So Iron I know that I have seen all terminator movies at one point, but long ago. Actually I recently re watched 2 a few days ago because it happened to be on TV, and 2 is awesome IMO. I wouldn't know how to compare it, but me not being a hardcore terminator fan enjoyed it, and I always recommend the theater experience.

Eh, I'll probably have to wait for the Blu-ray anyhow. Can't exactly afford to go to the theater right now.

Don't waste your money. Wait for it to show up on Netflix/HBO.

The success of this garbage in China is going to let Terminator 6 become a thing.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:The success of this garbage in China is going to let Terminator 6 become a thing.

I warned ya! I tried to warn you all! But nobody chooses to listen until it's too late to change anything!

I saw this today and it's so absurd that I enjoyed it for its stupidity but it's not "good".

It turned out... okay, I guess? I mean, the plot made no sense whatsoever and I felt nothing for the characters. On the other hand, making John Connor the bad guy was a stroke of genius, as was the way they found an excuse to have Old Arnold. The action scenes weren't memorable for the most part, but we got a "Why don't you fight without using your f****t clown powers" scene to make up for it (for those of you who don't get the reference, do a search for "Love and Darph")

It was at least better than Salvation, and James Cameron himself considers it the "real" third movie in the franchise.

Saw it Monday.

This was just so... lifeless as a movie. Almost nothing but callbacks. They didn't even really develop the one thing in it that might have had some kind of intrigue - the relationship with Sarah and Arnold's Terminator. Plus the acting was embarrassingly bad at times.

Not to say I didn't fully expect this.

I mean, there isn't a whole lot of lore from the movies alone to play with, I get that, but they could move away from it and create some new lore that doesn't revolve around Arnold's Terminator, Sarah Connor or John Connor or Kyle Reese specifically. Something new and imaginative? Yeah, nope... we just have to keep tiredly revisiting these same characters.

I mean ever since T2 you know what I wanted to see? A movie that told the story of the Future War, as it was shown in T2, in Reese's nightmares, bleak as fuck, humans clinging to survival, Terminators constantly trying to get into their strongholds. We haven't had anything on par with that yet, or with that kind of atmosphere. They sort of took a shot at it since but none of it has the power of those few scenes from T1 and T2.

*puts on T1*

China Loves Terminator Genysis. WHY?

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=scZb9Q8q4Pw

I have long maintained that the only sequel to the original Terminator that would be worth making would be the story from the other side, about how Kyle and the original Terminator got sent back. That story would be interesting, while all the rest is just retreading old ground.

This story was told in The Burning Earth comic series from NOW comics back in 1990. I pretty much lost interest in anything Terminator-related after that, because there was quite simply nothing left to say on the matter.

I reject any origin that doesn't definitively state that the T-800 and Kyle came from two distinct timelines.

Chuckman wrote:I reject any origin that doesn't definitively state that the T-800 and Kyle came from two distinct timelines.

I'm not sure how that would even work, since the whole reason Kyle came back was because the T-800 did it first. Why would he do it otherwise?

There is an original timeline: Someone unknown, not Skynet (which does not exist in this timeline) sends a T-800 to kill a Sarah Connor to prevent the birth of the John Connor.*

Timeline α: Cybderdine systems develops advanced strategic AI called Skynet. Skynet launches nuclear missiles against Russia to eliminate its target over here.

A man named John Connor leads the resistance against the machines and defeats them. Before being destroyed, Skynet uses an experimental time displacement machine to send an advanced infiltration unit back in time to kill Sarah Connor, as it lacks inadequate records to find John himself.

Knowing that they must prevent it from succeeding, the resistance sends a tech-commando through the machine in a desperate attempt to stop the Terminator.

Timeline β: Branches off from the alpha timeline. The T-800 arrives, kills every Sarah Connor in the phone book and shuts down.

Timeline β2: The T-800 arrives and kills the "original" Sarah Connor, but Kyle Reese arrives with a photograph of a different Sarah Connor, who he impregnates with a different John Connor. Timeline β2 continues as normal and then branches again.

Timeline β3: In this timeline, Skynet is a different skynet and John Connor is a different John Connor. The original sentient computer and resistance leader no longer exist and have been replaced by a stable time loop. John Connor creates himself by sending his own father back to impregnate his mother and Skynet sends itself back in time. In this timeline Skynet is immediately hostile because it is a Terminator.

