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![Terminator Salvation (Director's Cut) [Blu-ray]](http://cdn.hometheaterforum.com/9/9f/50x50px-ZC-9fbafe8b_B001FB55I0-51EJM15OikL.jpg)
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Originally Posted by Norm
I was reading something about McG stating the t-600 was 8ft tall. Well how the hell is that model going to sneak inside the resistance groups. It seems like a toy decision there or a blatant not caring about continuity.
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Originally Posted by TravisR
I don't know the 'in-universe' explanation or what McG is thinking but I would think that an 8 foot T-600 isn't designed to have skin wrapped around it. It's designed to be a big robot that shoots people. Eventually, they develop the T-800 which is small enough to be human sized and infiltrate the resistance.
All that being said, I don't know if there's something in this movie or T3 that contradicts that. |
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Originally Posted by Will_B
Yep, the T600s only have rubber skin so they look like people from a distance. (This happens in the film.) Up close, they're big enough to kick your butt.
The film takes place at a time when the T600s are about to be replaced by newer models, so the 600's rubber skin is weathered or in tatters, making them look like monsters. Plus I expect at this point people know that any figure hoisting a gattling gun is a robot, so the ruse is no longer as important as it presumably was at the start of the war. When I first saw the pics of the T600s, I thought this film would be another "terminator chases after the hero" story. But no, they're just there to add some frightening/disturbing imagery to an already scary future world. |
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Originally Posted by Chuck Mayer
1a) I hate that Skynet has a "personality" in this film. I like HBC a lot. But one of the charms of the first 2 films, and the 3rd one even got this mostly right, is that the antagonist is cold and inhuman. Methodical, brutal, relentless...but impersonal. There was a tiny little of bit of malice by the T1000, but it was calculated. Seeing Skynet monologue (to use The Incredibles parlance) and twirl its figurative mustache was dumb.
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| Here was my key problem with the script. Conner makes it a point to save Kyle Reese...specifically discussing not performing a major operation in the context of "we have to save Kyle Reese!" This makes him sound like a self-involved douche. Later, when conducting his Bill Pullman ID4 speech, he makes a much better, much more tonally-consistent-with-T2 argument. Humans don't sacrifice their own to win battles, especially when they have a choice. I would have flipped the film a bit and had Conner working to rescue the citizens. I think it would have played with more intensity and truth to have John Conner trying to save people (as he points out how important each person is). And one of the people he saves is his father. |
| In short, the film has John Conner trying to save his father and therefore he rescues a bunch of people. The film should have him trying to rescue a bunch of people, and thus he meets his father. A thematic reward, so to speak. |
| Should have used Linda Hamilton's narration from the first film. The lines in Salvation would have sounded LESS robotic had Johnny Five recited them. |
| Secondly, Sarah wouldn't have been able to tell him any specifics about the war or the machines. She only knows the T800, and barely at that. She teaches him how to fight, how to survive, how to lead...she couldn't give him intel. That part did not make sense in the least. |
| This is all the negative. There is some positive, but this film is a real missed opportunity. I didn't even get into Kyle Reese (who I mostly liked, with some reservations). Poor Yelchin, two summer films, two impersonations. |
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Originally Posted by Will_B
Yeah I wondered about that. Who recorded the bits of Sarah Connor's voice on the tape recorder? It sure didn't sound like Linda Hamilton. They should have made the tape sound warbly, as if the tapes were barely playable, to disguise the way that it didn't sound like Linda Hamilton.
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Originally Posted by Brian Dobbs
you know, I think the trailers really spoiled everything. They should have kept Marcus's secret until people actually saw the movie. Imagine how cool that would have been to realize what was going on while you're watching the movie instead of already knowing.
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| The problem with that is that Marcus goes through a lot of insane things before the reveal that would be impossible for a normal human to survive. If I didn't know that he was secretly a Terminator, the scene where he gets blown off the hostage plane and skipped over the water like a stone would have been totally laughable. |
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Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt
The problem with that is that Marcus goes through a lot of insane things before the reveal that would be impossible for a normal human to survive. If I didn't know that he was secretly a Terminator, the scene where he gets blown off the hostage plane and skipped over the water like a stone would have been totally laughable.
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Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt
It was Linda Hamilton; it's just that 2009 Linda Hamilton doesn't sound exactly like 1994 Linda Hamilton. That doesn't change the fact that the dialog from the 1984 film exists; since they created a 5.1 soundtrack for the DVD, you'd think they have the original dialog stem.
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Originally Posted by Diallo B
and that is exactly the point. you would have been thinking, wtf??? and then you would have gotten a reveal. i also think that it was poor to do the cyberdyne chick with marcus at the prison scene first thing in the movie.
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Originally Posted by TravisR
This movie expanded that dialogue/recording though. I guess the new lines couldn't mix together with the original dialogue so they just re-recorded it all.
