On further research, you’re correct, though Paxton was nearby.
The same site also documents death by finglonger.
Well, once they have Kyle, why don’t they kill Kyle, before he can go back in time and…
…this movie makes no sense!
Well, at least he wasn’t punched in the cock, because that transplant would be completely gratuitous.
It was good enough to tempt J.D. Salinger!
It’s in many ways like the Phantom Menace - the type of movie fans have been eagerly anticipating for so long, and wanting to like so bad, that they’re able to trick themselves into thinking it’s good movie when they first watch it. But after awhile they realize they’re only fooling themselves.
Naw, I wasn’t especially waiting for it…until I heard it was going to be made, I hadn’t thought about the franchise in years. And it’s still a pretty entertaining movie, despite the criticisms.
You may want to rewatch them. T2 was identical to T1 in nearly every way (practically a scene-for-scene reshoot). It had a bigger budget, and some interesting themes (Sarah becoming a terminator, the Terminator approximating a human) but was largely the same movie.
Only it didn’t have the newness factor of T1. It was a great action movie, but I don’t think it’s clearly better than T1.
I find this dubious at best. At the very least. the first film has no Miles Dyson analogue, nor the destruction of the Cyberdyne facility. Moreover, the first film assumed that WW3 was inevitable, while events in the second were efforts to prevent it.
Yeah, this gets me too.
But even more annoying was the whole bit about the trap.
The machines go through this whole massive, convoluted plan, including building a special new half-human terminator who doesn’t even know he’s a machine, in order to get John Connor into their clutches.
And then, when this incredibly elaborate trap works, they don’t simply incinerate Connor by locking him in a booby-trapped room and blowing him to pieces. No, they send one single, slightly upgraded Terminator after him, and let their new machine-with-a-conscience waltz off and help Connor.
Also, Connor makes clear on multiple occasions that if anything happened to Kyle Reese, the whole timeline would be fucked and Connor wouldn’t even exist. Surely the machines know this too, but do they kill Reese as soon as he’s in their clutches? No, they decide to use him as bait for Connor.
Now,you might argue that getting Connor is also important to them, but they could have killed Reese and still used him as bait (assuming Connor didn’t just disappear once Reese as killed), because the only way that Connor knew that Reese had been captured was that Marcus told him. Connor knows only that Reese has been taken, but has no way of knowing whether he’s dead or alive. So the machines could have killed Reese without nullifying his effectiveness as bait.
As a one-off, action-and-explosion-fest, i liked the movie fine. But the plot was lame, and it was certainly not a worthy successor to T1 and T2.
Yes, T1 presents a circular loop in time: the future causes events in the past that lead to the future that will … etc. Although the characters’ actions are the result of their decisions, the path seems determined.
And yet, we get some hints that indicate at least one prior loop (future John Connor might have been aware that he was sending his father back into the past which means that he (another “he”) might have been sent back there on a previous occasion) and that would mean that the loop, although closed in itself, doesn’t need to be closed eternally – which would have been an extremely dystopian “moral” anyway – but is merely closed within the story present in T1.
T2 explores the possibility of an out; the dualism of determinism and freedom, only hinted at in T1, is openly discussed and the successes of the protagonists suggest that they are free to choose their future.
But, like in T1, we are left with doubts whether we have seen the whole story: prior to T1, the human rebellion had already won and the T800 was a last-minute-attempt of SkyNet to reverse history, at least that’s what Reese said. He also told us that he went into the time machine soon after the terminator went through, so we know that the time machine had also been secured by humans.
T2, however, shows that the pre-T2-SkyNet is still (?) able to use a time device to send back yet another terminator, and this one is, strangely enough, far more advanced than the previous model.
So, T2 tells us that the events of T1 have turned the human victory unsure; what seemed to be a loop, turned out to be a spiral: future and past interact with each other to produce different results … but how different?
Although the terminators are destroyed at the end of T2, they left ample proof of their impossible existence. We already know, that the investigation that followed after the events of T1 led to the pre-T2 situation; can we be certain, that post-T2 research won’t culminate in yet another AI? After all, the conditions that encouraged its development in the first place still exist.
And there is also the problem of John Connor’s existence: Can he “be” if Kyle Reese won’t be sent back to become his father? If this is so, SkyNet has to exist too or there won’t be neither the opportunity nor necessity for Kyle to go back.
Though T1 and T2 present almost opposing tales, they fit together quite well and manage to avoid too much contradiction because it is pretty clear that they are embedded into a much larger story.
Sorry for waking up a sleeping thread but can anyone explain why the robots were collecting humans in the huge robot/cage/motorcycle dispensing/plasma shooting/riding on the HK thing? Why were they being taken back to skynet and being pushed about by bulldozers and conveyors only to be holed up in cells?
That didn’t make much sense to me either. If Skynet’s priority #1 is to exterminate the human race why are they collecting people instead of just outright killing them on the spot?
The only explanation I could think of was that they were using them as bait to get other humans to come and try rescuing them.
While I liked T3, I did recognize that it was semi-seperate, and couldn’t be taken with any depth to it. It was just a popcorn flick, and I knew that walking in.
T4, well, I haven’t seen it. Nothing I’ve seen even remotely led me to think it might be a worthwhile film.
I did see one positive review. It was our local weekly free newspaper. While the paper has good local government coverage, they are also rather dim paleoleftists who never outgrew the 60’s, with a hugely exalted opinion of themselves*. Their tastes in the arts are abominable. Their reviewer tossed in a grossly fawning review which, compared with all others, made me question whether or not he saw the film.
Generally, that reviewer can’t stand any film anyone else finds watchable. He enjoys nothing except awesomely obscure art-house films, and while I like some of them, too… they mostly just suck, and his prententious blather offends me. When he gave T4 a positive review, I knew it had to be awful.
*I would like it a lot more if the didn’t think they were such hot stuff.
The story made no sense–none whatsoever, there’s no point in even listing the plot holes, the whole thing is one giant plot hole–but the action scenes were cool. It was what I was expecting it to be and I enjoyed it.
It certainly didn’t hold a candle to the first two movies. I thought the TV series was a better contiuation of the mythology than either T3 or 4.
In T1 Reese explains that Skynet kept some humans around for slave labor - doing the sorts of jobs that early model terminators couldn’t do, I guess.
But that still doesn’t explain why Skynet didn’t just kill a high profile target like Reese on the spot.
In the first Terminator movie, Kyle told Sarah that humans were rounded up in camps for orderly disposal, and he was enslaved to load bodies into something or another. I think the writers were trying to flesh out that concept while getting John Connor to come to Reece’s rescue. In other words, no logic outside of plot requirements.
ETA: Never mind, I see that joebuck20 already made the same point.
I liked it…but I wasn’t expecting much because of the reviews.
I went to it…it had excitement. Lots of special effects and things blowing up. The plot had holes, but as a whole I enjoyed it.
For me, the visual awesomeness of the scene in the helicopter and the giant robot and the scary noise it made made up for any flaws the movie had. I also like how every Terminator movie ends with a pursuit through a deserted, unguarded machine shop/foundry. Man, they have those things everywhere!
Thanks joebuck20 and BMax for clearing that up!
Pravnik - agreed about the awesome noise the “reaper” robot made.
I was just pleased they dropped the Sarah Connor “destiny” bit and gave us a cool new character to root for (Marcus).
One other thing I’d like to know though, how come John Connor could ride the “bike” terminators - why would they have human controls…!!?
So the T-800s can use them?
My major complaint about the movie is the robots themselves. We see the bikebots doing some crazy maneuvers with split second timing, as if they are in the matrix. Then the big lumber robots come in and move slower than arnie.