T4 Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins

Roar

MooseJam wrote: »

Why even bother with Connors - think outside the box , send a few t-800's back 200,000 years or so , before homo sapiens arrived on the scene and start a machine civilization unbothered

but skynet needs to be created by humans first..

paulieeye

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

Think about like a machine though...

DOES NOT COMPUTE

monkeyfudge

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

Think about like a machine though...

BlitzKrieg

MooseJam wrote: »

Why even bother with Connors - think outside the box , send a few t-800's back 200,000 years or so , before homo sapiens arrived on the scene and start a machine civilization unbothered

probability? limitations?

There is alot that still needs to be explored in the terminator franchise, mostly around how the future war and time travel works.

Seeing that this film failed to fill us in on any of that it still left up to speculation.

You could argue that skynet has run the numbers in probability and has concluded with the limitations in time travel that we know off, they run a high risk of self destruction if they make any big sweeping changes to the timeline by establishing themselves as the dominant civilisation. Therefore they concluded the best probability to create a successful scenario while still perserving as much of the timeline as possible was to go for 1984

then they got more desperate, 1994 and 2004 were periods that proved too close for comfort for skynet when you consider in both cases they came close to self destruction.



There also could be limitations we do not know about.

One I believed but is now disputed with TSCC is that the time travel instant for all films is the same one each time. That changes to the past become permanent regardless if the action to cause them are not acted on in the future, so therefore its a strategic fight between skynet and john connor as they both get one move each and it replays out again and again in multiple timelines. First he sends kyle, then skynet changes the target and terminator, so he sends arnie, skynet changes things again, john connor reacts accordingly.

There could in fact be only 2 time jumps possible in the future and each time they are used, the future changes and new time jumps are selected to improve the situation in favour of one side. And the same moment is played over again and again, different dates, different weapons, but there is a point where skynet decides on its last ditch plan and each time its different because it knows of all the previous last ditch efforts like John does and must alter the circumstances in its favour.

Thats why I was initially hopeful for the rumoured time travel elemnt to this film, because it would finally establish that time travel plays a role beyond simple hit squads.


Course Sarah Connor Chronicles shoots that theory down because there are people jumping in all the time from different points in the future. So as long as that remains Cannon the only explanation of how time travel works was given by Derrick Reese.

SirLemonhead

What always bugged me is there's quite clearly a mostly intact terminator leg visible after the explosion in the factory in T1 that never surfaces

Fysh

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

Course Sarah Connor Chronicles shoots that theory down because there are people jumping in all the time from different points in the future. So as long as that remains Cannon the only explanation of how time travel works was given by Derrick Reese.

I'm almost certain I've seen comments from someone involved in production of either Sarah Connor Chronicles or T4 stating that Sarah Connor Chronicles wasn't canon.

Edited to add:

Found it - I'm not sure if it was just up to him, but as far as McG was concerned at least, the TV series isn't canon.

shenanigans1982

Fysh wrote: »

I'm almost certain I've seen comments from someone involved in production of either Sarah Connor Chronicles or T4 stating that Sarah Connor Chronicles wasn't canon.

Edited to add:

Found it - I'm not sure if it was just up to him, but as far as McG was concerned at least, the TV series isn't canon.

I thought I had read that Sarah Connor Chronicles was canon but T3 wasn't.

BlitzKrieg

shenanigans1982 wrote: »

I thought I had read that Sarah Connor Chronicles was canon but T3 wasn't.

that would raises serious questions about T4 seeing as kathrin Bruester who is introduced in T3 (and cut from TSCC timeline) is running around pregnant doing heart transplants in the desert.

Fysh

shenanigans1982 wrote: »

I thought I had read that Sarah Connor Chronicles was canon but T3 wasn't.

As far as I understand it, the production team behind Sarah Connor Chronicles wanted to ignore T3 for the overal storyline they had in mind; McG decided separately that the film he wanted to develop would only follow on from the previous films (an understandable decision, given how hard it could be to keep any film script in continuity with a constantly-developing television series).

Kinetic^

I was entertained for the film. The only thing I didn't like was the

CGI version of Arnie as the terminator, they really need to drop the affiliation.

nicklauski

I liked that bit.

