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Just got back from seeing this and I thought it was pretty damn good, I don't know why such bad reviews. Actually ya I do the critics must have wanted the deep personal,introspective stories of the first 2 movies, but this is the WAR of course things are going to blow up more and its going to be less character driven. Its a damn good pop corn flick so enjoy it for what its worth.
But honestly the movie was acted well Marcus was probably the best played character and the movie seemed more about him and his journey rather than Connor. Of course the action is great giant robots and things blowing up all the time, this is pg-13 so theres not much blood, but honestly I didn't miss it much.The movie moves a long fast enough that you don't care about plot holes or cheesy dialog much. The movie stays away from the cliches of the last movies, it repeats some old lines but they make more sense hearing them in this movie. Its definatly not the cliche riddled mess that 3 was.  Go see it if your a fan of the Terminator movies.

I've read the prequel novel and the novelization of the film, and I liked it.  I'll probably get into the theater to see it in the next couple of days.

When Christian Bale signed on they had to do a lot of rewriting on the script because Connor's part was really minimal in the original.


I generally don't take anyone's word on a movie, because what people like is such a subjective thing.  I happened to like T3 a lot, it didn't have the depth of the first two, but it was a good action movie and a good way to launch a new series of films.

This movie was a little better than I thought it would be. The final showdown with the T-800 at the end was pretty cool. This movie has a problem with not knowing how nuclear explosions work. You have to be very far away to keep from being flash fried or getting a lethal dose of radiation. Of course, this series couldn't really exist without suspension of disbelief. The machines really would just have to wait for the radiation to kill off the humans.

Also the timeline of these films is all messed up now and when you introduce the idea of time travel into a movie you wind up with things that have to be set in stone for the whole series to work.

Terminator Timeline (Spoilers ahead):

The Terminator (1984)

In 2029 Skynet sends a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 T-800 terminator back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. TechCom forces led by John Connor sends Lt. Kyle Reese back in time to save her. The machine fails and Reese fathers John Connor.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

In a year that seems to be 1996 or 1997 (because Edward Furlong looks a lot older than 7 years old) a reprogrammed T-800 (whether this is the same cyborg as in the first film or just another of the same model has been sketchy with me) is sent back to defend John Connor against the liquid metal T-1000. Sarah Connor gets busted out of the mental institution she's been locked up in and they all try to prevent Judgement Day from happening in a few months by blowing up Cyberdyne Systems and destroying what's left of the T-800 from 1984. The final destruction of the T-1000 and the T-800 should have stopped this all from occurring. It didn't.

Then there was what happened in The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series. (I never watched it so someone else will have to fill this in if any impact was made).

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

In 2003 a T-X terminator arrives in L.A. to kill John Connor and his lieutenants in the coming future war. A T-850 terminator is sent back to save him, but Judgement Day happens anyway. John Connor and Kate Brewster manage to survive in an abandoned military bunker in the mountains of California somewhere.

Terminator Salvation

Earlier in 2003, Marcus Wright is on death row convicted for murder. He signs a form giving his body up for science. Cyberdyne Systems gets it after his execution.

In 2018, John Connor leads TechCom forces in a resistance movement against the machines. After an unsuccessful attack on a Skynet base at a satellite array, Marcus Wright emerges from the rubble seemingly unaged. Meanwhile, Skynet is kidnapping humans and taking them to what seems to be a facility for mass execution, their main target is the teenaged Kyle Reese. Now John Connor's existence is on the line and it's up to both Connor and Wright to find a way to rescue Reese, rescue the human prisoners, and smash the Skynet complex.

Now here's where stuff gets tricky. To add dire consequences to the story Skynet is going to kill Kyle Reese. If Reese is the father of John Connor and Skynet knows it and they kill him there will be no John Connor. Thus there will be no reason to send a T-800 back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Thus there will be no T-800 parts for Miles Dyson to build a computer company from which will give birth to Skynet.

So killing Kyle Reese would negate Skynet's existence and save 3 billion human lives since there will be no Judgement Day. I would have thought that machines would have figured this out with their cold analytical CPUs and not tried something that would have erased them from existence.

So the movies work if you don't think about them too much. But the Terminator films are supposed to be thought provoking (at least the first two) and thusly it's easy to put together the timeline and see how it has to be set in stone and not rearranged just to make money at the box office.

Oh well, this movie is still action packed and the mechanical horrors really cool. The film is dedicated in loving memory to Stan Winston and someone related to producer Victor Kubicek (sorry, I can't remember that person's name), so that was classy. The Terminator shot at close range with the grenade launcher at the climax was very cool.

