Terminator Salvation

[Bilbo]

It's called pulling punches even if he didn't know he was doing it.

I don't know about you, but I don't pull punches when I'm trying to knock someone out (not that it's ever actually happened, but whatever.) How the hell is he supposed to hold back when he doesn't know he has to?

So because you've never done it, you cannot see why another person would as well? Jesus, you are fucking dumb.

But to put this in perspective, no one fights by putting all their power into a punch or kick unless you're desperate or untrained. It takes a lot of energy and is wasted for something far more efficent. You aim for soft areas and put the amount power needed to hurt or kill. And unless you can demonstrate he was aiming to kill, was a completely untrained in hand to hand, or some untrained yokel hick, he was using what he thought was needed to hurt. Thus even as a T-whatever model he was exerting that much power.

You also missed the other logical reason for this change. If Marcus is to infiltrate the Resistance then it would get pretty hard to do if you see him punching through chests. Obviously Skynet programmed Marcus to be unable to use all of his strength before he knows he is a machine. Hell, in the beginning he actualls winces and makes a sound when he gets that tiny cut on his arm that the slent girl puts the band-aid over. Which demonstrates that Skynet did a fairly decent job of programming the computer portion of Marcus to make the human portion of him act and react like a human.

[Shroom Man 777]

I saw Terminator Salvation and I say that it was a fairly decent summer blockbuster, good and a way better deal than Terminator 3. But, of course, it no way comes close to either The Terminator or Terminator 2 but those movies are goddamn classics and no one expected Salvation to top either two of 'em. So let me just start by giving T4 a 3/5 on the Shroom-o-meter. Three littel Shrooms! Right about Star Trek's levels, and well above Angels & Demons.

Now, the movie itself!

After the intro, the movie reveals to us in cool detail the bleak and gritty and and grimdark world of 2018 and it does great in depicting postapocalyptic warfare! Finally, Spartafreedomerica gets the light network-centric future warrior warfare it can get with highly airmobile unit of spec-ops asskickers! But the kick is that they're taking on armies of obsene mechanical deathstrosities and armored skeleton soldiers of death led by Skynet! Strafing runs! Robot death-squads! Hunter Killers from the sky! A-10s and Hueys (Bad Pennys, Siege )! Bikebots! Tactical atomics!

John Connor does alright with the role of John Connor, hardassed leader of the Resistance - but I guess in a way, it's similar to Batman in The Dark Knight where while he has moments of heroism and badassery, the true substance of his character aren't profoundly delved in but just touched on - and really, we're already familiar and well-versed in Bale bat-badassery. This is because we see some really strong performances by Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright and Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese! Both give surprisingly compelling performances amidst a backdrop of special effects spectacle and explosions, with Worthington doing really well in his role as a more-than-human machine and with Yelchin playing a younger Reese to a T. The guy looks like him, better than that scruffy guy from TSCC, and goddamn man he's basically a one man resistance cell in Los Angeles! He's totally scruffy and totally plays the part of the young resistance boy soldier surviving out there in a literal no-man's land!

Movie starts off and middles off great - it's immersive and it shows a complex world post J-day. The remains of the human armies battling and kicking ass and struggling to survive in post-conventional assymetric warfare against Skynet's machines. Skynet being ruthless and near-omnipresent with really nifty killing machines that fly, roll, stride, and slither to DESTROY ALL HUMANS in all sorts of ways. People caught in between, just trying to stay alive, survivors caught in the crossfire on a war of survival and extinction! Man.

But the thing is, the movie could've shown us so much goddamn more! It showed us a lot - but goddamn I wanted so much more! Moar! MOOOAAARRRR! It kind of plays with the imagination, the scenes are well set up and stuff but on some level, it doesn't deliver enough - it entertains and catches the attention, but it doesn't end by delivering a cold metal fist into your heart for the killing blow. You are entertained, but not knocked out.

That, I think, is it's only failure. More of the postapocalyptic world could've been seen, with more details on humanity's ragtag struggle, with more indepth perspective of the brooding Great Military Leader that is John Connor, it needed to go more Lord of the Rings with the panning shots and the scores and the lingering on epic scenes. Especially at the end, it needed a better finisher - something like a piledriver or the cinematic equivalent of a penultimate wrestling maneuver!