I thought it showed that skynet was just about ready to launch the human like terminators. An lets be honest, as soon as you think Terminator, you think Arnie

pixelburp

Well I saw it at last, despite my reservations (but hey, no point criticising something for so long prior to release and then not give it the benefit of the doubt). Overall, I thought it a fairly pointless movie that added absolutely nothing to the franchise or its mythology. As an action movie, it was ok but many of the bigger set-pieces were just very dull & by the numbers. We have seen it all before & even in the 2 hours we saw the same stunts twice (the helicopter crashes). Generally I thought it a bland crappy movie. Are peoples expectations that low that anything with a pretty explosion is deemed passable entertainment?

Pros:

• Anton Yelchin (sp) was pretty good as Kyle Reese & I felt caught Micheal Biehn's original performance nicely.
• In spite of Bale's rant at the Director of Photography, the movie looked very well & some of the FX work was excellent, boosted by the use of animatronic props for the Terminators.
• Michael Ironside. Always awesomes up a movie. Shame he didn't have an Ion Cannon handy
• Marcus' unintentional slip into an Australian accent during the interoggation scene was hilarious.

Cons:

• The Script. Again, are people that easy to please now that a truly abyssmal, messy & bafflingly amateur plot is excused? Seriously people that grand master plan of Skynet's was ... jaw - droppingly circuitous. And then to cap things off, we had the gloating-infodump-of-the-entire-plan by the antagonist. Jesus Hollywood, I'm not 6.
• Christian Bale was rubbish. I don't care how bad the script was (and it was bad), he could have at least invested something into the role beyond his generic "bottled rage" schtick & Batman voice. Some of his lines I could barely make out.
• Common. Dear Hollywood, please please please stop hiring rappers under the assumption they can act, when clearly the evidence points against this.
• Also Hollywood, don't waste your money hiring talent like Bryce Dallas Howard & then giving her a few pointless lines.
• The Transforminators. We knew they were there, but up there on the big screen it was so obvious these set-piece terminators only existed for said set-pieces & the sale of toys. Mostly the latter I bet. I thought their honking call-sign wasn't as bad as others found it.
• The finale; it was telegraphed ages ago, but even so ... the whole sequence was just a neat bottling of how woeful the script & dialogue was.
• Too. Much. Fanboy. Referencing. Yeah we get it McG you clever guy, you're winking at the fans. We would have preferred if you made a competent, coherant, exciting movie to be honest, than have Christian Bale flattly deliver "I'll be Back".
• Like I said, this movie contributes nothing to the franchise; it doesn't even end with a sense that there's more to come. We get a mild hiccup in the timeline with Marcus' existence, but even that just becomes a cheap cipher. The trailers made it sound like some sea-shift in the story, but there wasn't.

What really yanks my chain is that, in all likelyhood, this movie was a further nail in the coffin of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and that's a big shame as that show was going in some interesting places & beefing up the mythology. This movie was just a big brown-saturated waste of space.

BlitzKrieg

# In spite of Bale's rant at the Director of Photography, the movie looked very well & some of the FX work was excellent, boosted by the use of animatronic props for the Terminators.
# Michael Ironside. Always awesomes up a movie. Shame he didn't have an Ion Cannon handy

ok people might start accusing us of being the same person soon if we keep making the same conclusions and the same jokes

Patricide

pixelburp wrote: »

Well I saw it at last, despite my reservations (but hey, no point criticising something for so long prior to release and then not give it the benefit of the doubt). Overall, I thought it a fairly pointless movie that added absolutely nothing to the franchise or its mythology. As an action movie, it was ok but many of the bigger set-pieces were just very dull & by the numbers. We have seen it all before & even in the 2 hours we saw the same stunts twice (the helicopter crashes). Generally I thought it a bland crappy movie. Are peoples expectations that low that anything with a pretty explosion is deemed passable entertainment?

Pros:

• Anton Yelchin (sp) was pretty good as Kyle Reese & I felt caught Micheal Biehn's original performance nicely.
• In spite of Bale's rant at the Director of Photography, the movie looked very well & some of the FX work was excellent, boosted by the use of animatronic props for the Terminators.
• Michael Ironside. Always awesomes up a movie. Shame he didn't have an Ion Cannon handy
• Marcus' unintentional slip into an Australian accent during the interoggation scene was hilarious.

