Terminator: Genesis

[Dai]

I just wish they would either commit to a direction or stop giving us first chapters to trilogies that they'll never finish.

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

[mr.negativity]

[Jinzo Ningen]

Frankly, I'm not that interested in seeing a bunch of aging geezers trying to act half their age in some desperate attempt to wring a few more dollars out of this "franchise" which, frankly, hasn't been anything but junk after T2. Arnold is really pushing believability as an indestructible anything. I hope his phased plasma rifle can convert into a walker, and he'll probably have to trade in his motorcycle for a trike or, better yet, a Hoveround. While they're hitting the casting circuit, why not get Eddy Furlong back as John Conner... if they can manage to track down the dumpster he's sleeping in. And Hamilton returning is hardly cause for joyous celebration either. Sure, she can act, but she'll need a lot of training, a ton of makeup and several body doubles if she's gonna anything more than scream and hide from who or whatever the badguy for this entry is. I caught her recently in a crapola flick called Bermuda Tentacles and... wow. She has not age well at all. I hadn't seen her in anything since Beauty & The Beast, and admitted that was a long time ago. Honestly she looks like she's spent the last 25 years riding around in a cement mixer, chain smoking.

[Dai]

It's hard to get excited about this, knowing that the first movie of this would-be trilogy will focus on 'passing the torch' and foreshadowing plot threads that will never be resolved when the two sequels are inevitably cancelled. Between the Salvation 'trilogy', the Genisys 'trilogy', and the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Terminator has become the franchise of unfinished stories.

[eabaker]

I really wish that they'd stop thinking in terms of "a direction for the franchise" and just focus on telling one good story with a beginning, middle and end.

Of course, they did that in 1984. I'm mostly pretty comfortable ignoring everything after that.

But, as much as I may issue a resounding "meh" anytime I'm reminded that T2 exists, that movie also works for a great many people, and, again, it was just telling its story, not trying to set up future stories.

When the focus is always on setting up some hypothetical next story, you never have the opportunity to actually... tell the story you're telling.

[Benjamin Haines]

It's funny, once this new movie gets released, there will have been three post-T3 Terminator movies..... but they won't form a narrative trilogy..... and yet each one of them will have been conceived as the first part of a new trilogy. It will be a trilogy of part ones. It's like a physical manifestation of Hollywood tail-swallowing and it might actually break the fabric of time.

[lhb412]

^Oh, god. An ouroboric nightmare. I'm getting queasy thinking about it.

[mr.negativity]

[Dai]

The problem with Terminator as an ongoing franchise is that it painted itself into a corner from the outset. That wasn't a problem for the early movies because the material was still fresh, but the more stories they try to tell in that universe, the more obvious it becomes how tightly knit its mythology is. John Connor isn't just one leader of the resistance, he's depicted as the messiah, the fulcrum against which the path of the future is set. Then there's the franchise's titular character, which is defined by its name, a tool of assassination. The terminator can learn to grow beyond its programming, but it always begins from that same purpose. Skynet sets the terminators against John Connor in various time periods, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, in order to ensure that the machines prevail.

Those are the basic ingredients of every cinematic iteration of the franchise to date. The Sarah Connor Chronicles gave us the most interesting take on the material since T2 by taking the time to flesh out all those essential elements, but even that had to start from the same familiar springboard in order to be recognisably a Terminator story. Each new reboot has to begin from variations on the same basic idea. As long as they keep remixing those same ingredients over and over, fatigue can't help but set in, and so each new wannabe trilogy-starter will be increasingly doomed to failure, regardless of its own merits or what radical ideas it had for its cancelled sequels. My greatest fear for this latest reboot is that it will do nothing more than recast new characters in the same basic roles, with this touted new teenage protagonist just being a replacement future messiah with a different name.

[mr.negativity]

[Benjamin Haines]

As time has gone on, I've realized how pointlessly convoluted it can be for new films in established franchises to act as selective sequels to prior entries while consciously contradicting others. It can actually damage a franchise's relevance with general audiences.

It made sense for Toho to do that with Godzilla in 1984. The original film was 30 years old, there had been 14 sequels and most Japanese audiences wouldn't have seen all of them, so Toho rebooted the series while still maintaining continuity with the first movie. I'm guessing the contemporary press coverage in Japan made that fact clear.

But how clear was it for American moviegoers in 2006 when Superman Returns came out? It was the first Superman feature film in 19 years and the fifth overall, yet it was meant as a follow-up to Superman II which ignored Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. It was essentially meant to be an alternate Superman III that takes place more than 20 years later with a younger cast. How clear was that to moviegoers who saw the Superman Returns trailer and decided to buy a ticket? I don't know, but I do know that Warner Bros. considered it a box office disappointment.