It needed more melodrama, that's what it needed. More booming music and lens glares and multiple helicopter camera angle Bay-shots! Because while some movies might be criticizing for using those things too much, T4 actually underused those elements!

Because, yeah, while the final battle of the T-800 was good and seeing Arnold in all his 1980s glory, naked and beating ass, I think in a way that it was one homage too much. The movie excelled in the places that showed us things that were more, and beyond, The Terminator and T2. Backtracking to reference scenes from those two movies was okay, but while Cameron did it artfully and with grace, McG wasn't able to match up and really - T4 didn't need any more homages, it needed to continue breaking out and defying what's been established, kick ass and take no prisoners!

I guess in the end, it just didn't go all the way. It had the right ingredients.But it was served meal-sized, when what we needed was a full-blown buffet, the kind that turn people into KFC-gobbling Jabba the Hutts! Because fuck it, Terminator is all about going the way!

EDIT:

Marcus Wright was in "believe he was human" mode, almost just like Robot River in Allison from Palmdale episode of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. That meant that the human part of his brain was active, not any Skynet programing. In fact, his Skynet programing was definitely more of a passive thing rather than an active conscious thing, and was thus more insidious. His organs, his brain, it made him act and thing and move and punch and kick and hurt like human and that's the point. He was supposed to infiltrate the Resistance without himself ever knowing it!

That's probably why he was a one-of-a-kind shot, his design must've taken so much goddamn effort and balancing that mass production would've been a pain in the ass for Skynet. He's the more mechanical version of the I-950 from the Stirling novels.

[Coyote]

I saw it yesterday, and liked it. I agree that it wasn't as good as T1 and T2, but seemed more "proper" than T3, which still seems kind of out-of-place in the general telling of the story. I also think Shroom nailed it when he said he needed "more": more background, more context, more depth, more of the setting. It could have used some more fleshing out. The character Blair Williams especially-- she kinda seems a too-convenient cutout for Marcus to latch onto.

As for the various inconsistencies in the timelines, I've always seen the Terminator series to be expressing a mixed message about fate. At some level, there's a hard center to fate that cannot be avoided; but what happens as a result of that, and how you react to it, can and does change. It's like a story where you can go back in time to New Orleans and escape Katrina by stealing a car (to eventually be caught and go to jail); or you can go back in time and escape Katrina by getting on a train (and end up staying forever in a new city); or go back in time again and escape Katrina by barricading yourself in the French Quarter (and meeting and bonding with someone who becomes your future spouse). Each timeline is different, but there's no changing the "hard fate" of Hurricane Katrina.

In the Terminator series, there will be an artificial intelligence that attacks humanity, and there will be a man-machine war. That part isn't going anywhere. But all the fuzzy stuff around it is malleable, and in different timelines the people that went back in time changed things, like put the war off by a few years. Skynet is delayed, inconvenienced, or relocated, but its inevitiability is set. No one can make truly accurate predictions abotu what will happen, because each time someone goes/went back in time, they altered things just enough to make the notions and plans you had not entirely applicable anymore.

As for the homages, I liked them. I think to go to the early stage of the war and not have at least one Ahhhnuld model would have been a suspicious omission. I'm glad they resisted the urge to dwell on it, though, at the same time. It showed up, they fought, that was that. The Terminator franchise does not need a constant dose of Ahhhnuld to survive, after all.

I saw other homages, too. The tow truck that they steal early on is almost exactly like the truck used in The Road Warrior, despite being a tow truck instead of a fuel tanker (although it did push a fuel trailer into the giant robot attacking them). And when the tow cable hooked the cyclobot and dragged it, tumbling end-over-end, that too was from a similar scene in The Road Warrior when one of Humongous's lackeys in a dune buggy get dragged by the tanker. (And didn't those cyclobots remind you of Tron, even just a little tiny bit?)

