I looked at the Wiki article and apparently they did it the same way they did for Salvation. From the neck down, it’s all meat- new actor. The cgi face was done from a 3D mold of Schwarzenegger’s face from 1984. The mold was cast for makeup effects for the first movie. The fact that someone kept that mold safe over the years is more impressive to me than all the other special effects combined!
I thought of the same thing especially considering that John time traveled to three years before Genisys was supposed to come online. However, they had Pops to get things ready for them and all they really needed to do was a commando strike. John caught up to them almost immediately anyhow so it wouldn’t really matter when they landed.
I found Sarah’s backstory the most confusing. She’s in a boat with her dad. Mom is back at the house until it blows up. Pops is standing there with a rocket launcher. The T-1000 pops up in the boat Sarah is in and kills her dad but she swims away. These things don’t fit together well. Did the T-1000 take the place of her mom and Pops bazooka-ed the house to try to kill it? And instead he blew it into the boat but it was discombobulated enough that Sarah had time to get away?
I liked this much more than I expected to; I’ve felt that the franchise was pretty much done after The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I especially liked how they moved the T2 plotline back to when Sarah was a kid, so the T1000 could be hunting an unaware target, rather than trying to kill John Connor 13 years after Sarah had been a target herself. And, yeah, the flashback sequence was a bit too disjointed.
I liked it. I agree that Reese didn’t look like a guy who grew up in post-apocalyptic California. I think Sarah looking young and small was fine - in the first movie, Sarah’s character was clearly early 20’s at best.
I did wonder what would happen to the rookie cop who survived the T-1000 in the department store, and laughed when it turned out to be J.K. Simmons character 30 years later.
Quick question - I’ve never seen T3 or Salvation, though I’ve watched T1 and T2 countless times. Is there any info from those required to understand anything in this movie? Specifically, why/how Pops and the T-1000 were sent back to 1973, and why Pops doesn’t know who sent him? Or is that all presumably to be revealed in this new trilogy?
Nope nothing from T3 and Salvation are required knowledge for Genisys. The explanation about “Pops” is all in the movie and that change sets up an alt timeline that replaces the events of the entire franchise, pretty much.
We start off in the future that we are familiar with, but once there is time travel, everything has changed. Kinda like Back to the Future 2 meets Star Trek reboot.
I agree the first half of the movie was the strongest, but I enjoyed the whole thing. Emilia Clarke NAILED it, but the Kyle Reese guy couldn’t compare to Michael Biehn. Could anybody? The asian T1000 was awesome too. Very good at imitating the Robert Patrick’s mannerisms.
There are no direct references to T3 or T4. In fact, I think this movie ret-cons T4 in how John and Kyle met. IIRC in T4 they had not met until the events of the movie but in Genisys they meet when Kyle is a kid.
There are a few indirect references. The T-1000 being able to reprogram another Terminator was also done by the T-X in T3. Polymimetic alloy over an endoskeleton was also in T3. Retro aircraft attacking a Skynet base was all through T4. Blowing the skin off of a T-800 with a grenade launcher was done better in T4. Instead of an endless bloom of fire from the grenade we get a fairly standard explosion but all the skin sloughs off the T-800 in a very cool effect. T3 is never explicit about it but could be (and now is) an alternate timeline. The actions of the T-X, specifically killing John’s lieutenants and bootstrapping the fledgling Skynet evidently led to a different future where Skynet was much more technologically advanced. There’s a similar attempt to bootstrap Skynet in Genisys so that could be a vague reference as well.
I know this is probably an insane question, but given product placement (and I noticed a few), and the fact that JK Simmons is closely identified with Farmer’s insurance, is there any chance that Farmers helped him get that part?
Told you it’s insane
I thought it was because he looked kinda-sorta like Dr. Silberman, the only other guy who has seen a T-1000 and lived.
T1 was good, not great. T2 was amazing. If T2 was never made, T1 would be remembered almost like Commando IMHO. A good movie in its own way, but not great.
T3 was crap.
Salvation was ok.
Genesis was pretty damn good. I think I’d rather watch it than T1. The new actors were good in there roles. The new Sarah was so damn cute. Overall, not as good as T2, but a damn fun movie to watch.
Early 20s at best? Heh, you and I have a different eye for age evaluation.
I have always thought that Sarah Connor in the first film was pretty close in age with Linda Hamilton at the time both in looks and in characterization- late 20s. I don’t think they ever explicitly state her age in the first film, but that’s how I always thought of the character, which is why it felt like a retcon to me that this new entry tells us that she’s 9 in 1973.
