Be Excellent To Each Other

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/termina ... howVideo=1

That looks bloody good. I thought this was meant to be crap?

Can't see at work, but is the entire trailer Bale having a go at the DoP? If not, why not?

Also - maybe they're just showing the best bits. It's not unheard of for trailers for shit films to look good.
Prepare for disappointment.

I've literally cum oil at that trailer.

No-one knows. It's very possibly going to be great though. Bale (or his agent) has a pretty good track record with choosing scripts, and Nolan and Haggis are great writers. McG is an unknown quantity. A gritty war movie set in the early years of the human resistence against Skynet? Yeah, awesome. Eight foot tall proto-Terminator T-600s with rubber skin and glowing red eyes? Bring it.

I've said it before, I'll say it again - sci-fi war films are criminally underdone. Full Metal Jacket in the 22nd century? That would be lovely, ta.

Indeed. How long until someone malkes a film of The Forever War? Well, it's been 30-odd years already.

What have we got, Starship Troopers, Aliens? Does Aliens count?

Aliens doesn't. Starship troopers does, but it's too tongue-in-cheek to be a 'war film'.

Screamers?

Starship Troopers is a satire, not "tongue in cheek".

It's hardly a clever biting satire though. It's massively in your face obvious. I'd count that as tongue in cheek, myself.

So it's basically Syndicate?

Excellent.

Although it isn't a shit film. Tisn't tisn't TISN'T!

Have you not seen Fox news? And the other news channels that make Fox look like it is run by gay communists?

I'd say, as a satire, it's bob on the fucking money.

well I finished season 1 of SCC yesterday. I'd watched it before but had excellently forgotten enough of it for it to still be brilliant.

(last ep of s1 spoiler)


Thoroughly enjoyable. Will start s2 tonight hopefully.

The music playing over that closing scene is awesome! I really like SCC, and I feel it's very under-appreciated.

Does it go on in a similar vein to the pilot, as that was so mind blowingly shit it made me repeatedly shout at the computer monitor. I would love for there to be more good Terminator films/TV, I love the first two films sooooooooooo much. The trailer for T4 looks v good, the CGI of the T800s and action looks fucking great, but it means nothing yet as the film could quite easily end up being utter shite...

Mm, I'd also like to know if it became any good or not following what was a diabolical pilot, in my opinion.

I like SCC well enough, but I'm only about three episodes into season two with the rest using up loads of space on my Sky HD box and not actually getting watched.

It definitely improves, and although it's sometimes like a fan-fiction wankfest, it's mostly reasonably entertaining television. If it was cancelled tomorrow, I wouldn't really care, but it's good enough to get a weekly PVR recording in our house. FWIW, I really like the original film, think T2 is deeply flawed, consider the 3D show at Universal a load of shite, and reckon T3 was a waste of celluloid.

I saw a preview of this in TPCG yesterday. Looks pretty cool !

I've never played a MGS game before (see fallout 3) but I'm game. At the time MGS became popular I preferred steaming in with cannons blasting. I tried to play it once but kept setting off the alarms lol.

Now in my older slightly more patient mode I should be able to get into this

It annoys me that, by necessity of plot, you go from a single terminator being all but indestructible in Terminator to lots of terminators being easily taken out in this sequel. Same thing happened in the Alien series.

Music is Nine Inch Nails, The Day the Whole World Went Away from the rather excellent album The Fragile.

The trailer does look encouragingly 'adult' and bleak. Colour me a bit excited.

Yeah. But... These are earlier model Terminators, so there's at least a bit of a reason for that happening. If we see a T-800 or two as T:S's ultimate bad asses, I hope it'll take at least a phase plasma rifle in a 40W range to take them down.

When Sarah asked if he could stop the Terminator, Reese did say "With the weapons available today? I don't know." So modern gun technology could be helping, too.

This too. T1 was 1984, and armour-piercing rounds have come a long way in the last 25 years (assuming that T:S era projectile weapons technology is unchanged from whenever they hell they have Judgement Day happening -- 2011?)

Yeah, but in Alien, there was a single badass alien on a cargo hauler with no weapons (they knocked together some flamethrowers out of urinals and garden hose, or something. Not very effective) In Aliens, there were loads of the buggers, but the Colonial Marines had thoughtfully brought a shedload of cutting edge military technology. Which helped a little. (thought their mass produced military flamethrowers also sucked against the xenomorphs)

The flamethrowers would actually have been very effective if they hadn't been ambushed on Sub-Level 3. They couldn't really use the flamethrowers effectively without covering each other in hot napalm death, so they couldn't fight.

If it'd been Marines at one end of a long corridor and Aliens at the other end, the flamethrowers would have been more than good enough.

Until the marines realised there was an air vent above them.

AvP was a brilliant game.

God yes - and there's a new one coming.

*wees a little bit*

What platform? Please say 360.