Wait, was that the same one that was going to be sent back to 1984? Hmmm...

The machines didn't seem too keen on killing Reese.  They had multiple opportunities but captured him instead and kept him alive.  At one point a T600 appeared to be prepping him to be turned into a cyborg like Marcus (it was loading him into some kind of medical-looking machine, anyway ... didn't seem to be an execution machine).  I think what they intended was this:

Capture him.  Use Reese to lure John Connor to his death in 2018, effectively crushing the resistance.  Turn Reese into a cyborg like Marcus, program him carefully to fulfill his role in history, and send him back to 1984 with a T800 to fulfill his destiny and bring about the rise of the machines.  (They may have had to keep him around until 2029 so he would age appropriately ... maybe the machine the T600 was putting him in was some kind of stasis machine.)

It's really a shame that this film is getting a lot of hatred heaped upon it for no good reason.  It's not the best movie of the year by any stretch, but it's still a good popcorn flick that I enjoyed.  

People wanted this movie to fail, I think.  Ever since McG was announced as the director, and the fact that Ah-nuhld wouldn't be in it.  All the hateful crap I've read from the IMDB trolls is just appalling, and anyone who said what I just did would be called a MCG fanboy, or worse...

And now it's been beaten by Night at The Museum 2 at the box office.  I have a feeling that it's gonna be a while before we see another Terminator movie, unless James Cameron's involved in some capacity.  Heck, I can even see doubt over Christian Bale playing Batman again in the next movie because of this.  

One can only hope.

I saw the movie this afternoon and it does kick-ass.  The effects were great and I really didn't see any horrible acting like I've heard about.

So D-man, chill dude, this movie flopping doesn't mean the end of western civilization and Christian Bale hasn't ruined his career.

Akiraturbo,  they were holding Kyle as bait for Connor, plain and simple.

 It was not a bad movie and wasn't a masterpiece, but it is a very good action movie.  I thought the Arnie cameo was okay, especially because he wasn't on screen very long.

I like my theory better.

I hated it.

I thought that the movie was well directed, well acted and the action scenes done well if not being stuff I hadn't seen before.

However, the writing/plot/script was some of the worst that I've seen in quite some time.

Well I'm no series aficianado; I haven't even seen the films in quite a while, though I think I can try to figure this out.

Well the first quoted paragraph is assuming it was only Dyson's work that brought the machines to be. I think it's logical that a "chicken and egg situation" would make the machines existing in one timeline have to happen before Dyson got ahold of the technology. It makes sense that someone (Like the ones in T3, or hypothetical people who funded and helped Dyson) thought of the idea themselves, and Dyson's discovery was only an "accelerant".

What would happen if Reese never came back? ...Well The Terminator would probably come back anyhow and complete its' job, then self-destruct or what not and be discovered on its' own... Skynet would probably still come into existance, and without major opposition to boot.

But without Reese to father John Connor there is no John Connor. If there is no John Connor then there is no reason to send a T-800 back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor and leave pieces of itself behind for Miles Dyson to build his company Cyberdyne Systems from. So there is no Skynet.

In the past, John Connor is the reason why Judgement Day happened simply because of what he will become. In the future, Kyle Reese is the key to John Connor's existence and because of that, Skynet and Judgement Day. If he died in the future then John Connor, Judgement Day, Skynet, and the war against the machines cease to exist.

If he is so important that he must live, then he cannot die in Terminator 5. This also means that it is set in stone what has to happen. John Connor can die because what he had to do, starting the TechCom resistance, he has done. When you talk about what has to happen in time travel for things to make sense in the future you wind up with a rigid, unbendable continuity where you can't deviate from events or else it makes no sense. When Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines rearranged history things stopped making sense a little.

If Judgement Day passed by in 1997 without happening then it shouldn't have happened at all. Terminator 3 shouldn't have happened, this movie should have been Terminator 3! Then it would have made a bit more sense. SPOLIER: The Connors and the T-800 failed to prevent Skynet's "birth" by blowing up that building in T2 and this is the future humanity faces.

In history everything is concrete when you know the facts. Someone can rewrite history from their own perspective, but the truth will come out eventually. In fiction you can do what you want, but when you want to make it believable you have to make it make sense! Things happen in a straight line and can't deviate. That's how things happen and we deal with the consequences of them.

I can't quite remember in terms of plot for T3 but wasn't the whole Skynet thing a bit of software that didn't have anything to do with the chip or what have you?

I got the impression at least that they basically said in T3 that it was all inevitable to happen anyways, and it seemed to me that the whole Terminator parts-starting Skynet were just a red herring.