That makes her 20 in 1984. Although Emilia Clarke can certainly pass for 20, she’s actually about the same age Linda Hamilton was in 1984 -28years old, which is how I always saw the character.
T2 was a cooler movie, it was a more fun blow-em-up summertime romp, it had better special effects, but I think the first movie is superior as an effective and artistic dramatic work.
I love T2 and will always pair it with the first one as the only two “real” Terminator movies, but the first one is just a genuine work of beauty as far as I’m concerned.
Well, I saw T1 in the theater when I was 17, and working as a busboy in a restaurant much like the one Sarah worked in. She struck me as being more similar to the waitresses I worked with who were either shortly out of high school or waitressing while going to community college. By the time waitresses were in their late 20s, they looked a lot rougher. YMMV.
The wiki for the Terminator franchise says that Sarah Connor was nineteen years old during the first film. Wikipedia says this age is given in the original script, which is on one of the DVD versions of the film. (And actually, I remember that film was released many times on DVD.)
I know this is 12 minutes long, but you all need to stop everything and watch these two guys from Redletter media try to explain the whole movie’s timelines. They joke around, but they really are trying to figure it out.
It’s hilarious.
I’m pretty sure that’s a dream sequence in Terminator. Given the obvious metaphorical meaning to Reese of watching Sarah’s picture burn in a Terminator attack, maybe it didn’t really happen that way.
Well, can’t say I liked it much. Plot was ok, not great, Arnold pretty good, effects and all that were decent, but I couldn’t get behind the leads at all. They struck me as totally unbelievable for what they’d supposedly been though, like a couple of YA characters, ‘it’s my life, I’d like to be consulted.’ it’s like 23 is the new 13 or something.
The future-war preamble could have been trimmed.
Every robot just dropping dead when they killed the central whatever was really stupid, since we know that Terminators are autonomous. Obviously the ones going back through time aren’t communicating with a central server.
The initial twisted timeline scenes were awesome, including the shot-for-shot from the first film. I loved how it blended parts of the first two movies together in an in-universe plausible encounter. Both sides know that the two parties are going to show up, and they need to intercept. And I also liked that the terminators are relatively easily dispatched given sufficient planning.
I think the handling of Reese’s alternate timeline memories was sort of awkward in a few ways. There should have been a physical change to go along with the new memories. We can see his scars going away. We could even see him transform from a scrawny post-apocalyptic scrappy warrior into the well-fed hunk that we apparently expect all actors to be these days. Looper was a great model for how to handle changes in a character’s past propagating through time. As it was, the flashes of memory were sort of weird and mystical, and having the lame standoff between Reese and Sarah be resolved by technobabble from Arnie felt both contrived and absurd. The Terminator should not be able to reason about the crazy effects of time travel.
Nanite-John-Connor was a good villain. One of the downsides of Terminator 3 was that the Terminator didn’t really seem like an upgrade over the T2 one.
I disliked that it’s explicitly mentioned that Pops has no record of who sent him back, and that that’s left hanging. I get that it’s teasing at a sequel (like the credit cookie does) Honestly, better to just not mention it.
Easily the third-best Terminator movie. And closer to the good two than the crappy two.
Redlettermedia.com has pointed out that unless Sarah Connor (either with Kyle Reese or already pregnant by him) travels back to 1984 at some point, there’s no way John Connor can be born in 1985.
I don’t think that matters. The Terminator movie series does not depict a stable time loop the way that, say, All You Zombies or The Time Traveler’s Wife does. Things don’t happen the same way on each trip through the timeline. It is a branching looping mess where each time through, meddling in the past creates a new future. As long as Sarah and Reese still have a kid named John, the timeline can just shift further into the future.
I think we should talk about it for a few hours, makes lots of diagrams with straws.
When he popped up in the trailers I assumed he was playing Dr. Silberman, because the resemblance and the original actor had died.
I did like the idea of this character being a rookie and seeing some weird shit and being greatly affected by it… but to the point that he’s a joke to the other cops talking about future robots…and in whole 'nother city seemed bizarre.
He didn’t seem like he actually saw all that much strange stuff. He saw the T1000 shot a bunch of times but keep going…I don’t think he saw that much liquid metal action. I wish they had kept him around for a little bit and had him overhear a lot of the time travel and future war stuff.
Also… why did the movie switch to San Francisco?
Yeah that was weird. I thought a possible implication was that Pops was working alongside the T1000 and it helped kill her parents because they would have gotten in the way of it protecting her. Once the parents were gone, Pops turned on the T1000 and took Sarah away. Then I’m curious if that T1000 was the same they fought in LA in '84. Basically it knew its next best chance to get Sarah was to wait a decade and pose as a cop until the next time they knew her whereabouts.