Terminator 6 aka the real Terminator 3 or something oh god when will it end

i really did like that new star wars movie that ends with the princess leaving the video in the robot. i would watch that again. so, i guess there are some exceptions when it comes to beating dead horses.

Avatar is one of the best-plotted tech demos I've ever seen.

Summer 2019

https://io9.gizmodo.com/its-official-the-next-terminator-movie-will-be-out-in-1818847609

Plus, interview with Cameron and Miller

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/james-cameron-sounds-alarm-artificial-intelligence-unveils-a-terminator-21st-century-1043027

Ellison, 34, has for the past year worked secretly with Cameron and Deadpool's Tim Miller, who will direct the untitled sequel for a July 26, 2019, release. They assembled a writers room with scribes David Goyer, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman and Justin Rhodes as well as Ellison, a lifelong Terminator fan (Cameron himself shows up once a week), and have crafted what they want to be a trilogy with Schwarzenegger, 70, and original star Linda Hamilton, 62, passing the torch to a young female lead. The team hopes it's launching the equivalent of the new Star Wars trilogy — but with the most successful filmmaker of all time pulling the strings.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong.

Elsewhere at The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron said the following about his ridiculous film-making schedule: “The way I look at it is, I’m doing Avatar by day, Battle Angel by night and Terminator on the weekend.”

best-case scenario is none of them gets off the ground

when will james cameron stop doing battle angel

this weekend

jim cameron has a battle angel alita film in production, wtf?

i think he's had one in production for like a decade?

shit, even longer!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alita:_Battle_Angel

In February 2010, producer Jon Landau commented during an interview that he was trying to convince Cameron to change the film's title to Alita: Battle Angel, stating, "I'm telling people that we have to call it Alita: Battle Angel, because Jim only does T&A movies," he said.

Christoph Waltz as Ido is good casting I have to admit.

when will james cameron stop doing battle angel

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 27, 2017 1:02 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The names of street drugs get stranger all the time, but I wish Jim well on his road to recovery.

dropping my plot ruminations here since it's the newest thread

The dramatic tension and actual horror aspect of the Terminator series is linked to how strongly the main characters are threatened and the relative stakes

Terminator: A young woman, Sarah Connor, is personally threatened by this mysterious future cyborg. She's relatable, the world is relatively good if kind of seedy and threatening in an 80s Los Angeles way. They're trying to kill her because the world will conceivably end if she dies. Fear.

Terminator 2: Our main character is a kid. He's joined by an ally which -- clever twist! -- is the antagonist from the first film, but the threat is still impending judgment day and there's a much worse cyborg threat from even further down the line. Entire sideplot featuring a threatened family with kids, ramping up the tension.

Terminator 3: This existed. Same Arnold terminator/new terminator threat as the last one and it's mostly a retread. We get Claire Danes as our threatened person, but as viewers we know she's abducted by the good guys so the stakes are low. We already know the Arnold terminator can outwit the newer models because he has heart. The twist is that judgment day is inevitable, it's still a nuclear war triggered by machines. The real threat is apparently inevitability

Terminator Salvation: Everyone's a soldier. I guess the stakes are now that all of humanity are now the underdogs, but we've lost the threat of humanity's weapons ending the human race. It's whether the cyborgs and their big AI will finish us off. The real threat is the threat within, human/terminator hybrids! Which could be interesting, but even more than the last, jettisons the idea that it's a horror film and it ends up being not about whether a machine can have humanity, but whether a man that becomes a machine retains humanity. He does, and the ending is pretty much bait for a sequel that never happens.

Terminator Genisys: Not well-executed, but the threat is no longer nuclear apocalypse (or at least not that alone) but the idea that AI, the singularity, will eat us at some point. Threatened people? A young woman who already is battle-hardened, a newcomer from the future with all this baggage from the previous films, humanity will die and so on. Time travel is no longer a linear progression, which could be cool, but it's used in service of the idea that each Terminator chapter affects the time and place of the singularity but not the possibility of it happening. The idea of human/machine convergence is in play as in the last, but instead of a human with an Arnold terminator body, we get a human with the liquid terminator body. Overall, the main cast is threatened but we're completely out of the threat of violence. These people are contemporary but everyone's a soldier, basically.

Television sidebar of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Terminator of the week episodes! This predates the last movie (last two maybe, I forget) but the threats became more about fighting the human influence of machines posing as men. Main terminator unit is a young woman, the dynamic is different. Completely variable in quality between episodes. I kind of want to rewatch it just to see Shirley Manson as the terminator that is secretly on our side, a plot thread that never gets flushed out because the series ends.