Anyways, it shows how much I was paying attention to T3... That is to say very little...

Terminator 3 screwed up everything by saying Judgement Day is inevitable and that the future can only be slightly altered, not really changed.  Which is the exact opposite of what the first two films say. 

Terminator Salvation seems to more or less ignore Terminator 3 and part 2 (other than JC's scar and a few passing references) as well, since that would make the storyline have to explain what they apparently didn't want to explain - Skynet's origins, and how they were affected by the events in T2.  It seems preposterous to me to suggest nothing was altered by T2, but that seems to be the implication in TS.  What date do they give when we see Marcus in prison?  I don't remember...

Whatever though, Terminator Salvation had some of the worst writing (both in plotting and dialogue) I've seen in a major Hollywood film.  I mean, it was actually bad.  Like, I could have been brought in as a script editor and seriously improved it.  I say this because I'm not that good of a writer, so it's sad when that is the truth on a $200 million dollar film's script. 

Who out there was thinking about the convoluted Terminator paradoxes and its complex situations, and thought, "You know who could make a bang up Terminator sequel script?  Those dudes who wrote Catwoman!".

To be brief, this is a piece of crap which sole purpose is to make money. T2: Judgement Day is an action masterpiece. The storyline of that film makes any of the following "sequels" totally pointless.

Of course nothing was altered by T2.  None of the events of The Terminator were undone when Cyberdyne got blown up.  Since John still existed and Sarah still remembered a Terminator coming after her in 1984, obviously the machines still rose up, John Connor still led a revolt against them, Skynet still sent a Terminator to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, and Kyle Reese still came back to save her.  Any effect the actions of T2 had was decidedly minimal, otherwise the entire first film would have been undone and the second never would have happened.

You're assuming a linear, logical timeline.  That seems off to me considering how John Connor was fathered and how T2 shows the origin of Cyberdyne's technology, both of which are total paradoxes and logistically impossible.  There was a timeloop that caused John to be fathered by Kyle Reese, but he still existed when they closed the loop.  This isn't truly logical, but neither was the time paradox in the first place.  It's the sort of thing that always happens in time travel, where people have still experienced a timeline even though what they do should have prevented it from ever happening.

Have you seen the original ending of T2?  It was changed to the more open ending I feel not because Cameron was unhappy with this conclusion (it shows an aged Sarah Connor far enough into the future to know Judgement Day was averted), but because it wasn't well executed and became redundant - the clear implication of T2's storyline is that they prevented Skynet's rise. 

It's just that T3 and TS chose to ignore this in order to continue the franchise.

My head just exploded due to a time paradox caused by The Termniator films.   :buggedout:

From what I'm gathering, I doubt I will have ANY interest in seeing TS.  I wanted answers and Akira brought up a lot of commentary I mirror when it comes to talking about this film.  

Jim, as for the alternate ending...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgUsMkbipQQ
I saw this back when and didn't know what to make of it.  Now it simply makes me cringe.  The black road is cool in the final cut but unfortunately left too much open.  Hence the crap we got after it.  

I think it is as linear and logical as could be expected from a series of movies made over the course of 25 years, by three different directors, and at least as many different writers.  I think the events of T1, T3, and T4 fit together fairly well, if we use Reese's age as a yardstick.

He was approximately 25 in T1.  He said he grew up after Judgement Day.  If Judgement Day happened in 2003 (as it did in T3), and he was born shortly after, he would have been 14 or 15 in 2018 (as he was in T4), and approximately 25 in 2029, when he was sent back to 1984.  T2 fits* if you assume as I do that all their efforts to stop Skynet's creation were for naught and were merely part of what was "supposed" to happen.

I won't say anyone who doesn't think that way is wrong, that's just how I look at the Terminator "saga".

(*Except for John Connor being about twice as old as he should have been.  And where the hell did the T1000 come from?  According to Reese in T1, humanity had "won" over Skynet before he was sent back in time.  If that's so, how did Skynet have time to develop the T1000?  The T800 was still cutting edge, according to Reese.  I guess we can assume Reese was wrong about humanity's victory and that T2 takes place later than 1991 but, man, those two things seriously needed some explanation.  T3's TX is an even bigger head-scratcher than the T1000 but whoever wrote that movie was just following Cameron's lead from T2.)

For the most part, I agree actually.


Fair enough. 

On a related matter, I must say T3 making all the events of the second half of T2 essentially pointless (other than, perhaps, developing JC into a better man) is one of the reasons I was unhappy with it.  Taken on its own merits, I actually think it is a well-made summer blockbuster, with far better action and characters than TS. 

