact that in the Terminator, Kyle Reese himself said that almost all the records from before the war were gone. All they had was the Name: Sarah Conner. and the name of the City: LA.
Which is why the terminator ends up going systematically through the phone book and gunning down Sarah Conners in order.
But apparently now we’re in a new timeline :rolleyes:
I assumed that Skynet received intel from the future. They had to have known time travel was possible, otherwise why would they think that a kid from 2018 could be John Conner’s dad?
The other possibility is they had no idea who Kyle really was, but they knew John Conner had been looking for him. This actually makes more sense because it explains why they wouldn’t just kill Kyle then and there. They needed him for bait.
But in T4, they recognize Kyle through facial recognition. How the heck did they know what younger kyle looks like? His police booking photo from 1984? Weren’t the pre-judgement day records lost? I guess you could fankwank it so that the events of T2 postponed judgement day long enough for internet records to be maintained…
But for Skynet to ever remotely assume that its Marcus infiltration plan will be successful implies that Skynet knows about the time loop, and is in fact depending on it. If that’s the case, then it knows that any action to assassinate John Conner will ultimately be futile.
Well yeah, the movie kind of contradicts itself with regard to whether or not it’s using the time loop. Conner certainly seems to think the time loop is important - I got the impression that he not only wanted to save his father, but that he was also worried about himself ceasing to exist if his father died. But there’s other evidence that this is not the original timeline and so it wouldn’t really matter except emotionally if his father died (like in TSCC). I would say that the coincidences are consistent with the time loop idea, but that the time loop idea itself is not consistently portrayed.
Don’t you think that this is a logical conclusion of T2 or, for that matter, time travel per se?
Whether you argue that a jump into the past a) actually leads you to another “universe”, closely related to the one you know but still a bit “behind” or b) creates a new universe or c) stays within the universe you know but goes back in time – it doesn’t change the conclusion that, starting from the time of your entry, things necessarily are going to differ – unless, of course, you assume that everything is strictly predeterminated.
T1 could be interpreted that way: the time travel leads to the conditions needed to undertake time travel in the first place.
The story leaves room for quite a lot of interpretations concerning the “why did it happen that way?”, including a (pre-)deterministic “it had to”.
In T2, otoh, it’s not just the characters who express the believe that the future is not set, the story itself shows evidence to that effect; and T3 acknowledges at the very least a certain malleability of the future, when a) the Arnie-T confirms that Judgment Day was *postponed *by the actions in T2 and b) the Terminatrix succeeds in eliminating people who would have become John Connor’s lieutenants in Skynets post-T2/prior-T3 future.
Therefore T4 happens necessarily in a different timeline than the one that led to Kyle’s return prior to T1. However, T4 might still belong to the same overarching loop that will, ultimately, lead to the return of one Kyle, the impregnation of a Sarah and Skynet’s construction.
Damn, I should reread what I write. 
Anyway, let me add an explanation, why I was talking about “a” Sarah or a Kyle: if time travel took you into another line of reality, the individuals wouldn’t be totally identical to the ones that you left behind in “your” reality, though they might be practically indistinguishable.
If you went back in time within your own reality, an individual would be the same – unless you return to a point before (s)he was conceived.
Then the person would almost necessarily be different, because the chances that the same person was produced twice by sexual reproduction is incredibly small, so small that a second emergence of the same person would be good evidence of a deterministic reality.
But that would be at odds with time travel itself.
I think that trying to pin down causality in the Terminatorverse is a lost cause.
Well, T1 is a pretty logical, self-contained loop-story; T2 also works well by emphasizing the possibility of change in a reality where time travel exists; it manages to neither contradict T1 nor itself … too much.
T3 is a bit of a mess; while we learn that the future is indeed changeable, the repeated construction of Skynet, John Connor’s steady involvement and the continuous advent of Judgment Day seem to indicate that the future is (also) set.
T4 is a total mess and doesn’t make any sense at all.
The most interesting approach towards time travel and its logical consequences within the verse was TSCC.
We don’t know for sure what SkyNet’s plans were. I don’t think that SkyNet knew Kyle was John Connor’s father, only that he was somehow important. Maybe it’d somehow heard he was important to John Connor, or maybe SkyNet just wanted him out of the way because Kyle was a nuisance in L.A., near their San Francisco headquarters. Remember when Marcus was captured and John gave him the speech about how “You tried to kill my mother, Sarah Connor. You killed my father, Kyle Reese”? When Marcus synced to SkyNet, that information was made available to SkyNet for the first time. Then they sent a Terminator to take out Kyle in his cell (of course, John Connor arrives in the nick of time).
As for me, personally, I LOVED it. Of course, in my personal headcanon the series goes from The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Terminator Salvation. I don’t count the TV series or the third movie. I thought all the actors were amazing, especially Sam Worthington as Marcus. The sfx and action was cool, and as for suspense, I was terrified many times! The scene where
The truck smashes into the bridge, and Kyle and Star fall out had me shaking