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

being involved in james cameron's personal or professional life seems like it would be unbearable

I can't wholeheartedly recommend the show but there's a bit in Hulu's Future Man where they break into Cameron's house and it's an entertaining bit including weird shrines to all his movies and the house has its own siri-like voice

Latebloomer otm

It’s decent but nothing close to the greatness of the first 2 movies. Lots of exposition dialogue & ppl forming lifelong bonds after 2 lines of dialogue
but performances are all pretty great, esp Diego Luna who may actually BE a robot
He def gave a next-gen Robert Patrick-worthy performance imo.

But the action by the end was too long & murky and obligatory give statement of intention to villain before showdown & a no i wont let you do (x) crying scene

gabriel luna not diego
i keep doing that

this was like reasonably diverting for a couple hours, not as dreadful as i picture the last two being, and maybe feeling a little more substantial than T3 but not MUCH better. man the action in this was so hard for me to follow. maybe i'm an old person but it REALLY epitomized the "quick cuts, all closeups, no real sense of where things are and what direction things are moving" school of action. if they have to make these movies, can't they give them to justin lin or somebody?

the arnold stuff was dumb imo, dude has so much screen presence but everything was just jokey fanservice and inversion of expectations. the whole premise of his character made no sense and was just too goofy. reyes and davis barely felt like people.

and god what was this movie even trying to say about the border?

I dunno, i'm happy enough watching border agents being carved to pieces for however long they want to show it in the movie.

i think one extremely underrated aspect of the first couple Terminator flix is how the plots--despite the time travel aspect--are just so straightforward. there's not a lot of needless complexity, they're just really well-told. i think Cameron is just so good at setting up the story in his films and keeping it very focused, even to the point that films as ridiculous as Avatar or as dumb as True Lies are really watchable, because the singular plot focus and ability to maintain momentum has never deserted him. T2, for all the big-budget flash it possesses vs the first film, is just so stripped-down to the essentials in terms of getting the story told. there's no fucking about with time travel bullshit after the introductory scenes, he just gets everyone in place and lets them do their thing.

also the producers of the previous three films miscalculated in terms of what ppl find appealing about these films. Arnold is obv a large part of it, but Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor was just as crucial to the franchise as Sigourney Weaver was to Alien/Aliens and when she came back all ripped and fucked up in T2, everyone really responded to that role so strongly. Arnold was the badass lumbering comic relief Frankenstein's monster who helped protect them and delivered the killing blow, but she was the hero of that film. and the brand has been wrecked so much by however many reboots and new John Connors and overly complex alternate timelines that this new one's quality and Hamilton's return and Cameron's involvement are beside the point, bc no one cares anymore.

pretty much

after several movies that floundered, they finally figured out what to do with John Connor

Yea i liked that they finally used the answer to the question I kept asking - what if they sent like 30 Terminators back in time, how the fuck would you defeat each one?

omar otm also. Genisys really misunderstood what fans wanted.

A wibbly wobbly timey wimey plot was not it

imo you should never give fans what they want and attempt to make a compelling movie instead

Well that's also true. Should never pander to the fan service crowd

Which is why i loved Last Jedi

The job of creating subsequent entries in almost every franchise with a super-solid first installment is basically 'people like cheese because it's yellow right, so we'll just make this yellow, mission accomplished'.

yeah good comments all. i was trying to explain my gripes with this movie the other night and it really came down to "nobody is trying to make a great action movie, they're trying to make a 'terminator movie.'"

and twenty years of efforts in that vein have led to a situation where nobody gives a shit about a "terminator movie." the things specific to the "brand" - the robot skeletons and liquid metal and spheres of electric arcs marking a time-traveler - have been so worn down through overexposure that they are no longer compelling, sublime nightmare fuel in and of themselves. and the connors' story has been so devalued through alternate takes and timelines.... even with hamilton and that crazy prologue, this movie never feels like it's the "real" conclusion or continuation of T2. like this is just another piece of terminator fanfic, in a world that already has Terminator 3, Terminator 4, Terminator 5, and the TV show giving explicit, contradictory, alternate stories of what happened, with a bunch of different actors. you can feel them struggling to really make the sell with Arnold's final scenes in this movie, but like... we know he's not the same actual robot from T2 so it's a real hail-mary to try and make it feel like a big payoff.

IOW this would still be a mediocre sequel if none of those other movies had existed, but if it really was the first Terminator product since 1991, i think it would have a lot more feeling of integrity and of "mattering."

in a world that already has Terminator 3, Terminator 4, Terminator 5, and the TV show giving explicit, contradictory, alternate stories of what happened

haven't seen a second of anything bar Terminator and T2 and half a trailer for this new one, but: this sounds like an extremely cool and good position for a franchise about rewriting history to take

I heard they all make sense if you watch them all at the same time.

