Terminator: Dark Fate (Post-release)
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oota goota
Sr Member
Am I wrong in thinking that most terminator fans want to see the future war as shown in T1 in T2? Why not do a band of brothers meets terminator type film or tv series.......
Reese, the guys at the beginning, the gun store owner, two other Sarah Connors, Sarahs roomate, Roomate's boyfriend Slider, Sarah's grandma?, ALL the cops, including the one he told he would be back, and of course, the Terminator.
The only named character who lives in the first one is Sarah.
The only named character who lives in the first one is Sarah.
That is what fans have been talking about for years. Dark gritty, doesn't need to be a big budget spectacle.
Using the original designs. No time travel.
'Terminator' was never a 'war movie'. That's what a future-war-movie would be. It's not the worst idea for the Terminator franchise but I have never understood why the fans are so obsessed with it.
James Cameron showed that future in 1-2 minute bursts. It would require a lot more dramatic substance to sustain two hours in a bleak dark hopeless setting. What else is this future movie gonna be centered on? What's the theme? What character issues? "Do that movie we saw in those 1-2 minute bursts!" is not enough to work with.
The 3rd Matrix movie was future machines vs raggedy human rebels. It looked cool in TV commercials & trailer clips. But it sucked as a whole movie.
IMO the TV series did the franchise as much justice as anything else since 1991. Smaller-scale adventures in a present day setting and more character drama. They weren't remaking T2 but they recaptured the mojo correctly.
The Cameron movies were hits partially because they appealed outside of sci-fi fans alone. The idea of facing these machines in a familiar modern world was a big part of the successful chemistry. If we spend 2 hours in the post-judgment-day future then it becomes a different kind of movie. Not necessarily bad, but different. I think it's a mixed bag. The diehard fans would absolutely love it. But millions of other people would be less enthused.
The future clips in the Cameron movies were supposed to be a terrible hellish place. Normal people don't want to spend 2 hours in terrible hellish places. Same reason why they don't want to spend 2 hours in the battle of Stalingrad. Yeah, you can make a movie about the battle of Stalingrad, but just offering to take audiences there for 2 hours is not any big selling point.
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Hellish places are exactly what people want to see. Ever seen SAW or Hostal, Band of Brothers was what 10 hours long? Its the whole point of horror and war movies. Salvation was supposed to be our 'war' movie but they cast Christian Bale with his Batman voice and gave us a crap story so it was crap. There should have been a proper movie detailing the time leading up to John sending Reese back in time. It should have been T3 and it wouldnt have created more timelines and presrved what T1 and T2 did. They didnt need to give us another take on Terminator they should have built on what was there. It was the same with Star Wars, the best film since the originals (in my opinion) was Rogue One, a relatively dark story where all the beloved characters die at the end. The story all the fans wanted to see once the original trilogy was done and arguably the best received by fans. (the same people who actually go out and buy merchandise after which is where the big money gets made) It was Star wars' resistance movie. All these cheese movies are tanking at the box office and the crude or dark ones are succeses. ie Deadpool, Joker come to mind. Terminator has become a joke now as has Star Wars. All the great franchises are being systematically destroyed. Thats my opion i guess but buy the recent box office numbers for big franchises i must not be the only one.
Hellish places don't sell a lot of tickets. Most mainstream movies aren't set in a concentration camp or an African famine or a Civil War battlefield.
Hellish places often interest/provoke creative people. Those places can offer novel circumstances that "normal" places don't. Creative people come up with good stories & characters about hellish places. The mainstream audience responds to the good stories & characters more than the place. Those places are interesting in small doses but most people don't really want to spend two straight hours there.
There is a good Terminator movie(s) to be made about the future war. But the future war isn't a movie, it's a setting. T4 is ample proof that the setting alone doesn't make it good. I think we can all agree on that. When people say "Make the future war movie!" I don't immediately think "that's going to suck" but I do think "that isn't saying much."
'Band of Brothers' in the Terminator future wouldn't be a bad idea. There are plenty of worse ideas. But it doesn't really hit on why I liked the early Terminator movies, either. The Cameron shows packed a ton of big deep questions & subjects into a very relatable delivery method. You wouldn't get that with a standard war-is-hell story + future robots and weapons.
Hellish places often interest/provoke creative people. Those places can offer novel circumstances that "normal" places don't. Creative people come up with good stories & characters about hellish places. The mainstream audience responds to the good stories & characters more than the place. Those places are interesting in small doses but most people don't really want to spend two straight hours there.
