^ I think what Bagheera is saying is that on top of being a good action movie, it was also a good science fiction film. He's saying that that's what makes it superior to the sequel(s), as those were just action films with no real value as good sci-fi stories.

It's been a long time since I watched anything from the Terminator franchise. I really need to get around to watching the first two again. I remember liking them, especially the first one. Had it on DVD so I could view it multiple times while I only watched the second movie once when it aired on television. I remember being bored by T3 and Salvation.

That promo image with Matt Smith is kinda of funny.

Bagheera wrote:I am. The Terminator might have dated effects, but its social worth and value as a story haven't waned one bit. It was actually a surprisingly layered story, touching on humanity's burgeoning cyberization, our fear of our own creations, the omnipresent gloom of the Nuclear Age, and lots of other things. It was good science fiction, not just a good action movie. T2 pissed all over that, wrecking one of the few good time travel stories in movie history and replacing it with the same old drek. Good action movie? Sure, and it gets points for Linda Hamilton, but it's nowhere near the quality of the original. The fact it's the best of the rest doesn't mean it's all that great.

I have to respectfully disagree with you Bags. The first Terminator movie comes across as incredibly dated to me (T2 does to some extent as well, but not to nearly the same level as the first film), everything from the production design to the soundtrack screams 1984. I find the love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese forced and the acting from some key players and the supporting cast isn't as good as it was in the sequel. I also fail to see how T2 wasn't a good sci-fi film and I actually liked how they handled time travel better in that film. And while the plots for both films come across as a bit routine nowadays, the execution in T2 is so much better than the first Terminator. And yes, the special effects are better too. T2 also touched upon more themes than the first one (parenthood, free will, reliance on technology, whether something artificial can be human) and had one of the best endings in movie history.

^
When I watched it as a kid, T2 was moving, awesome and scary in one package. Cameron nailed it right. Anything else after wasn't, and unless director, writer and producers get it right (TBH, it's a 50/50 chance), assume that this production will be seen as a potential disaster.

Instead, I'm more excited for Furious 7.

I'm amazed there are people out there who would defend a Terminator 5. Especially a Terminator 5 with the subtitle Genesis mispelled as Genisys.

You're fighting a losing battle people. Terminator is really James Cameron's baby & it'll never reach the level of the first two.

Plus the movie hits theaters a mere three days before MAGIC MIKE XXL so I know where all my focus is going early July.

Trajan wrote:I have to respectfully disagree with you Bags. The first Terminator movie comes across as incredibly dated to me (T2 does to some extent as well, but not to nearly the same level as the first film), everything from the production design to the soundtrack screams 1984. I find the love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese forced and the acting from some key players and the supporting cast isn't as good as it was in the sequel. I also fail to see how T2 wasn't a good sci-fi film and I actually liked how they handled time travel better in that film. And while the plots for both films come across as a bit routine nowadays, the execution in T2 is so much better than the first Terminator. And yes, the special effects are better too. T2 also touched upon more themes than the first one (parenthood, free will, reliance on technology, whether something artificial can be human) and had one of the best endings in movie history.

You are too young to appreciate glorious 80s cheese and sythesizers that'll perm the hair on your balls.

T1 was also made on a pretty damn small budget, even for 1984...around 6 or 7 million...the budget for Ghostbusters that same year was more than 4 times that. Cameron could not have made a better film with the resources he had.

The first is more impressive as a film.

The second is more impressive as spectacle.

They're both great but they really shouldn't be compared.

^
This.
It's like comparing Alien with Aliens, both are great films in their own rights, but within different genres.
And it's me, or did the 80's and 90's made a far better job job at creating badass female characters without the need to sexualize them than the 00' and the New Tens?

ElMariachi wrote:^
This.
It's like comparing Alien with Aliens, both are great films in their own rights, but within different genres.
And it's me, or did the 80's and 90's made a far better job job at creating badass female characters without the need to sexualize them than the 00' and the New Tens?

Yes, they did. Which is odd given the gender politics of their respective eras, but so it goes.

^Yup. Women like Ripley and Sarah Connor were out being And, ironically, I can't think of an action/horror movie in the last decade or so that's had a similarly kickass female protagonist.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:I'm amazed there are people out there who would defend a Terminator 5. Especially a Terminator 5 with the subtitle Genesis mispelled as Genisys.