Cons:

• The Script. Again, are people that easy to please now that a truly abyssmal, messy & bafflingly amateur plot is excused? Seriously people that grand master plan of Skynet's was ... jaw - droppingly circuitous. And then to cap things off, we had the gloating-infodump-of-the-entire-plan by the antagonist. Jesus Hollywood, I'm not 6.
• Christian Bale was rubbish. I don't care how bad the script was (and it was bad), he could have at least invested something into the role beyond his generic "bottled rage" schtick & Batman voice. Some of his lines I could barely make out.
• Common. Dear Hollywood, please please please stop hiring rappers under the assumption they can act, when clearly the evidence points against this.
• Also Hollywood, don't waste your money hiring talent like Bryce Dallas Howard & then giving her a few pointless lines.
• The Transforminators. We knew they were there, but up there on the big screen it was so obvious these set-piece terminators only existed for said set-pieces & the sale of toys. Mostly the latter I bet. I thought their honking call-sign wasn't as bad as others found it.
• The finale; it was telegraphed ages ago, but even so ... the whole sequence was just a neat bottling of how woeful the script & dialogue was.
• Too. Much. Fanboy. Referencing. Yeah we get it McG you clever guy, you're winking at the fans. We would have preferred if you made a competent, coherant, exciting movie to be honest, than have Christian Bale flattly deliver "I'll be Back".
• Like I said, this movie contributes nothing to the franchise; it doesn't even end with a sense that there's more to come. We get a mild hiccup in the timeline with Marcus' existence, but even that just becomes a cheap cipher. The trailers made it sound like some sea-shift in the story, but there wasn't.

What really yanks my chain is that, in all likelyhood, this movie was a further nail in the coffin of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and that's a big shame as that show was going in some interesting places & beefing up the mythology. This movie was just a big brown-saturated waste of space.

This pretty much nails it.

niallon

Finally got to see this and...well...I dunno

The lifelong Terminator fan in me that even managed to somehow enjoy T3 first time around just couldn't not like it, but...

- Christian Bale: WTF? Is this the same gifted man who starred in The Machinist? Where has his acting ability gone? I'm not even talking about his inexplicable inability to deliver a single line in a non Jack Bauer-esque voice, I'm just talking about his ACTING. There just didn't seem to be any feeling behind anything he said, totally hollow performance.

- Sam Worthington: Fantastic rising star who stole the film from all those around him but would it really have been such a problem for him to keep his accent? He was quite clearly struggling throughout the entire film and it was incredibly distracting.

- Arnie: Oh for the love of Jesus, it was just terrible. Attrocious. Abismal. The Mummy Returns was groundbreaking compared to the muck I just bore witness to.

Aside from these points it still exceeding Wolverine by many a mile and while I await Transformers 2 it remains the best big budget flick I've seen this year (yes better than Star Trek, I loved it but I'm just not a trekkie). In all, I want to see this new series continued, I think there's great potential but McG would want to take a read of some of these posts, there's a lot of work to be done!

senordingdong

pixelburp wrote: »

[*]Like I said, this movie contributes nothing to the franchise; it doesn't even end with a sense that there's more to come. We get a mild hiccup in the timeline with Marcus' existence, but even that just becomes a cheap cipher. The trailers made it sound like some sea-shift in the story, but there wasn't.

I would be inclined to agree, but my super low expectations softened the blow enough to make me enjoy the dumb action flick. Just like watching a Jason Statham film.

Actually, there's an idea!
Maybe Jason Statham should have been John Connor.

pixelburp

senordingdong wrote: »

I would be inclined to agree, but my super low expectations softened the blow enough to make me enjoy the dumb action flick. Just like watching a Jason Statham film.

Actually, there's an idea!
Maybe Jason Statham should have been John Connor.

Which is fine, but this is a superior franchise & deserved a lot more. Doubly so given that we plainly saw what can be done with the mythology in the TV show. There's room for expanding the characters. Hell, there's room for making them characters in the first place, rather than bland ciphers.

pixelburp

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

ok people might start accusing us of being the same person soon if we keep making the same conclusions and the same jokes

Aha, but how do you know that we aren't??

*cue dramatic music*

Now, that's how you do a plot twist

monkeyfudge

Pixelburp is the newer model sent from the future to help discredit Terminator films so that we're all unprepared for when the machines really take over.

Don't listen to them, it was a grand old film all together. Agree with me if you want to live!

gimme5minutes

The moment I saw bale telling a few of his team to 'hold it down', referring to a 5ft long robot, I knew this was gonna be some serious shoite. Hold down a machine? And not only that but a futuristic machine designed to kill. FFS, it's not a dog we're talking about here, it's a machine made of solid metal driven by an engine. You don't 'hold down' a fooking machine.