They need to rip off L4D's structure.

A straight update of AvP would do for me.

I meant with the versus mechanic.

Also.

Or is there something special about the PvP in L4D that I don't know about because I haven't played it yet?

Their last Aliens game was shit though, remember?

Nothing tremendous, but it works well. Each act of the game comes with five chapters, four of them normal bits of level, the fifth a standoff conclusion. In versus mode, you form up into two teams of four, and play through chapter 1 with one team as surivors and the other as infected. You play until either the saferoom at the end of the chapter, or until all the survivors are dead; the survivor team score points based on how many survived, their health levels, or (if they died) how far they made it. Then the teams swap sides and you play chapter 1 again, with the infected team now getting to earn points as survivors.

It's neat because it's intrinsically balanced and mixes the game experience up.

Hasn't Colonial Marines been canned? Or at least pushed back fucking miles?

In the meantime though.....

http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?p=49531

Can I talk about TTSCC here?

Yes?

Excellent.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Malc

I seem to recall that it has it's own thread somewhere, Malc.

(Minor spoilers)

I saw this earlier this evening, with my eyes...

The future, a bleak post-nuclear landscape where survivors scrabble in the ruins for bonus survival points. Only the post-nuclear landscape appears curiously sans radiation, and people seem to thrive okay on a staple diet of coyote and beef jerky, so that's okay. Glad to see that without five a day and only bits of meat people can still outrun robot hunters. In this landscape John Connor is a lowly officer of the resistance, which is led by Ironside!

No, not legless Ironside the wheelchair bound detective. That would be silly. How would he get away from killer robots? Unless they mistook him in his stataco-70's-funky-animation-titles spinning wheelchair for some sort of cybernetic organism.

No, it is luckless Ironside! And he don't believe in the Connor, because Connor's all like - "I've got to get these civilians out of here!" And Ironside is all, "Ooh, tough decision bro. But the post-holocaust is a bitch, so we best leave 'em for the robots, who seem to be doing something with them but we're not sure what 'cos this is a PG13, and we can't show bad things happen, not reallys. So stop fucking about and like, go and tell your guys to get ready to blow more shit up from their huge airbase with an infinite supply of helicopters cunningly hidden out in the open that also has a secret bunker next to it somewhere with a river and trees despite being in a desert."

Connor is upset. And grumpy. But now he's happy because they have a new weapon that will totally kick ass. Sort of.

Meanwhile, people from a better film run about a bit. One of them is Chekov from new Star Trek. Only he's calling himself Kyle Reese now, and is even cooler and funnier and you'd totally want to kick back and chill with him while escaping deadly robots. He's got a silent little girl who's there to look cute and have trembly fingertips when bad things are coming. Despite bad things being sixty feet tall at times, with clomping huge feet, whirry limbs and glissando & bass squealings & hootings, they never fail to sneak up on humans - leaving silent girl to go *Trembles!* and everyone to look surprised 0.5 seconds before being whaled on. Little girl is adorable, and oddly - like the rest of the cast - doesn't suffer from any melting of the face, falling out hair, bits of metal under the skin or broken noses and mangled teeth that you'd expect from nuclear survivors.

But Chekov is cool as all get out, so I don't care. And Sam Worthington comes along, and he's all mysterious and also cool. And they team up and go on adventures, and Connor loses his Halls Soothers and so can't jabber on for half an hour, and everything's ace again with the two of them being clever and outwitting robots and running around and trying not to giggle and I want to invite them over to my house for beers and I'm really beginning to enjoy the film.

And then oh noes! stuff happens, and it's back to Connor.

Connor is boring. I don't know what happened to the using Chinnyhill Machine to jack into ATM kid, who legitimately referred to himself as 'moi' and said 'totally' a lot, but I can only assume that he one day ran into some nut-job in a park, was abducted, raped repeatedly and killed whilst screaming for Arnie to come back again and save him, and had the nut job assume his 'I'm future saviour' identity because, well, he's a nut-job. (Seriously, that would be ace. Everybody would be going, "Our saviour, John Connor!" and Connor would be sniggering behind their backs Stuart Lee style saying, "I'm not really their saviour. I'm just mocking them. Because it's funny, aahhh." while shaking his head in that 'Nyaaah' way.)

So yes, Connor is boring. He does these completely uninspiring radio broadcasts and barely ever talks to anyone around him unless it's somebody he can shout out for betraying their human side or something. And yet everybody thinks he the most charismatic leader since Sgt. Bilko. Note to Hollywood, have a Bilko type future leader of men, no more gruff scratch voiced intense stare "I'm hurt!" people, please.