 :buggedout: :buggedout: :buggedout:

WOW !
Is that for real ?

That's rubbish !

Yeah, I agree.  It's just worth noting as it gives some insight into how Cameron intended T2 to be the final film in the series.

 :teddyr: That was terrible! Was that her auld woman voice or Harrison Ford-esque purposeful bad acting to ruin the scene?

I saw T:S yesterday and it certainly was quite the feast for the eyes, the nod to T2 with the bike-terminators and the truck was excellent.

However by the time the third act rolled around I did get a little bored as there was an element of messy Transformers action and the action was near continuous! Exciting stuff but it can get a little much after a while. Certainly not the best written film and some of the plot holes were just silly, certainly a case of 'connect the explosive set pieces' writing, still I don't really mind, did what it set out to do and considering its setting I don't really see it as a 'true' Terminator film, not because it isn't 'pure' enough but its basically a sci-fi war movie with robots, rather than standard chase format of the first 3 with a single bad-ass monster.

One bit that did make me laugh my ass off though, and probably more than I should have, was the rednecks. The moment I heard a southern accent, I knew there was going to be an attempted gang-rape, such are Hollywood's cardboard sub-villains.

Also (bit of a spoiler), why did Skynet take hundreds of human prisoner? Kyle Reese maybe but the large Walkers are blatantly designed to capture people (defeating the idea of a Terminator arguably), and although it struck me as a nice nod to War of the Worlds was pointless, not the only hole but just the most obvious IMO.

All in all though popcorn joy that should be seen with a badass sound system and big screen

They were going to convert them into Terminators/use their flesh to grow Terminators.  It seems rather silly to me that they have to do that, considering we can already clone some human organs in labs today.

Eh, fair enough.

Actually just remembered something I really liked about T:S, arguably just an excuse to ramp up the tension but it struck me as a subtle joke, particularly when you consider it follows on from a trilogy of Arnie action blockbusters. When Reese and Marcus (and Star) are trying to blow up the giant walker at the gas station and Reese shoots a hole into the petrol tanker but it doesn't blow up. I smirked at that, as its probably one of most cliche 'things' to happen in an action movie and to my knowledge pretty difficult to do in reality. However as it takes place in a thin-plotted boom fest its seem a pretty weak lampshade if at all.

Didn't care for it. Maybe I was expecting to much. I thought Sam Worthington was great as Marcus but that's it.  I love Bale but was disappointed with his performance. I shouldn't blame him though he didn't have a lot to work with.

I saw this one last weekend. I think it is a decent film on its own, but a lesser Terminator film. It has an interesting premise and two good lead actors, but soon it degenerates into an orgy of explosions and bad dialogue.

Stuff like the first person point of view during the opening battle or the giant robot attack are cool seen in isolation, but the whole film just looks overdirected and underwritten to me.

Take the scene where Worthington's character escapes the resistance outpost. It could have been a short, suspense based scene. Instead, all Hell breaks loose very soon and we get shootouts, exploding mines, forests burning Apocalypse Now style, an helicopter crash and robotic anacondas.

And it's the same with almost every scene. We barely get any plot or character development between explosion and explosion.

The best of it? The Mad Max-like future world, Sam Worthington's acting, and the small and not so small nods to the other films in the series, such as Worthington pushing the windshield of his vehicle aside, not unlike the T-1000 in Terminator 2, or the final scenes in Skynet's assembly line.

Let's hope next time we get some time travelling and a less hectic place. I'd like to learn more about the future world, the dangers the survivors have to face, or the way the war is fought.

"Piece of crap," probably should have been this movie's tagline. The worst part is, I really, really, reeeeeally WANTED to like this movie. I tried to. I almost did. But, in the end, it just sucked. Not to mention the sheer amount of problems regarding continuity with the rest of the series (no, I'm not talking about all that overconvoluted time travel nonsense... "well if he was killed, then there'd be no reason to send the terminator back in time and then it would've never happened and then blah blah blah my head hurts"... I'm talking about much more simple things). I'm tempted to say that this movie took the franchise's balls away, but the truth is that Rise Of The Machines did that much more effectively.  Salvation was ALMOST "okay." And I would've taken "okay" over nothing at all, which is what I got. I'm a big Terminator series fan, but, seriously, this just blew donkey nuts. I guess that's what happens when you take Christian Bale (ugh) and a guy with a douche name like McG (double ugh) and let 'em loose. Actually, I don't really blame McG that much. He did a decent job with the direction. I blame the writers more than anything. Salvation was at least better than Rise, but that's not really saying much.