Not to mention the Eleventh Doctor as some mystery character (I'm not sure if Smith tried to change his look, but he still looks like he stepped fresh off the TARDIS and not from some hellhole future).

I've also never heard of any of these actors except for Smith and Schwaznegger; is this really the best they could hope to find, by scraping the bottom of the barrel?

ElMariachi wrote:^
And it's me, or did the 80's and 90's made a far better job job at creating badass female characters without the need to sexualize them than the 00' and the New Tens?

i would say yes...
but there is no reason not to sexualize them at least a little, it does not/should not negate there badassery in anyway. and it makes the audience more inclined to want to follow her non visual path, as they are already enjoying her visually on screen.
that sounds shallow, but its the point of movies being visual entertainment, for us to enjoy the visuals, including the characters.
honestly im not even sure it was even the 80s, but just james cameron, ripely was yes already kickass in alien, but aliens took it to a higher level, and her part in alien had been written for a male character, hence cameron, giving her more womanly aspects in aliens (motherly background/instincts)

T2 is absolutely on par with T1.

It's not the same, but it certainly has the same depth. T2 is Cameron's post cold-war reply to the bleak determinism of the eighties. The Terminator's transformation into a feeling being evokes the power of the human spirit. As with the Aliens in Aliens, Cameron evokes cold war paranoia about the decline of the American empire in the T1000; an amorphous, shapeless enemy that resists physical force.

The T1000 extends the metaphor by casting the villain as a subtle embodiment of the new globalist world as the amorphous opponent to American industry, represented by Arnold's slower, sturdier machine-man and his association with good ol' shotguns (the Terminator's signature lever-action is hilariously out of date and highly improbably armament for a highway honk-tonk proprietor) compared to the T1000's favored Glock and Heckler and Koch subgun.

It's also no accident that Aliens and the Terminator are, respectively, focused heavily on motherhood and fatherhood respectively. Sarah Connor in T2 reflects Aliens' Ellen Ripley in toughness and hardness but we see in the beginning that she has very little maternal feeling for John, concerned mainly with his role in the future. The Terminator himself acts as a counterbalance, an essay on the role and necessity of a father figure in a child's life. In a fascinating examination of gender roles, the Terminator's selfess fixation on actually protecting John illustrates the cruelty of Sarah's own approach in grooming him to be a war leader without forming a deep motherly connection.

The infamous "I know now why you cry" scene is not simply a tugging of heartstrings; it's the final reconciliation of Sarah's maternity with herself. By making the ultimate sacrifice for John, the machine demonstrates what parenthood is all about and reconnects Sarah to her maternal instinct for her son. When Sarah's final narration states "If a machine... can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too" she is primarily talking about herself. Sarah's arc in this film is to redeem Ripley by balancing masculine and feminine in a single figure.

T2 is also an apology against the ra-ra action hero current found in Aliens, which itself is a fantasy revenge narrative against Vietnam that paints the faceless foreign hordes that didn't know when to offer up their hearts and minds as faceless, monstrous bugs whose main threat is merciless reproduction. In T2 Cameron offers up an engine of war that is redeemed by learning mercy and makes a sacrifice to symbolically cleanse humanity of sin by retroactively destroying his own creator as a sort of benelvolent antitechnochrist.

Arnold is perfect in this sense. His presence in this film references other texts contemporaneous to The Terminator evoking Arnold as Dutch from Predator, a film profoundly similar in its imagery and themes to Aliens, and as John Matrix in Commando, a vicious, sarcastic murder machine that slaughters half of Central America with garden implements (reminiscent of the 'knives and stabbing weapons' of the T-1000. Interesting how the T-1000's purity of murder -its very body is a weapon- evokes blades and edged weapons, "more civilized weapons from a more civilized age")

Cameron very cleverly sets up T2 to mirror T1 almost beat for beat to establish the sequel as both continuity and alternity: T2 says mankind can determined to destroy itself (an observation only a manufactured killing machine can freely make) or walk a brighter road.

The John as senator ending is really the true ending of the film. The point is to act as a deliberate counter to the bleak uncertainty of Sarah Connor driving headlong into the storm at the end of the first film. Sadly the theatrical cut gives the metal to the forge but doesn't follow through beating the swords into plowshares.

