WTF!?! Is that Megatron at the end?!?
Let me start out by saying that I’m a huge fan of the “stuff blows up real good” genre. The Terminator franchise is probably one of the the most consistant ones around. The third one wasn’t great but this isn’t high cinema here.
As long as there are a variety of killer robots and Christian Bale puts in the same effort he did in Dark Night, I think we may have a pretty fun movie here. My friend and I have dreamed since we were kids that we would one day see a Terminator movie set after judgement day. Ask and ye shall recieve.
I have been waiting for a movie chronicling the Future War for years. I cannot fucking wait for this movie. And Christian Bale is just icing.
has geekgasm Looks fantastic!!
The “This isn’t the future my mother warned me about” is intriguing. Does this mean that fucking with the timelines (by sending terminators back, etc.) has an effect?
So looking forward to seeing this. I, too, have waited for years to see the war. Bring it on!
Much as I loved the future war scenes in the first two, I don’t think I could sit through a whole movie of it without wishing for a touch of plot. The timelines and messing with whatever canon exists for the Terminator franchise doesn’t really matter, I’d like a little bit of plot please with my fragmented human.
At the beginning he asks “what year is it?” Hm. Why would he ask that unless he jumped in from another time? I guess with a time-travel franchise, you can have as much fun as you want with it.
Looks fun.
If he’s supposed to be in his late 30s, Judgement Day should have already happened (as it did at the end of T3). His questions are intriguing, because it implies he was sent through time, and also, it’s not what he was expecting. Maybe they sent him further into the future, to escape some peril, post-J-Day?
I’m geeked out about it, though. Looks very promising.
I believe the story has him emerging from that underground bunker 3 years later where he didn’t keep track of time.
And I’d think the “This isn’t the future my mother warned me about” comment is more of a “It’s way way way worse than anything she described.”
Every reference to the story I’ve read (and this is all I’ve read as I’m avoiding spoilers like a motherfuck) are that the movie takes place in 2018. That’s 14 years after the third one.
Yeh, no way he was in that bunker for 14 years, is there?
I’m starting to think the character Sam Worthington plays is obviously some kind of traitor, but is the one responsible for sending Arnie back in time in the first movie, because John accuses him of attempting to kill his mother, and for killing his father.
There’s also a scene near the end, that shows Sam’s character throwing a chair through a glass wall, and in the background is a person (a Terminator? John? Kyle? Someone else?) strapped to some sort of device. Is this the time machine?
My computer could not run it. I am the sad panda. 
Seconding cmyk’s post … I think Marcus (Worthington’s character) will be the lynchpin of the film; a kind of agent provocateur, perhaps even a cyborg, who is playing both sides, though I hope not to see his identity and motives spoiled before the movie hits. I recall reading that this film is intended to focus less on Connor and more on Marcus, and I think having a good twist in the film will be more important than any blockbuster super asplosion special effect. For as much flak as T3 receives, I liked it and find the criticisms unfairly biased, almost always falling back on the excuse that it wasn’t Cameron’s doing. So what? I’m as big a fan of his films as any geek, but I can recognize the third for being a great interpretation of the established canon from the perspective of a different team of storytellers. Comics do this all the time and I’ve always felt that was a good thing, not a bad thing. It keeps things from getting stale. I found T3 to be a fairly clever way of delivering John into the fate that he spent his whole life running away from … it may not have had the tightly-paced intensity, masterful execution, or suspenseful polish of a Cameron piece, but I felt it was more much more ambitious as far as the story was concerned. YMMV, obviously.
As an example, I liked that the idea of Skynet was evolved into a more contemporary distributed computing model which used our own internet against us and which did not have an easily-targeted “central core” that could be destroyed at some point in the future war. This was a concept that didn’t even register in Cameron’s work, largely because the internet didn’t really exist – at least not to the extent that it does for us now – when he made the first films. The thing about the Terminator story is that it has the unique potential to evolve and reinterpret itself over time, and that’s why I welcome, rather than shun, the idea of it being told from different perspectives. Judging from the creativity being put into some of the first machines to rise from the ashes of the nuclear holocaust (i.e. motorcycle terminators), I can see that they are giving this some genuine thought. My hope is they can also come up with some innovative twists for the plot and not only deliver what we’re all already expecting.
It has giant stompy robots, giant tracked robots, medium-sized stompy robots and medium-sized wheeled robots. As long as they don’t ruin it with bad editing, it looks like it’s going to be great fun.
While I love T3, the Skynet is the Internet thing didn’t really work for me. Basically because there’s no way Skynet as presented in the movies could work across the Internet. It’s described as this big, complex computer AI that becomes self aware and then nukes us. I just can’t imagine how a software program could operate to do that. Not to mention the bandwidth required to move a self aware AI from computer to computer so that there’s no system core.
Me neither, but I’ve got to say that the trailer was…bleh.
Still, high hopes.
-Joe
Personally, I think that T3 is the movie that T2 should have been. An advanced-model shapeshifting terminator is sent from the future to kill John Connor, but the human resistance manages to capture and re-program an Arnold-model terminator to go back and protect him from the advanced model. It’s basically the same plot, but I thought that T3 pulled it off much better: T2, I thought, used the (at the time) fancy special effects as a crutch, but even within a few months, they were already looking dated.
Weird. You have the complete opposite opinion as me. I thought Robert Patrick in T2 managed to be menacing. The terminator girl from the third one - eh. I saw the movie again a few years ago and thought the effects held up pretty decently - they wouldn’t impress modern movie viewers but they wouldn’t stand out as bad.
And the biggest thing is that T2 doesn’t use supernatural magical fate fairies to drive the plot. That’s just bad and lazy writing.
The one thing T3 did better was that Arnold was more of a terminator bad ass, rather than the lovable squishy terminator who appeared to be growing a soft spot for humanity in T2.