There is a good Terminator movie(s) to be made about the future war. But the future war isn't a movie, it's a setting. T4 is ample proof that the setting alone doesn't make it good. I think we can all agree on that. When people say "Make the future war movie!" I don't immediately think "that's going to suck" but I do think "that isn't saying much."
'Band of Brothers' in the Terminator future wouldn't be a bad idea. There are plenty of worse ideas. But it doesn't really hit on why I liked the early Terminator movies, either. The Cameron shows packed a ton of big deep questions & subjects into a very relatable delivery method. You wouldn't get that with a standard war-is-hell story + future robots and weapons.
Laspector
Master Member
Yeah, people don't really want to watch a movie about a war....Oh wait, there are thousands of war movies. Good thing no one went to see that Private Ryan movie, or that Platoon movie.
What they need to do is change the franchise. Turn it around. Make the movie about the future war and the mission to capture the Time Displacement technology. From what I've always gathered from the first movie, that was the mission, not sending Reese back. Sending him back was a last minute idea once they finally got there and learned a terminator had been sent back.
Personally, I think they should just disregard T2 also. None of the sequels (or tv show) make any sense. The machines only had time to send one terminator back before the resistance blew the complex. Reese said "no one else goes through, no one goes back." How did the machines send all these other terminators back? And even if they had time to send (I can't even count how many we've seen) more back, why send an older model back, then at the same time send a newer model, and then even newer models? All of this done before John gets into the complex. Then he arrives, sees they've sent back several, all different models, so he sends Reese, then a reprogrammed Arnold, then another reprogrammed Arnold, and just on and on.
I would really like to see a timeline of exactly when and what the machines sent back and then what exactly John did.
What they need to do is change the franchise. Turn it around. Make the movie about the future war and the mission to capture the Time Displacement technology. From what I've always gathered from the first movie, that was the mission, not sending Reese back. Sending him back was a last minute idea once they finally got there and learned a terminator had been sent back.
Personally, I think they should just disregard T2 also. None of the sequels (or tv show) make any sense. The machines only had time to send one terminator back before the resistance blew the complex. Reese said "no one else goes through, no one goes back." How did the machines send all these other terminators back? And even if they had time to send (I can't even count how many we've seen) more back, why send an older model back, then at the same time send a newer model, and then even newer models? All of this done before John gets into the complex. Then he arrives, sees they've sent back several, all different models, so he sends Reese, then a reprogrammed Arnold, then another reprogrammed Arnold, and just on and on.
I would really like to see a timeline of exactly when and what the machines sent back and then what exactly John did.
The thing is this: T1 is a closed loop. Nothing is changed.
If you include T2:
An alternate timeline is created, because the gang blows up Cyberdyne thus preventing the creation of SKYNET and the future war. The End.
If one includes T3, then you have to ignore T1 and T2. Their message is "the future is not set". The writers of T3 completely missed that part and state "it's inevitable".
Oh and all of the sudden all Terminators have gotten Superman-esque super strength. Which all sequels have adopted. Each sequel lost more and more of the original spirit(and original designs) of Cameron's creation. And the over the top CGI action CRAP have gotten more and more ridiculous.
Yeah the lights are on but nobody is home! 
Further proof that the Studios will hand over a Major franchise to a moron who is completely clueless to the subject matter he has been entrusted with!
What a Putz!
Further proof that the Studios will hand over a Major franchise to a moron who is completely clueless to the subject matter he has been entrusted with!
What a Putz!
Some more hilarious comments from the director.
Terminator: Dark Fate Director Tim Miller on Critics, Linda Hamilton and Those Inevitable T2 Comparisons - Boxoffice
Spoiler alert: Terminator: Dark Fate isn’t as good as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Take it from Tim Miller. “I don't feel like it's better than Terminator 2 or anything like that,” says Miller, director of the latest installment in the long-running sci-fi/action franchise. “But it was never going...www.boxofficepro.com
"This movie is a lot darker than the other Terminator movies, where if you look at T2, nobody really dies—I mean, maybe somebody in a car they ran over. But here we’ve got… let’s just say there’s a lot of death in the movie..."
Did he not see the first two films, or something??
A guy gets his heart ripped out at the start of the first film. There's a freaking nuclear explosion in downtown L.A. in T2!
"Nobody really dies"?????
Wow, Tim Miller, just wow.
Spielberg or Nolan can get people to go see a war movie when they otherwise would not . . . for the reasons that I mentioned. War movies don't sell very big just because they depict war. It's the promise of action, character drama, the implied history lessons, etc.
I'm not really interested in a standard war movie + the war is fictional with robots and lasers. It's not a terrible idea but it doesn't hit on why I liked the early Terminator movies.