Frankly, I think it was a terrible idea to go into the post-apocalyptic future/man vs. machine war that the previous entries had been leading up to. If you watch T1 and T2, you see those short segments that give us glimpses into the future, and you get extremely stoked and you're like "man, I really wanna see that... I hope they make a movie of THAT someday," but I think that, in general, you don't really mean that. 'Cause it works better with the mystery intact. It works better when you have no idea what's REALLY happening in the future, and you're imagination fills in the gaps for you. When you actually show us the things that've been only in our heads for years, then there's no way that it's gonna compare, and all you'll end up doing (as Salvation did) is ruin our own visions with mediocre ones contrived by half-interested writers pumping out a lackluster storyline in an interpretation of the mythos that pales in comparison to the brief glimpses we were given before.

The thing is, those short sequences in "Terminator" were done in 1984. They look far better than the whole of TS, made 25 years later with huge sums of money and "advanced" technology at the filmmakers disposal.  :lookingup:

Even the crappy Sega and SNES Terminator games were more badass that this $ludge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOszcVgsZiw

I didn't know you could make a living stating the obvious. We hate McG because he makes crappy movies? Well... that's not exactly as dramatic as, say, knowing who Luke's father was, is it?

I guess even BBC needs filler.

Isn't that a beeyotch?

I have to agree both the short sequences and the old games which managed to capture them, were excellent.

I just could not get past the whole taken people to harvest their flesh part of TS.... Made no sense like a few other parts.

Poo on you all.  I like T4.   :tongueout:

I loved the start of this movie I thought it would blow the roof off but it didn't I hated this movie you just cant make a terminator movie without Arnold

Sure you can.  You don't need Arnold, you just need Terminator robots.  I think T2 and T3 would have been stronger movies without Arnold, honestly.  It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that Skynet would keep cranking out Terminators that look alike.  Humans would catch on pretty quick that enormous, Austrian bodybuilders are not to be trusted.

Nonsense.  The citizens of California didn't.  :wink:

I'm with Akira on this, I like the movie and don't really care who doesn't.

The pope has officially announced he disliked T4.

...

Joke.

...

Okay, I'll go back in my cage. ::sigh::

...And I don't care who likes it.  :tongueout:

I watched it for free...and I still feel cheated  :bluesad:

Wow.  You posters' thinking seems really linear.  

There are likely multiple scenarios wherein Skyenet will come to be.  We've witnessed one (or two).  What we've seen involved sending things or people from the future to create one of the scenarios that lead to Skyenet's existence.  It is reasonable to assume that they have now calculated the probabilities of various other scenarios.  There do, however, seem to be a few focal points in most of the probabilities.  Kyle, John, Sarah, Cyberdyne, etc.

The time travel rules haven't been violated beyond reasonability.  Yet.  But the franchise's linear contintuity is beginning to unravel as badly as Lost.  However, if you accept the concept of time travel, you must give up linear thinking.  All we can hope for now is a film with a better script and the soap opera acting that Terminator Salvation gave us.

I just have one final addendum when talking about timelines, time travel and plausibility: I find it a little strange people can accept a time paradox like the existence of John Connor but can't accept the paradox of a time loop closing (the intended conclusion of Terminator 2).

Drudging this topic up because I just watched the film.  Seeing I have thought just about every scenario brought up in this thread regarding time travel until the point of my head exploding, I decided to go into this endeavor by putting those thoughts aside.  I ended up with a movie that was enjoyable yet forgetable.  At times the direction seriously had no clue what the central focus should be.  I understand there were multiple characters but for me, the film jumped around too much between those characters.  The T-800 battle was nostalgic and fun but the CG was just awful looking.  Overall, not a bad reboot but like I said, I probably wont' be back. 

It was OK to me.  Better than some, worse than others in the series.  Loved the fight with the "Arnold" T model.  Honestly, this wasn't a series I was crazy about, so I can enjoy it without getting too worked up one way or another.

Whatever, I'm not going to give anybody a hard time over movie preferences. I liked it. Good popcorn flick. I do find it interesting that people are arguing plausability about time travel, the plausability of which is arguable to begin with. You'd be better off arguing plausability in regards to film depictions of black holes, that's at least something we're reasonably sure exists.

Borrowed this one from the public library over the weekend. I enjoyed it, it's obviously not even on the same planet as the first two "T's" but I liked it better than the forgettable "T3: Rise of the Machines."

Christian Bale did a nice job with a lot of hokey dialogue, and it was fun seeing some "new" Terminators (i.e., the snakelike ones that live in the water, the gigundo one that attacked the 7-Eleven). I honestly didn't miss Ahhh-nuld at all.