Was I the only one that found the giant Helena Bonham Carter head projection to be very reminsicent of the final boss in The Matrix, where Neo talks to the giant floating head? And the look of the flying HK through the thermal binos as Connor was testing the shut-down transmitter-- that glowy line image with the various heat traces and th evisible jet vortexes-- did that not, also, look a bit Matrix-y?

I don't care. Homages are frequently part of science fiction, so I have no problem with it. I enjoyed the damn movie even if it didn't keep me as riveted as, say, Watchmen. I look forward to the next installment, which will hopefully have... more!

[Drooling Iguana]

I saw other homages, too. The tow truck that they steal early on is almost exactly like the truck used in The Road Warrior, despite being a tow truck instead of a fuel tanker (although it did push a fuel trailer into the giant robot attacking them). And when the tow cable hooked the cyclobot and dragged it, tumbling end-over-end, that too was from a similar scene in The Road Warrior when one of Humongous's lackeys in a dune buggy get dragged by the tanker. (And didn't those cyclobots remind you of Tron, even just a little tiny bit?)

The whole first half of the movie seemed to be an homage to The Road Warrior, right down to the mute kid (although this one unfortunately never managed to cut anyone's fingers off with a boomerang.)

Fortunately, they also mimiced The Road Warrior's style of long, wide shots of desolate scenery, which worked a hell of a lot better than the millisecond-long up-your-nose shots that action movies seem to favour these days. I've never seen a McG movie before this, but he seems to be a generally competent director (especially considering the terrible script he was given.)

[SylasGaunt]

Thinking about T1-T4 and the whole 'No Fate' message that some people got so pissed about when the T-850 in T3 pronounced Judgement Day as being inevitable.. it's kind of spastic throughout the Terminator movies really. But then when you look at the series as a whole it's Skynet who seems to be following that message most of all. In T2 and T3 we see shots taken at stopping Skynet from coming about but even then they're a side mission to the Good Guy's main mission of 'Keep Connor alive so history will turn out like it did originally'.

[Bilbo]

Thinking about T1-T4 and the whole 'No Fate' message that some people got so pissed about when the T-850 in T3 pronounced Judgement Day as being inevitable.. it's kind of spastic throughout the Terminator movies really. .

What are fans all angry about? The phrase is a statement by a character in the movie. Since no one in the movie is Q or any other higher power how are they to know what can be changed and what cannot be changed. In reality the phrase is nothing more than an attempt to create hope. If there is nothing but despair over what is going to happen then why bother to plan and prepare to resist? If on the other hand you have hope then you will put forth more effort to make things better.

[SylasGaunt]

Back around when T3 came out a bunch of people wigged out when the T-850 stated that Judgment Day was inevitable, which they felt went against the 'There is no fate but what we make' message of T2. But then the entire series is based on John Connor having a specific fate so like I said it's a bit spastic as to whether or not that's actually the case even in the Cameron films.

[Bilbo]

Back around when T3 came out a bunch of people wigged out when the T-850 stated that Judgment Day was inevitable, which they felt went against the 'There is no fate but what we make' message of T2. But then the entire series is based on John Connor having a specific fate so like I said it's a bit spastic as to whether or not that's actually the case even in the Cameron films.

But those are all statements by characters within the movies. Which means they are not written in stone. That would be like arguing Star Wars is a stupid movie because right after Han Solo said blowing up a planet was impossible they ran into the Death Star which proved him wrong.

[Stark]

The idea that the events of 'judgement day' are inevitable is cripplingly stupid. What's even STUPIDER is that you can shift the date or change the details but everything else will be basically the same (post-nuclear time-travelling skeletons). It's pure fanservice, since somewhere after 1992 the Terminator franchise became about 'awesome timetravel paradox mindfuck fanservice' and not about anything else.

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't care. Homages are frequently part of science fiction, so I have no problem with it. I enjoyed the damn movie even if it didn't keep me as riveted as, say, Watchmen. I look forward to the next installment, which will hopefully have... more!

The only homage I minded was the blatant homage to the ending scenes of T1 and T2 in the final fight with Ahhhnuuuld. Ahhhnuuuuld was alright there, he was young and huge and if possible, I would've enjoyed a reference to that scene in T1 where you can see his schlong swinging along as he walks down the street stark naked.

