Jumping in here, if you don't mind:
LexX said:
Johnny Ringo said:
You could look at it that way, but it's more like Star Trek - every time they go back, a new future is created. Terminator 3 taught us that everything they tried to prevent still happened, just in a different way.
Well, Star Trek sucked too, so yeah it's more like it. Also neither of them was really needed. If ST was needed, okay, I don't like it anyways (TNG was pretty good though).
To throw in another example of a franchise movie where a new timeline is created, there's the lauded X-Men Days of Future Past. I respect franchise rewriters in a sense because they try to fix what is broken, rather than cop out and just reboot the damn thing. Terminator Genisys was always going to be necessarily complicated because it's a franchise, unlike Star Trek or X-Men, entirely steeped in time travel.
He was in over his head there too. remember the police station, or the crimes he committed? He wasn't really a model soldier.
Didn't say he wasn't/he was. But he wasn't a whiny bitch Jai Courtney -type character acted by Jai Cortney who just became a passenger in this film. Now, I don't think Michael Biehn was an awesome actor and some of his lines were bad, but seriously, I couldn't picture Biehn's Kyle in this movie doing what he does here.
Really? I didn't find it too far a stretch of the imagination. He'd come back in time mentally prepared to be the archetypical male hero who saves the damsel in distress from the monster. Moreover, he even has a personal connection of sorts with the damsel in distress because of the picture that John gives him of her in the future.
When, expecting what he does, he travels back to 1984 to find that she has become competent enough in defending herself, it is no shock that he should become a bit whiny. Your description of him as a "passenger" is entirely accurate, albeit not a detriment to the film. He is essentially rendered impotent, as the damsel in distress has not only saved herself but also knows far more about the situation than he does. You're seeing Kyle Reese with his ego extremely bruised with feelings of uselessness.
Kyle Reese also must be taken aback to see his potential love interest consorting with the enemy, in the form of Pops. He's grown up, learning to smash "these metal motherfuckers," and it's reasonably hard to adapt to working with one. If Kyle Reese saw the events of Terminator 2, I have no doubt that he'd be utterly horrified to see his wife and son so close to the model that killed him.
By no stretch of the imagination am I saying that Jai Courtney is a good actor. I hate him in everything else I see him in. Yet, the role is not as badly written as many think, and he performs adequately.
oh and with John - the most we've seen of him was the Xian Bale version where he doesn't really do a lot. he sits around the base, he growls at people, he gets zero respect from command and then he almost gets himself killed by defying orders.
Salvation was a bad movie, yes. But at least John Connor was still John Connor, not a plot device to do something kinda old kinda new twist. It wasn't my strongest point, but it just felt lazy writing.
As I said before, in no sequel following T2 has John Connor been more accurately portrayed than he has here. John Connor is not meant to be the relatable married, family man with the baby on the way. He is supposed to be "the great man," ala Thomas Carlyle, who saves the human race.
I question, in Salvation, why they felt so strong a need to have an incompetent command led by Michael Ironside even exist. From Kyle Reese's description from T1, "There was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk," it sounded like Cameron wanted John Connor to be a mythic, messianic figure.
John is the singular reason the human race survived. His extensive foreknowledge of the future is what allows him to assume the role of "the great man" in the eyes of the resistance. Everyone else must be totally shocked by the simultaneous nuclear apocalypse and rise of the machines. That John Connor is so thoroughly prepared and mentally fortified for this inevitability makes him the automatic figure for leadership.
The price, of course, is that John Connor is alone. No one has as much knowledge as him, and he must be cold and calculating, as shown in the brief moments of T2's intro, in order to defeat Skynet. He has been prepared for this lonely existence by all the losses he has suffered in his life, from Kyle Reese before he was born to the T-800 when he was 10 to his mother, presumably sometime shortly before or after Judgment Day.
I appreciate in Terminator Genisys then how people are still continually surprised by John's instinctive knowledge how to proceed. He hasn't even told Kyle Reese about his secret foreknowledge yet. Whenever watching Salvation, I always wonder why so many people follow Bale Connor, seeing how openly he claims to have future foreknowledge.
Another clever(!) thing about Genisys is how desperately John Connor wants to reunite his family. Even though he has been completely reprogrammed, that base desire for the warmth that he lacked as the lonely leader in the future exists. Somehow, he wishes he could be with his mother and father, which, because of the Terminators, he never got a chance to.
I think the point here was Sarah realising that she could actually make her own choices and not be a slave to the timeline. she'd been told that she had to have sex with a man she'd never met, I can see how she'd be uncomfortable with that. this is a bit different to meeting and falling in love with a guy.
Yes, but they had zero romantical chemistry on screen. It was almost Anakin-Padmé bad.