Actually I knew there was a problem even sooner than that. At the start when bale is in the desert or whatever and a terminator that's missing its legs attacks him. It seems that the terminators in this film like to push and throw people around rather than actually killing them. WHY didn't it just simply snap his neck or any of his bones, or break his back with a punch when it grabbed him from behind? Why would it throw him? Do you think the T1000 in T2 would throw bale if it placed in the same situation? No it wouldn't, it would stab him right throught the fooking head and that would be the end of it.

Then we had the motorbike chase where the skynet motorbikes just drove along behind the truck kyle reese, marcus and the mute kid were in and fired off a couple of harmless rounds about 3 times in total. Why couldn't they get in behind it, start firing and don't stop till its in absolute bits. Why did they just fire off a few rounds every few minutes? The truck was piece of sh*t with no maneouverability or speed, it was a sitting duck. Time after time in this film I was left thinking skynet was absolutely useless at killing humans. This chase scene ends with one of these motorbikes getting flung into a skynet hunter-killer and blowing it up. What???? A little motorbike bashes off the side of a huge futuristic war machine and it blows up...complete joke.

Then there was the section where marcus, reese and the mute started an old jeep just as a skynet drone came by and had to make a quick getaway. Reese hopped into the drivers seat and we had a bit of a chase scene where reese said 'ive never driven before'. How in the name of god could he drive the fricken jeep then if he's never driven before? It was just completely dumb. Like the terminator with the mini gun firing at marcus, reese and the kid and not hitting them once. A FOOKING ROBOT WITH A MINI GUN and it can't even manage to land one shot on its target.

The biggest joke of all though was the end scene in skynet. Basically they just flew into skynet and released a load of prisoners completely unchallenged...like wtf...they even had another chopper/plane sitting completely unchallenged for absolutely ages on the roof, while it waited for bale/kyle reese. I thought skynet were supposed to be ruthless and efficient killers, yet they dont even bother attacking a vehicle that is sitting slap bang in the center of their HQ. A vehicle that goes completely unchallenged even as they rescue bale and fly off. Where bale then detonates a nuke in skynet...while the helicopter is still in the vicinity..for god sake.

The scene that pissed me off most of all was the confrontation between bale and the 'arnie' terminator. FFS it could have killed him easily a ton of times, instead it preferred to walk extremely slowly around after him and give him a push now and again. It even threw down its gun at one stage so it could finish bale by hand. ITS A TERMINATOR ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE EMOTION SO WHY WOULD IT THROW AWAY THE GUN TO FINISH HIM BY HAND?? If that was arnie in of the previous films he would have just blown bales head off. So after a few minutes of pushing bale around, as oppposed to simply killing him which would be a piece of piss for the terminator, it finally grabs bale and is holding him up in the air, for an exteneded period of time of course. Then marcus comes in and pushes the terminator off bale and the terminator and marcus have a fight. So the terminator is not capabale of killing a mere human like bale after about ten minutes of messing around, yet after fighting marcus for a few minutes, who is almost a terminator himself, the terminator spots he has a human heart, punches him in the chest and kills him stone dead....lol....at least thats what terminators are supposed to do, but why didn't he do it to bale......and why did skynet send just one terminator to kill bale, he was right in the middle of their HQ, when the arnie terminator was destroyed why couldn't they just have sent every terminator in to kill bale rather than letting him leisurely make his way out of skynet and back to the helicopter that is sitting on the roof comletely unchallenged for the last 20 mins.

The whole concept of the terminators in previous films was that they were lethal and if they were coming for you, you were fooked, unless you had a terminator yourself to protect you. In this film the terminators were completely impotent. I have never seen such a useless bunch of fooking machines. They couldn't kill sh*t. They couldn't shoot straight, they preferred to man handle humans rather than kill them, and the machines skynet created were so weak as piss that humans had comparable strength to some of them. They were more like zombies than the terminators we know from the earlier films.

Arnie blew the fook out of dozens of humans in the first movie, and although his character was ordered not to kill in the second one, robert patricks T1000 almost made up for it, killing several humans ruthlessly and extremely efficiently. The audience was left with the impression, and rightly so, that if the T1000 was after you, you weren't gonna get pushed and thrown around for 10 mins, you were gonna be killed instantly as soon as he got within a metre of you.