Inevitably all these characters meet, I won't say how but I guarantee you'll accurately predict it. The bonkers named actress Moon Bloodgood makes big eyes and flies an A10 that they have fuel for somehow, and is really in touch with her emotional side and reminds everybody of their humanity. Yes, everybody kind of looks if grim-faced, then remarkably relaxed. It's like they're going, "Tchaw. These robots. They're going to pay for messing up LA." This instead of them twitching and sweating and crying like the broken soldiers of Das Boot and Stalingrad and holding dead babies watching broken televisions like broken people in Threads. Curiously, it never really says how long after the war it was, or how the resistance got together. Even more curiously, whenever you see ruins they're smoldering with scattered fires and burning cars. Even if they're in the middle of nowhere, where no battling has clearly gone on for a whiles. And even though the nuclear war was years ago.

Occasionally, something awesome will happen. Like people being harvested like in War of the Worlds, or motorbike terminators, or Chekov smiling, or Sam Worthington being a bad-ass and probably wondering, "Why the fuck isn't it me and Yelchin on the poster, laughing and holding beers aloft like in a Shawn Black film, instead of me and Baleful Bale glowering?" Yup, Sam Worthington totally sells the action hero in this, and frankly the film desperately needed to revolve around him and Yelchin.

I cannot stress how boring Bale is. And I've always liked him before, more or less. Man, he's boring. Also, Skynet seems to have had its artificial intelligence programmed by idiots. Their big plan (surprise) revolves around killing Connor AND Reese. For some reason this includes them not killing Connor and Reese for a fair whiles.

So, there's a showdown. And sort of a twist, only it's a bit obvious. And everybody attacks Skynet. And it proves remarkably easy, as if all the terminators but a couple were on tea-break. Oh yeah, can somebody please patch the terminators so that when attempting to kill the hero they don't batter him around a bit, throw him across the room, walk slowly towards him, throw him across the room, walk slowly towards him, break his leg, push him down a slide, walk slowly towards him while doing tax returns, bounce a basketball on his nogging mockingly and dutch rub him, call him a taxi to the nearest airport, walk slowly towards him...

I mean, you'd think they'd learn and realise that:

1: Somebody ALWAYS comes along to interrupt.
2: They're fricking robots programmed to terminate. Just snap his spine already!

So, stuff happens and the humans win and everybody learns something about being human and not being emotionless killers. Despite the mickey-mouse resistance movement being the least convincing one ever and seemingly composed of a couple of planes, a submarine, and a few dozen people.

*Sigh* I don't know. I was ready to accept from the trailers that the cool pulse-guns weren't there, which - frankly - was the best thing about the awesome future sequences of Terminator and T2. I liked the arc-light snapping-chittering noise they made. It was cool. I also liked how old John Connor stood and looked through his binoculars and looked cool as fuck and all enigmatic, and didn't talk as if a lubricated hamster was defluffing his throat of hairballs. I wanted to like this. But this film is two scripts in deadly combat - one a fast paced survival romp featuring two charismatic characters, the other one hastily written to play to the star power of Bale, despite the character best being kept as a cipher. It never WAS about John Connor, it was about his protectors. Dolts.

McG handles the action very well, and with good non-confused actors he gets good performances. But he's incapable of drawing out any quirks or showing much in the way of invention, and everything is clangingly forshadowed.

In addition, the next film that's a sequel or a reboot that clumsily shoves in lines from the 'franchise' like, "I'll be back," and "Come with me if you want to live," can go fuck itself. Remember Star Trek and the beautiful grace they handled the iconic stuff? Yeah? Well with Salvation it's as if they spread the catchphrases on Tesco Basics buttered bread and then rubbed the slimey mass in your face smirking, "You like this don't you? You like it when we HOM-ARRRJ! MMMM!" Seriously, it couldn't have been more forced and clumsy if they wrote in a scene where the resistance were all down in the dumps after a big fecking huge failure and Connor came along and said, "Hey, lets all put on a play!" And then Moongood says, "What about?" And Connor says, "Let's do a play about famous composers of baroque period. I'LL BE BACH."

Uppers:

Action scenes are generally good, with a couple of genuinely exciting sequences. Robots are cool. Yelchin and Worthington deserve to do more action films together, and are compelling. Some of the scenery and set design is quite impressive.

Downers:

The script completely loses it when Reese and Marcus (Worthington) aren't on the page. The opening scene is astonishing ham-fisted in execution. Bale is crap. Connor's character is deeply boring. All the supporting characters are boring. Skynet are idiots. If it weren't for the machines of death, the post-apocalyptic landscape couldn't be more congenial and survivable than if there were friendly Clangers wandering around doling out hot nutritious soup.

Bottom Line:

Please, no more Alien/Terminator/Predator films. Bored now. Give me new sci-fi action hi-jinks please. 4/10

(Personally for enjoyment I give it 6/10 as I watched it, purely thanks to Yelchin and Worthington and some fine action scenes, but frankly on the small screen this is going to be a bit crap. And the script is something of an insult.)

