Re: TERMINATOR GENISYS - 6/26/15 - Team Zimmer Rescoring (Si
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:50 pm
by AndyDursin
Paul hasn't seen 3 or 4. 3 in particular is well worth watching -- I think I'll put it into his playlist on his next visit. Can't believe it came out 12 years ago...is that even possible. Wow.
Re: TERMINATOR GENISYS - 6/26/15 - Team Zimmer Rescoring (Si
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 7:24 pm
by Paul MacLean
There was was a forth one???
Re: TERMINATOR GENISYS - 6/26/15 - Team Zimmer Rescoring (Si
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 7:49 pm
by Edmund Kattak
Paul MacLean wrote:There was was a forth one???
yeah, the 4th one was where Bale flipped out on a cameraman on set - caught on tape. Oh wait a minute. That sounds like it could be any movie.
Re: TERMINATOR GENISYS - 6/26/15 - Team Zimmer Rescoring (Si
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 10:05 pm
by Monterey Jack
AndyDursin wrote:Paul hasn't seen 3 or 4. 3 in particular is well worth watching -- I think I'll put it into his playlist on his next visit. Can't believe it came out 12 years ago...is that even possible. Wow.
And the third came out 12 years after the second one. It really is quite amazing that a series of films with such cavernous gaps in-between installments is still going strong and justifying huge budgets and prime summer release slots. Compare to Die Hard, where the most recent installment was thrown away with a February release and a budget under $100 million (and looking even cheaper than it was).
Re: TERMINATOR GENISYS - 6/26/15 - Team Zimmer Rescoring (Si
Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 12:24 am
by AndyDursin
Jim Cameron has, surprisingly, fully endorsed GENISYS in an interview that came out yesterday.
I do find this interesting. Cameron has no dog in this fight, he's not a producer on the film, and he never said anything positive about the third and fourth films (which I both liked -- more than AVATAR to be honest lol)
Could it be money? Yeah, sure -- but why would he need that at this point? I'm getting the impression this film is going to surprise the naysayers.
I start to see things I recognize. It’s being very respectful of first two films. Then all of the sudden, it just swerves. And now I’m going on a journey. I feel like the franchise has been reinvigorated, like this is a renaissance.
Even with a Cameron seal of approval, I'm sure people with bitch and moan that it's "not a real Terminator movie!" unless Cameron is actually writing it and behind the camera. This despite the fact that T2 -- 25 years later when its once-novel CGI effects have now become quaintly dated -- is the most slackly-paced and pretentious one of the batch. Seriously, even in the theatrical cut, the T-1000 vanishes for like forty minutes in the center of the movie!
I like both Cameron TERMINATOR films - both are watchable in their own way. The third and fouth installments I did not care for as much and honestly cannot remember anything about the fourth one except that it starred Christian Bale. I know the third one had a female Terminator in it, but that's all I remember of that film. Maybe it is time to go back and revisit films 3 and 4.
Monterey Jack wrote:Even with a Cameron seal of approval, I'm sure people with bitch and moan that it's "not a real Terminator movie!" unless Cameron is actually writing it and behind the camera. This despite the fact that T2 -- 25 years later when its once-novel CGI effects have now become quaintly dated -- is the most slackly-paced and pretentious one of the batch. Seriously, even in the theatrical cut, the T-1000 vanishes for like forty minutes in the center of the movie!
I'm going to try and rewatch all of these before the new one opens, if I have time. It's been years since I've sat through T2 but I've always had issues with it in terms of it being overpraised.
This new movie continues to look promising to me. And as much as I derided Emilia Clarke's casting, she is pretty hot from what I've seen in the trailers. Even Jai Courtnay looks like he might fit this role, we'll see, but the use of Arnold and aging is fascinating -- as is the whole "twist" which they've given away with John Connor, but that was something they rumored back in the SALVATION era.
I still guess this will be PG-13, not that I have a problem with it, but it will be another factor that might piss off the hardcore fanboy crowd.
Reviews are out and they read nearly identical to the mixed notices SALVATION received. Seems to me the film offers sufficient entertainment, from reading inbetween the lines, as even the negative Variety review indicates it's silly and watchable -- but probably for fans only. I'm still going!
"a reasonably entertaining and niftily executed sci-fi action-thriller...Indeed, Genisys never lacks for forward momentum or precision action filmmaking. But the movie’s greatest attraction remains Schwarzenegger. It’s both inventive and a little desperate that the filmmakers have figured out how to include the 67-year-old actor as the still-imposing android by explaining that the character’s human casing ages even though the robot inside doesn’t. Schwarzenegger is still right at home as the stiff metal man, but the grey in his hair and the wrinkles on his face provoke an undeniable poignancy, acknowledging that no machine (or franchise or Hollywood star) is indestructible."
"It is, on the face of it, a ludicrous and faintly depressing spectacle, like watching a “Terminator” highlights reel stiffly enacted by Hollywood’s latest bright young things (which makes the appearance of J.K. Simmons all the more welcome in the minor role of a police detective)."
"Series fans will relish the care with which director Alan Taylor and his team have, in the flashback, recreated the feel of James Cameron's original...The film just lumbers along, often tediously; there's no sense that the scenario has been carefully kneaded, structured and shaped by attentive dramatists. Visually, we've seen these images, or many like them, so many times before, and the score accentuates the retread feel with its monotonous thudding."
The first Terminator movie was pretty much the best one, in spite of the dime store VFX and the really cheesy acting - not to mention the overwrought writing. But as a low budget sci-fi action/horror combo, it worked quite well. Its best elements are lifted from Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand" (as Cameron was forced to acknowledge), but it still works as cheap, grungy stuff.