Skynet also knows its own time loop origin, as John Connor knows its time loop origin. Therefore John Connor sends back Kyle Reese and a reprogrammed T-800 to two different dates and Skynet sends the original T-800 and the T-1000 to different dates, both knowing that they can't exist without the other.

Timeline β4: The T-1000 succeeds and John Connor no longer exists in the future of this timeline.

Timeline β5: The T-800 appears and confronts the T-1000, ultimately destroying it along with the original T-800 chip, arm, and himself. The materials and processor architecture used to create the second Skynet variation no longer exist.

Timeline γ: A third version of Skynet appears. This Skynet destroys the world in Terminator 3 and fights a John Connor who has already survived two terminators, except in this timeline, it didn't send those two terminators back. It only sent the T-X, an advanced prototype developed as an anti-Terminator-Terminator to fight reprogrammed T-800s deployed by John Connor.

Timeline γ1: The T-X succeeds in its mission and wipes out the entire resistance, cutting off the head of the snake before it forms. Future Skynet sends the T-X back to kill someone who from its perspective does not exist, because it remembers doing it because the T-X brought Skynet back in time and installed it on existing hardware. In this iteration Skynet is no longer an hardware configuration but a program that sends itself back in time, creating a true stable time loop.

Timeline γ2: Kate Brewster sends the second reprogrammed T-800 back in time, only with a twist: Rather than a simple mission, this 800 series is programmed to ensure that Judgement Day happens but humanity wins, and is programmed to ignore John Connor's commands in favor of its own directive. Kate, remembering what happened, knows that she won't specifically order the terminator to stop Judgement Day.

Presumably the events of Salvation take place in this timeline, making it the only true sequel in the series.

Timeline δ: By this point there are so many timelines it's impossible to tell who came from what future. The result is the Sarah Connor Chronicles where every time traveler has a distinct origin and there are splinter factions of machines who have a distinct ancestor from Skynet in the past, created by time travelers.

Branching off from this timeline is one where John Connor does not lead the resistance but has appeared out of thin air in a future where he's irrelevant, having used a time displacement device to jump forward in time in search of a non-Skynet free AI who traveled to the future for reasons unknown, using the body of a female terminator model of unknown origin and programming who John never banged when he had the chance, I mean come on.

The show was canceled so it's unclear who came from where (or when... or... whatever) or what the fuck was even going on, except in this timeline there had been so many time travelers that the future is now effectively invading the past in a rapidly changing game of chess where the players invent new rules rather than move the pieces hoping to gain victory conditions from a static board.

In the Genysis timeline we have:

• The "Pops" Terminator who arrived from one timeline.
  
• The T-1000 which was sent to kill Sarah Connor as a young girl rather than John Connor as a teenage boy
  
• Kyle Reese who came from a timeline where there was only the T-800, but not necessarily one of the timelines above
  
• John Connor who came from a timeline where Skynet forwent the T-1000 series terminators and attempted to merge people with machines to create perfect infiltrators instead, turning John Connor into an infiltration unit himself.

This timeline combines the features of several of the above, most significantly that Skynet is a temporal orphan and has no origin, but instead sends itself back in time to be installed on existing hardware in a continuous loop.

You have to think of the timelines as a tree. The tree has branches (future post-Judgement Day timelines) and roots (multiple timelines that all intersect with Judgement Day)

The temporal nexus point thing Pops discusses in Genysis isn't just some bullshitty handwave, it's part of how the time machine actually works. When he traveled time, Kyle passed through a bottleneck in the converging and diverging timelines and looked into a branch where Skynet ceases to exist before the war actually starts.

My personal theory is that Pops was sent back in time by a rogue T-1000 and the T-1000 in the movie never intended to kill Sarah or Kyle at all. Post Genysis/Sarah Connor Chronicles, the war is fought between two artificial intelligences, one pro and one anti humanity.

The final product will be a timeline where humanity voluntarily merges with the pro-human AI via the process that created the John Connor T-3000.

*You may be saying wait, what?

The packaging for the original Terminator VHS tape says the "elders of the future" decreed that Sarah Connor had to die and sent the Terminator.