When a franchise jumps through hoops with its own continuity, it's really only the people who already have a vested interest in that franchise who are going to follow the convolution. I mean hell, I've been a fan of Fox's X-Men film series from the beginning. I thought 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine was awful, so as a fan I've been happy to see subsequent films (The Wolverine, Days of Future Past, Deadpool) just totally ignore it and do their own thing regardless of how much they contradict Origins. That works for me because I keep up with that series and disregarding Origins makes sense to me, but I can't deny that it's been a confusing creative choice for a lot of other viewers.

Just look at the Halloween series. That's one giant clusterfudge of continuity! You've got Halloween and Halloween II connected to each other, followed by the standalone Halloween III, then it's back to Michael Myers with Halloween 4, 5, and 6. Then, just three years later, Jamie Lee Curtis returned for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, a direct follow-up to Halloween II which disregarded subsequent entries, followed by its sequel Halloween: Resurrection. Then Rob Zombie did his remake of the first film and also did a sequel to that. Now we've got another new Halloween on the way and it is - again - bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis for a direct follow-up to Halloween II which disregards subsequent entries.

At some point, I think the folks making selective sequels to established franchises need to take a step back and ask themselves, "Who are we making this new entry for?" That's the $150-million question regarding this new Terminator project. The notion of James Cameron producing a sequel to Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton reprising their roles seems cool in a vaccuum, but in the real world, away from the entertainment news thinkpieces, who is really going to get excited about it? In 1991, T2 became the third-biggest worldwide box office hit up to that point in history, after E.T. and Star Wars. Between that and its prosperous post-theatrical life on home video and television, it's one of the most widely-seen action blockbusters in America ever. There are certainly a lot more people who have seen T2 than have seen 2003's T3 or 2009's Salvation or 2015's Genisys, but will those general moviegoers be more excited for this new Terminator project than they were for those prior sequels just because this one will have Linda Hamilton and James Cameron returning? If the movie is meant to be an alternate Terminator 3, is that context going to click with viewers beyond us genre nerds or will audiences just find it confusing?

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

Next 'Terminator' Movie Pushed Back Four Months to Nov. 22, 2019

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

[Dai]

This looks hopelessly generic. Say what you like about the quality of the last couple of Terminator movies, but at least they both tried something different. Salvation offered up a bunch of new terminator designs and some decent twists and turns. Genisys was so wilfully bonkers in the way it revised the timeline that it felt like a Dark Horse graphic novel. I enjoy both of those movies despite their glaring flaws. But, unless it's hiding some major twists and its entire second hour, Dark Fate looks like exactly what I feared: shifting back down into second gear with a bunch of new characters cast in the same old roles. These action scenes look like they could have come from any second-rate action movie. It feels like The A-Team 2 with a robot.

[O.Supreme]

Honestly, this series is so sadly beyond saving. James Cameron lied to the fans right on camera when he gave his approval of Genyseesisus.

I actually liked Salvation, even more than 3. Maybe it's because I'm a fan of Transformers, and I like Christian Bale.... But to me 3 has no redeeming qualities, and the other film with old Arnold is unwatchable. This next one is all that rolled into one. How does a true fan even reconcile continuity at this point...???

[jellydonut25]

This series is no longer something I care about. Oh well. I have the two that I like.

[Gargantuan Gargantua]

[lhb412]

I don't think it looks so hot, but I like Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton so good on them for being in a big movie!

[mr.negativity]

‘Terminator: Dark Fate’: James Cameron On Rewired Franchise, Possible New Trilogy

[XvGojira]

I've seen all the bad ones in the theater (as I was 6 when T2 came out, but I did watch the hell out the VHS), so there's no reason for me NOT to see this one in the theater. And honestly, I have a hard time think it could be worse than the last two. I actually enjoyed some elements of Genysis, as bad as that movie is, but Salvation just wasted the talents of great actors (Anton Yelchin, Michael Ironside, Christian Bale), made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was not the depiction of the war with the machines I (and I assume most people) wanted. If they just gave a war movie skinned to look like the opening scenes on T1 and T2, it would have been great but it was just dreck.

I'm fine if they pass on the "chosen one" torch to some new blood, as the Connor bloodline is getting up in age. I think it might have been neat if a young Kyle Reese became the hero of humanity but I understand wanting to put more women or minorities into the spotlight instead.