I daresay you're confusing a lack of "romantical" chemistry with how Kyle and Sarah are written in Genisys. Again, Kyle expected a damsel in distress, but he got a Sarah who's as fierce but more capable than the women he meets in the future. Perhaps Kyle isn't the type who fancies strong women... Sarah, on the other hand, is actively fighting against falling in love. As Johnny Ringo said, Kyle Reese is essentially the personification of her "fate." They have to make love, and she naturally resents this lack of choice. Only when John suggests that the three because of extensive time travel are outsiders, whose actions don't matter does Sarah let herself warm up to Kyle. She no longer has to fall in love with him; she chooses to.
Yet, love seems to find a way, as shown by the ending kiss. This act is supposed to raise the question of inevitability once more.
Here's an idea for an experiment - watch terminator 2 and every time Arnold delivers a cheesy one liner, take a shot of whiskey..
Are you comparing T2 and T5? Really? Arnold has one liners in all of his films. In T5 he was just a comedic relief more than an action star. If you think he's the same in T2 then okay.
I mean Arnold's 67. Did you expect him to be the big action star in this summer blockbuster? Harrison Ford was the younger age of 65 the last time he tried to be the action star of an Indiana Jones movie and look how that turned out.
I like that Arnold's an important side character instead, who occasionally does action-y things.
Salvation was a complete waste, absolutely nothing important happened in that film. Even worse - there was no time travel, no attempt to alter events by messing with the past. To me that is what the Terminator is all about.
Well, the same can be said with this film that it's a waste. The only point I'm giving for Salvation is that at least they tried something different. We have now 4 movies of traveling through time, you don't think that's enough? I think 2 was good, then it just has gone repititive. Why do we need to see more of the same? Or why do we need Terminator movies at all anymore? They did the "perfect" movies already, they can't top them, why don't just give it a rest.
And I'm not defending Salvation at all, I don't like it. The plot was bad, Jai Courtney, no wait, Sam Worthington was bad etc. I just give it props to try something new. I also like some of the Terminator models that were bad-ass looking (not all).
I certainly wouldn't describe this film as a waste. It was downright ballsy not to be another retread of old territory. Furthermore, Salvation's biggest weakness and strength is that it's completely innocuous. It's more like a spinoff than anything with no significant changes to the timeline or additions to the mythology. This builds on T1 and T2 even if it has to be necessarily complicated to do so.
If you or any others don't like the fact that more Terminator movies are being made, that's fine. That doesn't mean this one deserves more hate than it gets. I remember when Salvation came out, people were cautiously optimistic. It's a bit baffling to me how so many agreed to hate this film before it came out.
I feel like you are being overly critical on a movie you just plain didn't like.
Umm, just critical actually. I could be more if I wanted. Like how Sarah Connor recognizes her own unborn son? Or the whole Kyle's memory thing. Or how Arnold flies off the time machine and becomes T-1000? If you know the anwsers, great. I don't care. Just saying that I could rip this apart more if I wanted.
- Kyle recognizes John's voice at first, and, though he doesn't explicitly identify him, the magnitude of his reaction leads Sarah to the likely conclusion that this is her son. It requires some suspension of disbelief no doubt, but I can buy it.
- They had a long winded line of exposition about Kyle's memory thing involving a nexus. Considering that he traveled at the exact moment his universe changed (Matt Smith Skynet grabbing John Connor), it's understandable that he would remember the timeline he came from and start to have "memories" of the new one, which the Matt Smith Skynet created.
- Arnold's CPU wasn't damaged, so it reprogrammed the polymimetic alloy, introducing the lines of coding that it lacked. The coding bit was explicitly said when they entered the facility.
If you know the anwsers, great. I don't care. Just saying that I could rip this apart more if I wanted.
I do hope you actually take the time to read this rebuttal. I appreciate you have a difference of opinion, but, at the same time, I'd like to have a chance to explain why I have a positive opinion of the movie. Clearly, I now see I'm not the only one who thinks Genisys isn't as bad as the internet at large (and not just you) claim it to be. This not caring business is what I fear- when people put their thoughts out on a movie on the public forum that is the internet, I don't think it should come as a surprise that others could disagree. Furthermore, I think it's somewhat inconsiderate to dismiss responses so callously.
Again, I don't think Terminator Genisys is a great movie. Frankly, due to Alan Taylor's poor direction in terms of action, it skirts the line of good. Yet, I think it is the most worthy follow-up to the original two that has surfaced thus far. It's not a self-effacing retread (T3), and it's not a virtual spin-off (Salvation). The scriptwriters seem to understand and respect Cameron's originals. That's more than I can say for T3, where it's admitted that one of them just needed a house and in fact disliked the first two. In the end, I understand why Cameron calls it the "official third."
Certainly, that's fair.