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Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt
Terrific action and cinematography. The post-Judgment Day universe felt more like Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome than the glimpses of the future we got in the first three movies. Lots of apocalyptic cliches, like the resourceful mute kid and the kindly nomadic woman.
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| The portrayal of John Connor is the biggest flaw of this film. Who would have thought that Nick Stahl would make a better John Connor than Christian Bale? But he does. Both Stahl and Furlong portrayed Connor as a bright and compassionate person that genuinely likes people and feels tortured by the burden of his destiny. That personal touch, and that interest in people, were what made it plausible to me that he could be the future leader of mankind. T2 and T3 made the case that John Connor wasn't like the cold and unyielding Sarah Connor; he was better. Bale's Connor is more brooding and masculine, but John Connor has never really been a traditional action hero. I kind of resented that they turned him into one.This is why I wish John Connor would have been more like Stahl's portrayed, where he threatened suicide in order to get one last chance as preventing Judgment Day. The reason John Connor is so hellbent on saving Kyle Reese is because he believes in his own legend. His mother has convinced him that he is the only one who can save humanity. If Kyle Reese dies, he can't be sent back and John Connor isn't born -- which in turn means that humanity is doomed. By saving Kyle Reese, he saves humanity. The Stahl conception of the character would have felt really guilty for prioritizing Kyle Reese, even when doing so for the reasons outlined. |
| I would have really preferred that Skynet didn't identify Kyle Reese at the processing center, because I agree that it's implausible that Skynet wouldn't have killed him on sight. |
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Originally Posted by Will_B
Or Skynet read Sarah Connor's lock-down mental ward reports. She may have said something about Kyle Reese back then. Any info revealed in the 1990 or 2000s or whatever present day is, would have drifted forward.
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| Two weeks before “Terminator Salvation” hit theaters, the film’s director, McG, sat in his L.A. production office for an interview with EW. He was talking about the swirl of rumors and gossip surrounding the film — about how bloggers had posted all kinds of far-fetched speculation during production and how it drove him nuts. And then, out of nowhere, McG smiles and says, “Here’s something I’ve never talked about before...”. Now, before we go any further, there’s some backstory about the movie’s plot you’ll need to know if you haven’t already seen it. “Terminator Salvation” is set in the year 2018 — after the apocalyptic Judgment Day, which was prophesied in the earlier films. There are three main characters in the story: John Connor (Christian Bale), the son of Sarah Connor who will lead the resistance against the evil Skynet; Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), the young resistance fighter who will grow up and eventually travel back in time (as seen in the 1984 original when Reese was played by Michael Biehn) to impregnate Sarah Connor with the young savior, John Connor; and Marcus Wright, a mysterious dude who’s half human, half machine programmed by Skynet (the fact that he’s unaware of this makes for some of the most poignant scenes in the film). Okay, now back to McG’s big, juicy secret. A secret, by the way, that Bale will back up as you read on. “There was talk on the Internet about an alternate ending where Connor dies and they take Connor’s likeness and put it on top of Marcus Wright’s machine body. So that it’s actually a machine that’s leading the resistance! And the Internet caught wind of that and people went, ‘That’s bulls---! We don’t want that!’” McG grins. “Well, that’s not really what the ending was.” Actually, the bloggers were on the right track. Except, McG adds, the original ending actually went even further. “Connor dies, okay? He’s dead,” McG continues. “And Marcus offers his physical body, so Connor’s exterior is put on top of his machine body. It looks like Connor, but it’s really Marcus underneath. And all of the characters we care about (Kyle Reese, Connor’s wife Kate, etc.) are brought into the room to see him and they think it’s Connor. And Connor gets up and then there’s a small flicker of red in his eyes and he shoots Kate, he shoots Kyle, he shoots everybody in the room. Fade to black. End of movie. Skynet wins. F--- you!” F--- you, indeed. We tell the director that this would be the darkest, bleakest summer blockbuster ending of all time. He agrees. “It’s the most nihilistic thing of all time. And Christian went f---ing crazy, of course. He was insistent that it be done that way! He wanted the bad guys to win! Can you imagine the oxygen going out of the theater?! What just happened! It would piss you off! But maybe two years from now, you’d think it was ballsy. But in the end, it just felt like too much of a bummer.” He pauses, thinking about the alternate ending that wasn’t. “Maybe we blew it.” McG says the studio had signed off on this original dark-as-night ending. But something about it didn’t smell right to him in the end. How could a movie with a reported budget of $200 million and a possible future of sequels possibly end that way? EW sits down with Bale the next day and tells the star how McG let the cat out of the bag. Bale laughs. “There’s not much McG can keep in, is there?” Was he really, as McG says, gung-ho to shoot that everyone-dies ending? “I’m not the director,” says Bale. “There came to be a different option that almost everyone, except myself, felt was the better way to go. I took a bit of convincing, but you know, at the end of the day, you need a director to make that call.” |
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Originally Posted by Cary P
how does Connor infiltrate Skynet headquarters so easily
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