But still, they tried to copy the final fight scenes of T1 and T2, right down to the letter with the molten metal and the nice little touch of showing us the bare-skeleton T-800 walk up the metal staircase. But in going out of their way to do so, they kind of botched the scene up. Look at what we got, a protracted fight scene where the T-800 just bats Connor around uselessly - something people have already complained about. I mean, shit, the T-800 only manages to significantly hurt Connor by sticking a stick in him! Mang! The T-800 in The Terminator didn't need a stick - he shoved his hand right into those punks and RIPPED THEIR HEARTS RIGHT OFF!

Instead of doing that, they could've toned down the homage to the T1 and T2 final fights and done MORE.

The T-800 could've been more menacing if, for example, Connor's air support arrived and instead of Connor pulling out grenade launcher after grenade launcher against the T-800, we could've seen Resistance soldiers put up a valiant stand against that great gleaming chrome skeleton of death - only to see the human warriors end up being torn apart to pieces!

(All the other human characters don't have to die, just some redshirts. The Black Guy and Blair, for example, could've been not at the scene. Blair could've been piloting the chopper.)

But the T-800 would've been damaged, maybe by an RPG, maybe by the sheer volume of firepower mowed down on it by the soldiers it ended up killing. It could've lost its skin, fully or partially, and then we could see it limp after the lone survivor Connor - this time giving us a more POTENT and EFFECTIVE homage to the T1 and T2 scenes. Then and there, Marcus Wright does battle with the damaged but still dangerous T-800 and though battered, the 800 still ruins Marcus Wright's shit until through human ingenuity and sheer luck, Marcus exploits some damage done to the T-800 and lands a killing blow or something.

But at that point, Marcus himself has also had his shit ruined - maybe almost like Bishop in Aliens. Bleeding, battered, broken - along with John Connor, who could've had his internal organs crushed a bit too.

Then we could get some effective sceneries. The survivors, Connor and Marcus all dying, being brought into the chopper and med-evaced and stuff. Then, maybe they could've done soemthing about the hastily rewritten end and instead they could've done it better, more dramatically.

They could've gone and shown us glimpses of the surgery, rather than generic insertion of IV tubes (though it was a nice parallel of Marcus' execution at the start, we needed to see MORE!). We could've had a camera angle shot of Marcus Wright's broken machine body and his last words of hope to John Connor (and Blair, and well everyone present) about how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, of how one man believed in the glory of Rome, to hell's heart I stabbed at thee, of redemption - of Salvation.

Then we could end the film with a panning shot or something, and once more John Connor takes to the radio and makes his grand speech and we see postapocalyptic landscapes, a setting sun, survivors and Resistance warriors across the world (we needed to see more of them too, rather than the couple of guys at the subway) and stuff about A New Hope and shit.

That's how you'd do it! Not just rip off T1 and T2's factory fights, but to surpass it! TO DESTROY IT! The most dominant genes on the planet! SNAAAKE! LIQUID! It's not over yet! There's no escape! METAL GEAR!


robot rivers

[Hotfoot]

The idea that the events of 'judgement day' are inevitable is cripplingly stupid. What's even STUPIDER is that you can shift the date or change the details but everything else will be basically the same (post-nuclear time-travelling skeletons). It's pure fanservice, since somewhere after 1992 the Terminator franchise became about 'awesome timetravel paradox mindfuck fanservice' and not about anything else.

Look Stark, the mindfuck paradox shit started with Terminator 2. If they did stop Judgment Day for realsies, there'd be no war, there'd be no resistance, and John Connor wouldn't have sent back Kyle Reese to fuck his mom, and there would certainly be no terminators to send back.

Though I'm sure the writers didn't give a fuck about that at the time. Still, after T2, any continuation of the storyline is proof that Judgment Day can't be stopped. It might even be that this is a Babylon 5 styled closed loop, but who can tell at this point?

[Drooling Iguana]

The first Terminator movie certainly set things up as a closed loop, but then T2 screwed around with things to the point where there's no real point in ever expecting time-travel in the Terminator series to make any sense.