Now we're getting somewhere. That's more character drama & back story & big issues to explore.
Debatable. T2 did make less sense than T1. But it was also built out of cut portions and themes of Cameron's first T1 story. T2 did complement T1 in many ways. It wasn't like a 'Dark Fate' (or Disney Star Wars sequels) situation where the new show mainly takes bites out of the earlier work without much of an upside.
I think cutting T2 would make a more workable continuity in the nuts & bolt sense, but it would cost a lot of the most potent stuff in the franchise.
IMO the whole franchise just need rebooting from scratch. Cut all direct ties with the Cameron movies. No more roles for Arnold, the events of T1 didn't happen in 1984, nothing.
Start over and plan a big franchise from the beginning. PLAN all the multiple terminators being sent back to the present time, instead of having to make more continuity messes every time they want to do another movie. Etc.
I could not give it more than 3 stars (Probably over generous there) . Its just a reboot of T2. I like that Linda and Arnold are back but that is about it. Frankly I was more interested in the new war film 1917 preview that's look promising. Was it the better than the crap show after T2? Yes but that's about it. Blu-ray yeah maybe. GC
Too Much Garlic
Master Member
The "future war" isn't so much a war, as a struggle for survival from extermination. You can go into how people cope to survive. How they lose their humanity and traits like community and compassion, becoming selfish and out for themselves. Not thinking about the bigger picture. How do people survive in such a world where there are no resources, you are constantly hunted and the person next to you could kill you at any moment - either out of desperation, or later in the war, because he's a terminator. And yes. The terminators were described as the newest. Having seen many war documentaries, no soldier in war describes something over a year old as new. So for most of the war it would only be the hunter killers roaming around + the machines that collect and gather up humans for the work camps. I still think the reason they were loading bodies into disposal units was so that the material could be harvested for use for the planned terminators or a possible end-game where humans are cloned to be docile and merged with machines - bio-mechanoid.
How do people cope with feelings for other people. How do they form bonds. Will they have the same struggles as we do of not being able to tell the person they care about that they like them. You could do so much. And not focusing on familiar characters like Kyle Reese or John Connor, you have a frame work to build on from what Reese tells about the future in the first movie. Or you could follow a woman who likes Reese, but never gets to tell him and sees how he's pulled away from her by Connor and how she has to compete against Sarah Connor - a dead woman, she can never beat - to win Reese's heart.
Keep it simple. No advanced terminators or robots or silly things. Keep the action realistic and not over the top with huge armies of humans fighting terminators. That simply wouldn't happen. Sure, we see glimpses in T2 of the assault on Skynet... but that's the very last battle. And the people are being destroyed. Skynet can just build more machines... people are fighting a losing battle hoping to win against all odds. They are malnourished, fatigued, do not have many powerful weapons. The issue I had with Salvation was that they seemed too well equipped and never seemed to have to hide much.
You can explore why Skynet saw humanity as a threat. Why it started the nuclear war. Like in "9" the animated movie, the artificial intelligence was built and then taken over by the military to wage war. And being a machine it would know that time travel would be futile, because of the possible outcomes of it. You can't change the future, so, if changes are made, then it would be for a different timeline. You won't ever change the one you exist in, so sending back the '84 terminator was not Skynet wanting to change the future, but because it had to, because its whole existence was because of that terminator sent back. It had to continue the loop. That would be the logic solution a computer would come up with.
Plus, we have no clue what happens after Skynet is destroyed. What will happen to the human race after that.
I always thought Terminator, Alien and Predator was connected somehow. Sure Bill Paxton is in all three, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is in two of them, as well as Lance Henrikson. How to connect it. Terminator happens in '84. Predator happens in '87. Dutch is pulled into black ops research about building a defense system to counter the predators using the Cyberdyne research based on the T1 arm and chip and may even be questioned about the terminator in the photos from the police station shoot-out. If you want to include T2 you probably can, but it still feels contradictory to the first movie, it happens in '95, but doesn't change the future. Predator 2 happens in '97. Judgment day happens shortly after the Predator has left. Future war happens. Dutch is one of the blueprint outer skins for the termintors. Humans win over the machines. In the following space exploration, hyperdyne is formed from the remains of Cyberdyne research to form the androids in the Alien franchise.
Or not.
The fact that Hollywood can only seem to remake T2 and say there's nowhere else to take the franchise when that fails just pisses me off. It's like the people who keep claiming you can't have a horror movie where people stay together in a lit room and arm themselves. You ******* can. You only have to be a little more creative, which also makes the monster or bad guy more creative, because he has to find a way to get to the victims and take them out, so have to be clever about it. You care more when the victims try their utmost to survive, but still fail. With the standard formula you are just waiting for the next idiot to die in a spectacular way.