I agree that it's a cool position in sci-fi terms, but imo it's kinda bad in "event film" terms.

we rewatched T1 and T2 and omar super otm
about Cameron’s straightforwardness.

Everything in the movie is there because it’s meant to be, nothing is wasted, but it’s not ~so~ workmanlike that it becomes flat or dull. Plus in these movies the magic trick is also casting actors who can bring more than what’s on the page and really give bang for the buck.

What really struck me this time around in the first movie is the chemistry between Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn. They really create quite a moving love story that elevates the craziness of how/why they’re falling in love or even meeting. Reese screaming at a terrified Sarah in the car about robots & timetravel is soooo batshit but they just lock in somehow.

they should never have killed off Biehn’s character in Aliens 3. Thinking about a Cameron-directed version where he lives is like...ugh. Soul crushing how far that fkn franchise strayed.

but i digress

I wanted to watch the second one with my daughter, who has never seen either, but I'm not sure it would work as well without seeing the first one, though I worry seeing the first one will make her not want to see the second one. Hmm.

it works without the first one

but i am someone who saw terminator 2 long before i saw the terminator

But don't you miss the reveal that Arnold is not a baddie?

it's true that you totally do miss that and i will never know what it's like lol

it’s still jarring either way imo

Would you say the first is skippable then?

nope

Fuck no.

First Terminator is the best one

Arnold's lethal facial expression when standing on RONG Sarah Connor's lawn is legit terrifying.

Nobody since topped his psychotic machine performance. Tho Patrick did well

Fucker didn't even have to kill all those cops to get to Sarah. He just wanted to.

The Terminator is obv on par with Robocop/Die Hard/Predator in terms of rated R ‘80s action films.

It has its own inimitable cold and unsentimental brutality which Cameron never again accomplished, like the film has zero winking at the audience humor or cute tykes etc.

Is the first skippable, I’m this close to a FP

i am not saying the first is skippable, it's just possible to get a lot of enjoyment out of watching them in reverse, as i did

Can’t wait to show my kid terminator and then t2 and enjoy the Arnold reveal I never personally enjoyed since it was spoiled almost immediately by other kids.

xpost No, love the first one! I'm OG. I'm talking about watching it with my older daughter, though. To reiterate: she has not seen any of them and likely doesn't even know who Arnold is. My worry is, if I show her the first one, because it is much lower budget and less flashy she is unlikely to want to see the second one. But if she sees the second one first, she is possibly even more unlikely to want to sit through the first one, for the same reason: lower budget, less flashy, etc. The question is, do I pressure her to watch the first one first, with the caveat that it will make the second one better? Or do I just stick with the second one?

Again, I have seen them a million times, I'm in my 40s, I remember watching Siskel & Ebert review the first one at the time, I'm that old. You don't need to convince me. I'm just asking your collective opinion.

I'll prolly show her the first one and explain that it's a really smart, well made b-movie, which will cast the sequel in even more dramatic relief, probably/possibly.

Didn't the trailer give away that Arnie wasn't a baddie?

It was spoiled for me too so i don't recall.

The thing that pissed me off about the 0 fatalities of T2 is that at least if Judgment Day happened you could be like "ah well everybody's gonna die anyway".

Who knows how many people got lifelong disabilities from being winged!?

wait what? didn't the T-1000 kill like a billion people in that movie?

I mean Arnold, with his whole "you can't kill people" edict. Sure, ya didn't kill that poor Cyberdyne cop, but he probably had to go on leave to rehab that knee you shot him in!

He just sent himself back in time from the future to push the cop out of the way before his past self shot him in the knee.

So in one universe, there's possibly a bazillion Terminators running around?

That would be like the most realistic misuse of time travel ever, going back and trying to correct all of your mistakes and also all of the corrections that didn't pan out the way you thought they would etc.

Unraveling the time space continuum via thousands of failed attempts to thwart that traumatic wedgie you got that one time.

Is it ever explained why the robot doesn't just go back and kill baby Sarah Connor?

Smashed data grid, only knew she lived in LA before the war, weren't sure where she was born

Oh, btw, I asked my wife this morning if she thought our older daughter would like "Terminator," and she said something like "maybe, but she'd probably prefer something with a female protagonist," and I was all "!?!?!"

there are a zillion terminator movies and imo it's completely normal to forget the original is exactly that recipe