It's one of the reasons that I consider T2, while still a good movie, to be pretty overrated compared to the first movie. The other chief reason being the badly-conceived T-1000.

[Shroom Man 777]

Badly-conceived T-1000? What the hell are you talking about?

[Drooling Iguana]

An all-liquid metal robot both makes no sense in terms of realism (where's its CPU? Its power source? How was the thing programmed to begin with?) and is less effective dramatically by being more or less unkillable, causing the audience to simply wait for whatever deus ex machina the writers will pull out of their ass in the last ten minutes to do away with it (although, admittedly the way they did end up killing it made a fair bit of sense, it still wasn't really hinted at before that point.) One of the reasons why the original Terminator worked so well as a villain was that it was taking damage right from the beginning of the movie, which rules out a deus ex machina ending while still retaining its menace due to the fact that it made it perfectly clear through its actions that it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

The T-X, while somewhat unoriginal, was a much better design for these reasons. Unfortunately, the actual writing in her movie was much worse than what had come before.

[Shroom Man 777]

The T-1000 was built by an artificial intelligence that has mastered time travel. It's not poorly conceived that such an intelligence could create utterly obscene machines with incomprehensible science.

The T-800 didn't really take much damage at the start of The Terminator either. All it had was a ruined organic eyeball and a sprained wrist. It allowed us to see Arnold remove his organic eyeball and reveal to us his true form. Aside from that, the T-800 was only slowed down by gunfire. Much like the T-1000.

[Drooling Iguana]

Saying that it was "future magic-tech" doesn't in any way change the fact that it made no sense. The T-800 was a very logical design for a machine meant to look human while still being really cool and scary-looking. The T-1000 had the benefit of appearing in a generally well-written and well-made movie, and of making use of an (at the time) impressive new special effect technology, but in and of himself he was just an implausible gimmick.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

Still, after T2, any continuation of the storyline is proof that Judgment Day can't be stopped. It might even be that this is a Babylon 5 styled closed loop, but who can tell at this point?

Well, they didn't have to continue the T2 storyline. They could have made a T3 movie based entirely in the setting of the war (1997 - 2029) without revisiting any of the timeline changing elements in T2.

Edit: Re-read Hotfoot's comment and modified reply.

[TheLostVikings]

An all-liquid metal robot both makes no sense in terms of realism (where's its CPU? Its power source? How was the thing programmed to begin with?) and is less effective dramatically by being more or less unkillable, causing the audience to simply wait for whatever deus ex machina the writers will pull out of their ass in the last ten minutes to do away with it (although, admittedly the way they did end up killing it made a fair bit of sense, it still wasn't really hinted at before that point.)

Well it basically consisted of your average nanowank grey goo, just without the "self-replicating" aspects of it. Where to put the CPU is more of a straw man argument than anything, since about the only way for it to shape change that much is to have each of it's tiny components be connected into a parallel processing distributed network. Obviously making nano scale components that small isn't exactly a non-trivial matter, but then again neither is time-travel.

Incidentally the movie was made long before the nanowank cliche started, but it's pretty much the same concept, just way ahead of its time.

[Shroom Man 777]

The Terminator is on TV and I just realized that the T-800 killed Sarah's roommate's boyfriend by basically just throwing him around until he died. Skynet must've not bothered programming complicated close quarters combat techniques into its cyborgs since they really don't need jew-jitsu to kill squishy humans, just their hard metal fists. The Terminator only attacked Marcus Wright's weakspot because the guy was becoming a nuisance. Against a puny fleshling like John Connor, it didn't need to go for heart-shots.

[Peptuck]

The Terminator is on TV and I just realized that the T-800 killed Sarah's roommate's boyfriend by basically just throwing him around until he died. Skynet must've not bothered programming complicated close quarters combat techniques into its cyborgs since they really don't need jew-jitsu to kill squishy humans, just their hard metal fists. The Terminator only attacked Marcus Wright's weakspot because the guy was becoming a nuisance. Against a puny fleshling like John Connor, it didn't need to go for heart-shots.