This film was a total and utter disgrace. Hollywood ruined the alien and predator franchises and now they have ruined the terminator franchise. That McG prick should never have been let near this film, he has zero track record, and it shows in this joke of a movie.

monkeyfudge

gimme5minutes wrote: »

The moment I saw bale telling a few of his team to 'hold it down', referring to a 5ft long robot, I knew this was gonna be some serious shoite. Hold down a machine? And not only that but a futuristic machine designed to kill. FFS, it's not a dog we're talking about here, it's a machine made of solid metal driven by an engine. You don't 'hold down' a fooking machine.

I was watching Transformers again the other day and there is a scene with the marines inspecting Scorponoks tail on the plane that is utterlly identical to that scene in Terminator.

MooseJam

The t-1000 was the most unbelievable baddie in the history of movie making - possibly,

a fully functional human copy with 0 moving parts ?

shenanigans1982

monkeyfudge wrote: »

I was watching Transformers again the other day and there is a scene with the marines inspecting Scorponoks tail on the plane that is utterlly identical to that scene in Terminator.

Thank you....when I sat there watching that I knew I had seen the same scene somewhere before but couldn't figure it out.....even with the Transformers trailer beforehand.

Mully

CKWPORT wrote: »

That was brutal bad!!!

Sure if the invading Alien forces of Independence Day can use USB (the uploaded virus at the end), why not the robot bikes ....

Mr Freeze

Mully wrote: »

Sure if the invading Alien forces of Independence Day can use USB (the uploaded virus at the end), why not the robot bikes ....

Cause SkyNet should have seen ID and known not to make the same mistakes the Aliens made!!!:D

Sanjuro

A film with no sense of urgency what so ever. Probably because Skynet was like a Bond villain who wanted to kill Connor and Reese in the most elaborate and badly-executed manner possible. Because, ya know, shooting them in the head on-sight is just a little too easy.

senordingdong

pixelburp wrote: »

Which is fine, but this is a superior franchise & deserved a lot more. Doubly so given that we plainly saw what can be done with the mythology in the TV show. There's room for expanding the characters. Hell, there's room for making them characters in the first place, rather than bland ciphers.

Perhaps, but with the use of the word 'franchise', I think the word superior goes out the window.
I think the moment this became a franchise, was the moment it became ****e.
(I didn't like the tv show)

Cameron couldn't think of a good way to regurgitate the story, so he left it alone.

gimme5minutes wrote:

The whole concept of the terminators in previous films was that they were lethal and if they were coming for you, you were fooked, unless you had a terminator yourself to protect you. In this film the terminators were completely impotent.

Maybe they were nervous.
Or using an older version of Windows.

WEST

gimme5minutes wrote: »

The moment I saw bale telling a few of his team to 'hold it down', referring to a 5ft long robot, I knew this was gonna be some serious shoite. Hold down a machine? ........

Funny review, unfortunately I have a feeling that this review will be more enjoyable than the movie.

snapjiggyfluff

I thought that the film was ok, stands up well enough on its own as a summer action blockbuster but I would have to agree with others in saying that there are bits of it which just dont work, John Connor as a character, the look of the future, the terminators throwing people around and..... the ending, I couldnt have hated the ending more..

i was actually excited about the thought of a new terminator film with john connor dead and marcus as the leader of the resistance, could have brought up some interesting man v machine stories and i just thought he was a general badass, but with him dead and no cliffhanger ending or even a satisfactory one i can summon up literally no excitement for terminator 5

All in all an ok action film ruined by a stupid stupid cop out ending!

johnny_ultimate

pixelburp wrote: »

Which is fine, but this is a superior franchise & deserved a lot more. Doubly so given that we plainly saw what can be done with the mythology in the TV show. There's room for expanding the characters. Hell, there's room for making them characters in the first place, rather than bland ciphers.

Just back from this and have to agree with this. What an utterly pointless exercise. This is just a generic action film - change the characters to anyone else and it would pretty much be the same film.

Arnie's cameo

in particular was so very, very useless - why was it even there? I wouldn't say it was a complete waste of time -

that shot of John Connor in the helicopter going down was nice, even if it was a bit of a stupid moment

- but it was close to a waste of time. Lightly entertained maybe, and perhaps spoiled by the superior blockbusters Star Trek / Drag Me to Hell already this summer, but I honestly felt this film just did nothing of note. A silly story which doesn't expand upon the mythology, a moral about

humanity vs machines

hammered in like a particularly ill-fitting nail, and an awful Christain Bale performance.

Wouldn't consider myself a massive fan of the franchise (T2 is fantastic though) but even the third one had more going for it than this. Sometimes the backstory to films is worth leaving up to the imagination if its as boring as this.