They're fucking it just like they fucked Robocop

That's a porn movie I really don't want to see.

I'm probably a bit more tolerant of my Terminator movies than most (I like T3 a lot) but I just got back from seeing TS and it was shit. I was just so bored for all but 10 mins (towards the end). The very end was laughable as well.

It was like a Transformers movie but without the nostalgic loveliness.

Kate Brewster (based on actress ages) has aged three years over fifteen years as well.

I am seeing this on Sunday with the Egg. I am looking forward to it, notwithstanding Pete's poo-pooing up there. Star Trek has set the summer movie bar very high for this year, though (I am already looking forward to the Bluray).

FUCKING

Ever since I was a wee'un, and got to see the first Terminator (my mother helpfully fastforwarded through the scary part, where you see Linda Hamilton's giant rubbery nipples as her breasts turn inside-out, no really) the future was the coolest part. And indeed, when my dad and I had a guy's night in with pizza and coke when the second one came out on video and I got a bit misty eyed as Arnold got melted, the future was still the coolest part (but not by as much).

You know? The coolest part. Driving a battered Oldsmobile through the wreckage away from the giant tank and then trying to shoot down the HK. Or the huge battle of humans twixt robots, as the guy finishes off the downed T-101, and the giant tanks are crushing a pile of skulls (a PILE of skulls? Was this the location a concert or something when the bombs fell? Why a PILE OF SKULLS? I'd have loved to see the foley artists recording the sound of a giant tank crushing a pile of skulls, incidentally) and then a pickup truck races past (Toyota 4Runners I told myself they were, as they were the coolest pickup trucks at the time) and fires a rocket and knocks out one of an HK's engines and it makes THE COOLEST SOUND IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD as it plunges out of the sky and explodes.

Really. My schoolbooks were COVERED in giant battlescapes of HKs and pickup trucks fighting, and of soldiers being crushed beneath the giant tanks' RELENTLESS TREADS OF DEATH, and Terminators being grenaded by other soldiers. And I had one of those four-colour pens, so I'd click it over to RED for the Terminator eyes, and the BLUE for the lasers, and then GREEN AND RED for the positioning lights on the HKs' tailfins.

And then, yes, John Connor marches past. He is grizzled, but not as a cliche. He has a big scar, and you wonder where it came from. Everyone reverently salutes him. One of his lieutenants hands him binoculars and he surveys the huge battle before him, grim satisfaction on his face.

And then August 29th, 1997 rolled around, and I had a Terminator marathon.

And then Rise of the Machines came out, and was utter shit (though the other day I felt really horrible for the poor police headshrinker Dr Silberman and how after he has his recurring terrors about Ahnold which he is still not coming to terms with again at the cemetary, he would soon be dead from teh nueks).

And then this was announced, and it was the movie I'd been waiting for since I was the wee'un who only got to see rubbery nipples at fast forward speed (and hence had a strange and confusing glimpse of sex) but was allowed to see Kyle Reese trapped in a burning car or Ahnold cutting his eye out to repair it. And now, it seems, it's shit.

DAMN IT.

Oh my god, thank you. Seriously, this happens in everything, and it pisses me off something awful every time. JUST CRUSH HIS WINDPIPE/DRIVE YOUR FIST THROUGH HIS CHEST/STAMP ON HIS SPINE FFS. And writers/directors - it's not difficult to think of a legitimate reason the killing could be delayed, is it? How about the victim grabbing a weapon and defending himself a bit until help arrives? There. Already you have a far less stupid scene, and I didn't even have to think very hard.

Yes.

Remember Sarah in Terminator? That T-800 is instant death it grabs her, and it almost does - but it has to crawl at her, and she can only crawl away. It's a brilliant production line setting that matches the theme perfectly, and it's craftily staged so the tension is near unbearable.

But after T2, they felt compelled to have a fight in some sort of factory/foundry setting each time, and I still can't for the life in me work out why in T4 the Terminator simply doesn't kill him. Also:



And:



And:



And:



Gngh.

Just to contextualise, T1 is in my top 5 films (possibly top 3) ever, and my brother and I were utterly obsessed with T2 when it came out.

I concur with everything Pete said. I hated T4 less than T3, but only just a bit less. One thing that I haven't heard mentioned though, which ruined the whole film for me before the titles had even finished rolling at the start, was why the FUCKING HELL didn't Danny Cunting Elfman use the Terminator theme music? Yeah, he got the drum "tat-o ran-ta cash" in there, but where was the proper Terminator theme?!! I almost cry every time I watch T1 or T2 and the theme kicks in in the titles, it's one of the greatest movie themes ever! Instead we get the usual bollocks Elfman score, totally forgettable, meandering aimlessly like a Maria Carey vocal. Rubbish.

Please, no more Terminator films. Please.

They don't use the theme? I'm not watching it, then.