Eh, that's always annoyed me about the T-800s in the movies. They could easily kill a human by just grabbing them and crushing their necks, yet the movie Terminators try to kill by picking people up and throwing them. Or hell, just holding them by a limb and repeatedly smashing them against a wall or snapping their bodies about like a doll would be easier.

That's one thing I really liked about T:SCC: if a Terminator wanted you dead and got its hands on you, it didn't fuck around. Your neck would be pulverized the moment whatever reason it hadn't killed you yet was done.

[ray245]

Let me get this straight Spoiler

After harping about how important preserving the timeline is in order to win a war, won't John Conner be able to figure out maybe the war isn't going to end so early?

Come on, some sort of super signal that can end the war before Kyle Reese reach the age which he is supposed to be send back?

One more thing, where the bloody hell is the resistance going to get their weapons and planes from? They seems to throw away hardware after hardcare without any concern that rebuilding planes and helicopters when fighting a war with Skynet makes it hard to replace those losses.

[Shroom Man 777]

1.) Maybe that's why he DIDN'T tell the generals to commence the attack but told them to WAIT and see (because he himself was suspicious)? Besides, what is he going to tell the generals?

"I don't think we can win the war now because we haven't stolen the time machine which Skynet hasn't built yet?"

That was one of the reasons WHY he told his men NOT to attack. Did you see John Connor tell his men "RAR THE SIGNAL CAN'T BE STOPPED WE WILL WIN ATTACK!"

Or did you hear him say "IF WE STAY THE COURSE WE'RE ALL DEAD!"

Ray, mang.

And it's NOT like he has a detailed chronology of the events of the Future War. Hell, until the events of Terminator 3, the Connors actually thought they had stopped Judgement Day. The only source of information John has about the future is from the cassette tapes of his mom, who's hardly a reputable source on the Future War.

2.) The Resistance is a worldwide fighting force, presumably they've got factories still up and running. It's not like Skynet started out with an army of millions of machines, Skynet also had to build its forces from scratch.

And those helicopters happen to be Hueys, anyway. Plenty of those to spare. Hell, if there's any military helicopter for the humanity to use after the end of the world, it's probably got to be the Huey. Shit, that helo is like fifty years old now and still in service all over the world!

How the hell are you gonna win a war against technologically obscene killing machines if you're not going to throw your big weapons at them?

[Peptuck]

And those helicopters happen to be Hueys, anyway. Plenty of those to spare. Hell, if there's any military helicopter for the humanity to use after the end of the world, it's probably got to be the Huey. Shit, that helo is like fifty years old now and still in service all over the world!

How the hell are you gonna win a war against technologically obscene killing machines if you're not going to throw your big weapons at them?

The Resistance's aircraft losses in the movie come out to a grand total of three A-10s and a couple of Hueys. Holy shit, they lost FIVE aircraft! FIVE GODDAMN AIRCRAFT! Mankind is FUCKED, MANG.

Sorry, but if losing three ground-attack craft and a couple of choppers is enough to cripple the Resistance's air power, they're already screwed. Its not like its a war or something, with technologically equal enemies, where both sides suffer casualties regularly and would reasonably be expected to have the industries to repair and replace their losses. The mere fact that they're able to maintain a large fleet of aircraft and a submarine indicates the Resistance is pretty well-armed and industrialized in this timeline.

[ray245]

Guess I keep thinking that the resistance is nothing more than a bunch of guerillas and all of their equipment is stolen from Skynet, based on what I keep seeing in the past films.

Failed to look at the bigger picture I guess.

[Peptuck]

Guess I keep thinking that the resistance is nothing more than a bunch of guerillas and all of their equipment is stolen from Skynet, based on what I keep seeing in the past films.

Failed to look at the bigger picture I guess.

Eh, the resistance in T1 and T2 do look like nothing but guerillas with stolen weaponry. they're even resorting to using technicals instead of combat vehicles.

Presumably, the future was altered enough by the Connors' actions that the resistance is doing better, or this is while the resistance still has plenty of resources to draw upon from the remnants of pre-JD humanity's military. Its entierely possibly that by 2027-2029 the human industrial infrastructure has collapsed to the poin tthat they're down to rifles and technicals.