How do people cope with feelings for other people. How do they form bonds. Will they have the same struggles as we do of not being able to tell the person they care about that they like them. You could do so much. And not focusing on familiar characters like Kyle Reese or John Connor, you have a frame work to build on from what Reese tells about the future in the first movie. Or you could follow a woman who likes Reese, but never gets to tell him and sees how he's pulled away from her by Connor and how she has to compete against Sarah Connor - a dead woman, she can never beat - to win Reese's heart.
Keep it simple. No advanced terminators or robots or silly things. Keep the action realistic and not over the top with huge armies of humans fighting terminators. That simply wouldn't happen. Sure, we see glimpses in T2 of the assault on Skynet... but that's the very last battle. And the people are being destroyed. Skynet can just build more machines... people are fighting a losing battle hoping to win against all odds. They are malnourished, fatigued, do not have many powerful weapons. The issue I had with Salvation was that they seemed too well equipped and never seemed to have to hide much.
You can explore why Skynet saw humanity as a threat. Why it started the nuclear war. Like in "9" the animated movie, the artificial intelligence was built and then taken over by the military to wage war. And being a machine it would know that time travel would be futile, because of the possible outcomes of it. You can't change the future, so, if changes are made, then it would be for a different timeline. You won't ever change the one you exist in, so sending back the '84 terminator was not Skynet wanting to change the future, but because it had to, because its whole existence was because of that terminator sent back. It had to continue the loop. That would be the logic solution a computer would come up with.
Plus, we have no clue what happens after Skynet is destroyed. What will happen to the human race after that.
I always thought Terminator, Alien and Predator was connected somehow. Sure Bill Paxton is in all three, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is in two of them, as well as Lance Henrikson. How to connect it. Terminator happens in '84. Predator happens in '87. Dutch is pulled into black ops research about building a defense system to counter the predators using the Cyberdyne research based on the T1 arm and chip and may even be questioned about the terminator in the photos from the police station shoot-out. If you want to include T2 you probably can, but it still feels contradictory to the first movie, it happens in '95, but doesn't change the future. Predator 2 happens in '97. Judgment day happens shortly after the Predator has left. Future war happens. Dutch is one of the blueprint outer skins for the termintors. Humans win over the machines. In the following space exploration, hyperdyne is formed from the remains of Cyberdyne research to form the androids in the Alien franchise.
Or not.
The fact that Hollywood can only seem to remake T2 and say there's nowhere else to take the franchise when that fails just pisses me off. It's like the people who keep claiming you can't have a horror movie where people stay together in a lit room and arm themselves. You ******* can. You only have to be a little more creative, which also makes the monster or bad guy more creative, because he has to find a way to get to the victims and take them out, so have to be clever about it. You care more when the victims try their utmost to survive, but still fail. With the standard formula you are just waiting for the next idiot to die in a spectacular way.
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vader45
Sr Member
We have strayed away from the original style of the film. Because there was a so much content past the original it doesn't feel like it any more. Truth is look at the original film as a standalone. It's a horror film point blank. Then T2 and the rest came along and changed all of that.
Sort of like the Alien franchise
Galactican
Sr Member
Exactly! In my theory "Alien" takes place after the victory of the humans over the machines. While humanity rebuilds their society and start anew, the world's two biggest companies, Weyland Inc. and Yutani Ltd. take their chance and join forces to "build a better world" and found the Weyland-Yutani corporation. They salvage and accumulate all knowhow and technology that has survived the war to outdo their competitors and become some sort of monopolist in all fields (food, living, military). Due to the after effects of Judgment Day (contamination, radiation, wastelands) mankind has to import their resources from other planets. Weyland-Yutani is aware of that and starts creating their own androids to be sent on deep space missions to minimize the dangers of space travel for humans. They base their technology on Cyberdyne's research. In order to let those efforts shine in a more positive light they simply rename Cyberdyne to Hyperdyne.
A long time ago I wrote a script for a Terminator Predator crossover comic to link these universes. You may read it here:
Terminator vs. Predator: The Verdict
A comic by Marcell von dem Berge depicting the monsters of two of his favorite monsters/characters Terminator and Predator. Originally slated for a 28 page version, the entire story has become a whopping 101 pages long... and turned into a monster itself. Check some of the drawings and the full...
Today I would rewrite it so that it implies that the time displacement device used to send the Terminators through time was converted Predator technology (remember the dino skulls in the Predator spaceships?
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