I think the only way a new movie could work is either as a biological extrapolation, maybe Skynet comes online but fucks with genetically modified embryos (I thought I was editing diabetes out of my genome, it turns out the computer made my baby into a sleeper soldier) or does something where it 3d prints its own humans. Or they go with even grittier back to basics, or some dumb "what is a soldier, really?" thing with self-aware terminators in the far future wandering off to start their own agrarian society

in other news, I think I'm going to start blogging instead of thread polluting, and seem to have had two beers and ordered the tv show on blu-ray last night (vmic)

that was a great post. i haven't seen anything past T2 but your post inspired me to read the wikipedia plot summaries of the last four.

also too bad you didn't have twelve beers and didn't order this

https://www.amazon.com/Terminator-Six-Disc-Limited-Endoskull-Blu-ray/dp/B001RIY49C

the three or four lonely posters who watched the tv show had a nice little thread about it, iirc

oh, I was there

I think the several of the different science fiction/horror franchises have gone through the same pattern:
The horror of the other (monster) -> Acceptance, or a Cyclical, repetitive struggle against what was the other -> A merging with the other

Both the Terminator and Alien series did this over four chapters, although Ridley Scott is trying to create some overarching cycle (Prometheus/Alien Covenant) where man's creation nurtured the initial horror, and Terminator has always had the subtext that the horror is a creation of humanity that becomes the other

There's also the internal subtext in Alien with androids and The Company, so its subtext there is... Terminator's text?

Then you have Blade Runner that kicks off with The Other is Us and in a somewhat uninspired fashion returns decades later to drive the point home further

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyEX6u-Yhs

Schwarzenegger did some brief AMA-style posting over on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/bs2n3o/were_back_heres_your_terminator_dark_fate_trailer/

was it really necessary to have someone record a moody piano cover of björk's "hunter"

regardless this looks way less horrible and idea-bankrupt than genysis but uh low bar

i'm excited for the part where we see the terminator finally try to kill sarah connor

The secret surprise in this one is that not only does the Terminator's skin get ripped off to reveal a robotic endoskeleton but that skeleton is itself peeled away to reveal a miniature version of Arnold Schwarzenegger feverishly working a complex system of levers and pulleys.

Thank god the guy who made Avatar is bsck in the saddle this time

the guy who made deadpool is in the saddle, the guy who made avatar is the guy providing the horse

or perhaps more accurately, flogging a horse that looks distinctly unwell

"director of deadpool" really does make this DOA, even with my extremely positive experience watching another cameron-produced film this year

the CGI looks ghastly, i thought people had gotten better at this sort of thing

terminator is basically a franchise for people who like leather jackets and automobile stunts, this sort of thing should be easy

definite plus points to whoever was like, "oh yeah, remember linda hamilton"

there are no bad terminator projects, only bad alternative timelines explored by terminator projects

I also have no idea what I was smoking when I revived this thread in January '18 but I want some of it

and holy shit, Brad wasn't kidding. why would you do this to a Bjork song?

terminator is the worst franchise somehow.

Well, the first two are ace, but that was before they morphed into franchise mode, I guess.

I hope the entire new movie is slow-mo and ramping.

I think part of it is that they hint at the rich narrative promise of a dystopian future controlled by time-travelling robots seeking to destroy humanity but then chain each installment to the notion that the only stories worth following are those that involve an increasingly-aged Arniebot and his adventures with the Connor family.

constant slow moody piano covers of women empowerment pop songs performed by men
"Nasty.... Nasty Boys... Don't Mean... A Thing..." *plinka plinka plinka*

where’s john connor

Furlong's 1991 facial likeness from Terminator 2: Judgment Day will be used in flashback scenes through the use of CGI in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).

Something along these lines I imagine

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rXjKhcrad5oqGXRHhbYnaZmKFyU=/0x0:1280x720/1200x800/filters:focal(398x143:602x347)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52827505/lawnmower-man-original.0.0.jpg

I like the idea of the Terminator series being like a sci-fi "Up" series, with the aging cast gathering every 7 years to reboot the movie again.

pretty weak

the CGI looks ghastly, i thought people had gotten better at this sort of thing

Yeah the CGI looks bad. I'll be glad when we're past the thing of having CGI-assisted fight scenes where it's obvious that it's just two little CGI sprites jumping around each other.

Its weird how CGI in action & sci fi movies can still suck in 2019. Its like the quality of it stays the same but the amount per film just increases.

How have the Terminator 2 FX held up? I know the practical stunts are still great.

t2 still looks astonishing imo

but it's hard for me to be objective about it

it's been a while since i listened to the cameron commentary track (which is really, really great, and gives you a sense of how they made a great story out of all these different moving parts, and how even though the theatrical release is 2+ hours long all of the editing choices they made were perfect, and how the original ending was so, so terrible) but iirc he points out a lot of the instances of cgi and it's really the way the computer graphics interact with the practical effects that keeps them looking good and natural

yeah, t2 still looks great because cameron made very, very smart choices about how and when to use cgi, and as sparingly as possible

T2 remains absurdly good -- the months leading up to its release were full of such anticipation amongst myself and my dirtbag friends that anything short of a masterpiece would have disappointed, and it didn't. it was sold heavily on the CGI but its pace and directing is what keeps it a classic to this day. Cameron is a genuinely amazing filmmaker in terms of plot structure and action and character types and getting memorable performances from his cast. his dialogue can often be a hard sell (increasingly so over time) but the films are top notch because all the parts are calibrated precisely. we can joke about Avatar and Titanic but those films as ridiculous as they can be are also shockingly non-boring.

i think his weakest film is True Lies in all respects.

also re: t2, they flew a real fuckin helicopter under a bridge in the highway chase scene

never fails to blow my mind