T3 is just a hamhanded parody that mocks its audience and Salvation could actually be a good film if it kept the original ending, but without much to really add or say after the themes of the first two; Salvation and T3 are to me as Iron Man 2 is to that franchise, a rehash that adds nothing while Iron Man 3 is an actual sequel to the first film with some interesting imagery in it.

Chuckman, this is why I love you. I haven't yet decided whether or not you're full of shit, but you've honestly got me rethinking a movie I once loathed, and that is delightful. Thank you for that.

And for the peanut gallery: see, Bags isn't an asshole just for kicks. If you make a decent argument he'll listen. But you have to work for it.

I mostly agree with Chuckman here, there's subtlety and themes in Cameron's earlier works that his later films like Titanic and AVATAR, sadly lack.

But I have to disagree, Iron Man 3 was a slap in the face to everyone. Casual and diehard fans alike. [Resulting tangent here. - Monk]

Back on topic with terminator. . .Like with the live action GITS I'm probably not going to go see this. First two films were perfect, there's no need to add anything more. There's was and maybe still is potential for sequels and spinoffs, but whatever opportunity they had was and is being squandered by the minds of lesser talents who didn't understand what made the first two films work.

Going back to Terminator, I'm a bit worried about the fact that the plot apparently revolves around Sarah trying to reject her destiny and her apparent perception of the T-800 as a father figure. I'm guessing there's gonna be some stereotypical angsting about her fate. And is it me or does she look much younger than every other depiction of Sarah? It may be just me but she certainly doesn't look like she's been trained to defend herself from the age of nine by a robot.

I'm also a bit doubtful about Arnie rejoining the fray; he certainly doesn't seem physically capable of punching through glass windows anymore.

Though I guess since I won't see the film unless it turns out to actually be good (which is a very, very low chance) I can only stand on the sidelines and mourn the franchise getting pulled further into the dirt.

As much as I think Chuckman reads too much into things sometimes, I think he absolutely nailed it here. It's like everything I wanted to say, only put much more eloquently. Excellent work, sir.

movieartman wrote:1.) More terminators is good, the longer the war rages the more experimental types will be made to more effectively kill the enemy. It's just

This is the one thing that everyone (fans and sequel screenwriters) forgets.

In the first Terminator, Kyle Reese said that they had smashed Skynet's security grid, and they had basically just won the war. Skynet sent the terminator back as a last ditch effort to win. In T2, Sarah Connor's opening narration states that Skynet actually sent back two terminators.

The thing is, Skynet sent back two terminators, the T-800 and the T-1000 simultaneously, one to the 80s, the other to the 90s. It did this at the exact same time, just before the humans won the war.

The war is not ongoing with Skynet continuously developing newer and newer terminators and sending them back on a consistent basis.

Essentially, the story should have stopped with T2. Every time they send back more terminators or new terminators, it fucks up the original continuity.

^Yeah, everything since T2 has just been pretentious attempts to claim that the last piece of media twisted the timeline so that Skynet was developed later, or had more Terminator variants, etc.

GUYS OMG ITS HERE AND IT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IT MAKES SENSE


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62E4FJTwSuc

So it's a dump on the original? And a rehash of T2 with ending Judgement Day? And a redo of Salvation with Kyle Reese & John Connor fighting robot baddies & young CG Ahnuld? And it's Inception/The Dark Knight with trucks doing 360s?

Eh... I give the Terminator franchise props for their consistency. Every sequel made post T2 intentionally sets out to be worse than the last.

I'll be genuinely surprised if this is better than Salvation. What's interesting is they cast the Sam Worthington knock-off Jai Courtney in the film as the lead.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:So it's a dump on the original? And a rehash of T2 with ending Judgement Day? And a redo of Salvation with Kyle Reese & John Connor fighting robot baddies & young CG Ahnuld? And it's Inception/The Dark Knight with trucks doing 360s?

its a alternate time line overlapping the events of the original caused by the constant time travel, thats not a dump, its events happening logically if the timeline was altered the way it is before 84.
if they MIGHT have the power to stop judgement day, i would make every effort to continue trying to stop it.
its not redoing salvation its just showing the future timeline like t2 did at the opening, for gods sake dude its called flashing forward?
the film overlaps the events of 1984 so of course they will show the young arnold getting there.


will agree with the truck part