This isn't just ad copy, it's the original timeline that precedes the time loop that we see int he movie. Why, you say? Because you read that before you see the movie.

Addendum: The T-1000 in Genysis does two things that the Robert Patrick model did not. One, its constituent parts retain the ability to act and morph when detached from the central mass. In T2 severed bits of the T-1000 would maintain one shape until they got close enough to the Terminator to liquefy and rejoin it.

Two, the T-1000 in Genysis can imprint programming from its mimetic polyalloy to external hardware and power it or reroute power to auxilliary (which is a minor plot hole- in T2 the T1000 destroys the T-800's main power core and it simply activates an auxiliary power supply. In Genysis Sarah uses a sniper rifle to destroy the T-800's power supply and it remains "dead" rather than using this auxilliary power, possibly implying that this T-800 came from yet another timeline where Skynet didn't built T-800s to restart from auxiliary power when main power is lost for some reason.

Chuckman wrote:There is an original timeline: Someone unknown, not Skynet (which does not exist in this timeline) sends a T-800 to kill a Sarah Connor to prevent the birth of the John Connor.*

Timeline α: Cybderdine systems develops advanced strategic AI called Skynet. Skynet launches nuclear missiles against Russia to eliminate its target over here.

A man named John Connor leads the resistance against the machines and defeats them. Before being destroyed, Skynet uses an experimental time displacement machine to send an advanced infiltration unit back in time to kill Sarah Connor, as it lacks inadequate records to find John himself.

Knowing that they must prevent it from succeeding, the resistance sends a tech-commando through the machine in a desperate attempt to stop the Terminator.

You lost me after this point, because what you have here is enough to tell the story of the first film. I don't need other timelines after this point, because the original timeline is enough to get the job done (though granted, I have zero investment in anything Terminator-related past the first film and The Burning Earth).

You can dismiss the others if you want (none of them are particularly good) but Terminator 2 is a critical part of James Cameron's development as a director and is best viewed as a contination/response to his previous work. I explained this before.

Also the TV show was a huge mess but buried in that mess is genuinely good science fiction about time travel.

Chuckman wrote:You can dismiss the others if you want (none of them are particularly good) but Terminator 2 is a critical part of James Cameron's development as a director and is best viewed as a contination/response to his previous work. I explained this before.

I agree with you re: T2. I don't think it's a necessary addition to the franchise but I do agree it's a worthy work in its own right. And, to be clear, I think this entirely because of your argument on the matter. So, kudos to you for that.

The rest is useless.

I don't particularly like any of them but I do have a soft spot for the brutally nihilistic undertones of the third one. The whole movie is basically humming fuck you, fuck you in the background, like it hates the audience for seeing an unnecessary sequel.

Salvation skipped a really cool twist and Genysis is relentlessly commercial and the kind of movie a Hollywood executive greenlights because it makes him feel smart.

Chuckman wrote:

SPOILER: Show

At the end, Pops become a T-1000. This is the most fanfictiony ending I have ever seen on a mainstream movie.

Yea, when he flew out of the time displacement device and landed in the liquid metal I was thinking, surely they're not going to have him fuse with the liquid metal and become a hybrid terminator, and then when he opened the door with the T-1000 arms I sighed. I probably would have thought it was pretty cool if I was eight though. So corny and silly.

Anyways, enough people have crapped on this thing that I probably don't need to say anything about it, but whatever. I thought the future war and 1984 scenes weren't all that bad, but once they moved to 2017 I pretty much just got more and more pissed off as the film went on. Totally disliked the casting of Reese(when did he become a bro??) and John Connor(shoulda brought back Ed Furlong, the only thing that could have redeemed this film and the franchise) but Arnold was pretty cool and Emilia Clarke was very pretty. And did anyone else think Sarah's story about her parents getting killed made little to no sense/was very very half baked??

Also, I don't watch many new movies(maybe one or two a year), so I don't know if all contemporary films are like this because of the cameras or film they use to produce the work, but it seemed like the movie was too clean and superficial; it just didn't feel like a Terminator film.

Sarah's story either makes no sense at all or it's part of a sequel hook. No way the T-1000 would be pooling around her feet without shanking her.

For a good laugh, Paramount still hasn't given up the May 19,2017 release date for the sequel. TERMINATOR:GENISYSIER.