I still remember being at a Creation Convention back in summer 1984. Most of us were there to see stuff about Star Trek III, Ghostbusters and things of that nature. (There were fanciful scripts being offered by the usual guy from back then for what he thought would be Star Trek IV: The Trial of James Kirk...) In the afternoon of that day, there was a presentation of some upcoming fall movies in a side room. One was a parody of E.T. called P.P. Planetary Pal, which got a couple of laughs from the group. And then a young director named James Cameron came in to talk up the slides of his new Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie called The Terminator. Cameron actually got more laughs than the parody director did - mostly because the slides he had were not making the robot makeup look very convincing on Arnold. Cameron repeatedly had to say things like "Well, it actually looks better than this in the movie", but the crowd wasn't buying it. Between the shots of the cheap FX and the bad makeup, he'd pretty much lost the room by midway and he knew it. His description of the love scene between Reese and Sarah Connor actually got the most laughs of the whole thing, sadly.
Of course, when the movie came out that October, it did fine - mostly due to non sci-fi fans just enjoying Schwarzenegger shoot up the screen. And when it hit cable and video, it did REALLY well. Friends of mine finally showed me a VHS tape of it a few months later, and it looked okay. Really cheap, but more effective than what Cameron had showed us the prior summer. Cameron of course was able to parlay that into getting the assignments for Rambo and Aliens, the latter of which had some of the same VFX aesthetics as The Terminator, albeit with a somewhat larger budget. And Cameron was able to continue making that kind of movie with The Abyss and onward.
Terminator 2 was, at the time, on a technical level, a greatly improved re-run of the first movie. Instead of flimsy tinfoil models on strings, we now had state of the art ILM VFX for the future combat stuff, and the morphing CGI was ground-breaking. And some of the acting was actually pretty good - particularly Joe Morton in the thankless role of the computer programmer. Linda Hamilton at least looked butch enough to pull off the role, even if she still couldn't play much depth in the acting area. She had a couple of good moments here and there, but there were plenty of misses there too. Robert Patrick was completely flat, but that was kind of the point of his part. The hard part was that the movie relied so heavily on the performance of Edward Furlong as the young John Connor and on Schwarzenegger playing a friendly Terminator. Which is where the writing of the movie really began to grate. Several of the John/Terminator scenes were hard to watch in 1991, and they're excruciating today. Seriously - cute kid with his Terminator bodyguard? And really bad, tech-infused dialogue as well - sadly a trademark of James Cameron throughout his career. At least, at the end, they found a way to completely end the story, as Cameron's original Future Coda showed. The writing was still turgid, but that ending thankfully got us out of the story and promised not to do it anymore. (The oddest part of the whole thing was Cameron insisting that the first movie was really a romance. Nonsense. It was a cheap sci-fi/horror combo using Schwarzenegger's muscle to maximum advantage as a heavy. And if Cameron had had his way and used Schwarzenegger as Reese, the movie would have been completely ridiculous. Schwarzenegger himself understood this - and correctly made the choice to be the villain, which did great things for his career for the following two decades.)
And then there's the third movie, from 2003. The one thing it's got going for it is that it restores the gloomy outlook of the first movie from 1984 - the idea that the nuclear apocalypse is unavoidable because it ALREADY HAPPENED. (That was always one of the nice grace notes of the cheap first film - even in its ending) Beyond that, the movie is another series of action set pieces, each trying to top the last. But Jonathan Mostow doesn't have Cameron's tech abilities when it comes to this stuff. Cameron at least has always had a strong sense of where to put a camera and what technical gack to use for maximum visceral effect. If Spielberg is the greatest 2nd unit director we've ever had (credit to Peter Benchley), James Cameron is the most highly skilled grip we've ever had trying to direct movies. The first two Terminator movies were all about maximizing their technical resources - frankly, ALL of Cameron's movies are all about that. The third movie tries to retread the territory of the first movie on a much larger budget scale, but sadly fails to get anywhere in terms of acting, directing or convincing writing. And without Cameron to come up with some new technical spin on the equipment, even those sequences simply feel hollow.
I remember watching the fourth movie at some point in the past few years, but I don't remember much about it at all. Other than catching an aged Michael Ironside in there somewhere (isn't he still fighting off the Visitors?), the only memorable moment in the movie itself was a late CGI nod to the original 1984 movie. The Christian Bale explosion is really the one thing about the whole project that seems to survive today.
The new movie seems to be trying to retcon the original two movies. I've seen the previews and I'm not sure that it works. I frankly was never a huge fan of the whole series. At its best, the first two movies function more as a vehicle for Schwarzenegger to be in the middle of complete mayhem. The others quickly go downhill from there.
Based on the reviews, I'd say that they're noting what we'd expect. It's an attempt to retread the material with a younger cast, with Schwarzenegger along for the ride. And they're not being kind to Alan Taylor. It's interesting that reviewers regularly pile on Taylor, who directed effective episodes of HBO series like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. But the same reviewers give a pass to JJ Abrams, who has consistently directed less interesting material. I frankly agree that Taylor would do better to return to television and demonstrate his skills there. But I've repeatedly said the same about Abrams. It's a sad truth that some directors are very good at motion pictures, and some directors are very good at TV. Different skill sets are required. And TV is more of a writer's medium anyway. But I wish that the good TV directors wouldn't keep trying to jump to movies - why not leave that to the people who are really good at it? And frankly, most of the best work these days is on TV anyway.