Comments on: Terminator Salvation: The Future Will Be Loud

By: Dante

Dante — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:10:42 +0000

What the hell are helicopters doing in this movie? What kind of hemorrhaging brain thinks we'd buy helicopters in a dirt-and-grit future? Like Xymph points out, it doesn't fly, it just adds to the pile of evidence showing that Hollywood is finished, running in a hamster wheel without getting anywhere. Lucky for the Hollywood directors that they are writing for audiences dumbed down by decades of dumb schooling and dumb movies. I didn't think anything could be worse than watching monkey-face Nick Stahl as a clownish John Connor in Terminator 3, but reading this review it seems McG has done his best to prove me wrong. Such a pity, too. What I really loved in the first Terminator movie, was every glimpse of the savage future. That scene with the grinning-skull robot walking over a landscape of twisted metal and human skulls. The machines rolling onward slowly, with humans hiding and trying to get a punch in every now and then. Ever since I was a kid I have waited for a Terminator movie that would do that futuristic vision justice. Guess I can stop hoping.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:04:29 +0000

I was never interested in seeing this movie, but to say that Christian Bale is a shitty actor really crosses the line of acceptable discourse. Both Rescue Dawn and especially Harsh Times were exceptional movies, largely because of Bale’s outstanding performances. Maybe Eileen Jones hasn’t seen these movies. Maybe she should.

Also, Bale’s rant against the DP on the Terminator set is one for the ages…

By: xymph disciple

xymph disciple — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:23:03 +0000

This movie has two opening credit sequences.
One immediately following the other, with nearly identical information.
I honestly think that was a simple error that some show business professional was supposed to catch and stop. This movie was bewilderingly depressing because it was made at a level inferior to third world cinema. There are objections that it raises that have absolutely nothing to do with disapproval of violence or noise level.
The doggedly pointless flashback sequence could have been totally left out and then you could’ve tried too make the secret robot-ness a secret; instead it is telegraphed loudly from the beginning, to no effect whatsoever.
the military details bother the hell out of me. Americans, Israelis and Brits are addicted to the dumbest and weakest kind of warfare possible, enjoying a huge tech and money advantage over third worlders who can’t compete, to the total and possibly religious exclusion of any kind of mental flexibility or backup plan. McG shows us a totally different human community from Cameron’s tunnel rats, with loads and loads of heavy machinery and computers (do they know what movie they’re in?), many of which are laughably maintenance-dependent. Helicopters especially need something like five hours of work to every one hour they fly. Why wouldn’t Skynet have torched or converted this stuff long, long ago? Stupid AmerIsraelis are not capable of imagining an world in which they do not have a Christmas List of Blackhawk helicopters to merrily throw away. Cameron implied he could and showed glimpses of the ultimate bourgeois horror: Americans reduced to fighting like third worlders against first world technology. McG reminds us that Americans can’t be bothered to do without the sort of overwhelmingly dishonest advantage that fixes Star Wars missile testing.
There are mistakes in here that are unforgivable even from the 12-year-old perspective: I don’t think I’m being a prude at feeling positive anger that the near-sex scene so closely follows the gang-rape-rescue, but that is by no means the stupidest thing in this cavalcade of stupid, stupid stupidity.
Crank 2 is more intellectually rigorous, internally consistent and deeply satisfying: in Crank 2 you get to see Bai Ling hit by a car and lit on fire. I’d happily pay a non-matinee ticket to see a variation of that with the grown man calling himself “McG.”
I meant to distinguish mistakes from bad decisions: a mistake is something totally unjustifiable regardless of position and a bad decision is something ideologically defensible. So you can disagree with bad decisions but still accept them, but nobody should accept what I am calling mistakes. Of course that’s pointless because when you try to do that the whole damn project looks more mistaken than what Joel Silver and his evil twins did to the Matrix.

By: JimBob

JimBob — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:03:57 +0000

Read the AP piece, don’t see any rip-off. Care to elaborate on your claim?

By: Evilcor

Evilcor — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:29:25 +0000

This article was just plagiarized by the AP:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090518/ap_on_en_mo/us_film_review_terminator_salvation

I advise a vengeance-killing spree.

By: aleke

aleke — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:29:41 +0000

You know, it’s too bad it ain’t about machines, because the rise of robots is some serious shit.

By: texas

texas — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:40:15 +0000

>> Terminator Salvation: The Future Will Be Loud

does the ticket price include ear-plugs?

By: charlie

charlie — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:25:22 +0000

As a professional computer scientist, with experience working for the DoD, all I could do the whole time was pick apart the various technical inaccuracies in the film.

For example, they’re fucking machines–why not just pump the atmosphere full of anthrax, botulism, or mustard gas. Or, for that matter, neutron bomb the fuck out of the planet (just be sure to shield the critical systems from the EM radiation).

These movies arn’t about technology — otherwise they would have tried harder to make it fit — it’s about humanity triumphing over the inhuman forces of evil, which means it’s pretty much the same as Lord of the Rings, or every zombie movie ever made. Except they botch that part, too.

By: Eric F

Eric F — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:53:29 +0000

I only paid 12 bucks to watch a movie that cost $200 million to make. As a consumer I would say it was a good deal. However, with that said, I still want every damn penny back from all those awful Seth Rogen movies!

By: alexa

alexa — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:29:51 +0000

Bale is the new Ben Afleck minus the huge-assed Puff Daddy’s leftover byatch.

By: mofolotopo

mofolotopo — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:23:08 +0000

The kid was a girl? I seriously had no idea.

By: Plamen Petkov

Plamen Petkov — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:59:05 +0000

I honestly cannot wait to read what kinda review you sneering punx would do for Cameron’s Avatar.
It should have been fairly obvious this new terminator would suck. Badly. Hopefully the exile would reimburse you the money you spent. Or next time you should wait a day or two and get the torrent instead.

By: Eric F

Eric F — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:31:58 +0000

Compared to all the science fiction and comic book trash that has been produced over the past decade in Hollywood, the last two Terminator installments have been solid contributions to American Big Budget Cinema.

Listen folks, if you want to indulge in some real science fiction then head over to your local library and pick up any book by the master of the genre, Philip K. Dick.

By: Stephan Galvanocci

Stephan Galvanocci — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:03:15 +0000

Eileen, how can you write about Russians conducting experiments on you (all) in such a -’ha-ha don’t take it seriously’ way. I’m not a Russian myself, admitted, I’m a Greek living in Palermo, Italy, but I conduct experiments on you. My friend Max again I’m not sure if he’s Russian or not but I saw him with my own eyes conducting an experiment on you. There is no conclusion to my short remark. A smart man will understand everything himself.

By: harv

harv — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:50:00 +0000

american phsyco II did come out einstein

By: geo8rge

geo8rge — Mon, 25 May 2009 05:50:53 +0000

One life lesson I wish to impart on the young’ns before I die. When a summer movie is released in the spring, it always sucks. In particular T-whatever was released in the spring, like Star Crap, because of the Transformers movie.

As second mini lesson, if you cannot beat a Transformers movie, you really suck.

By: McMoviemaker

McMoviemaker — Mon, 25 May 2009 04:54:27 +0000

McG sounds like a McDonald’s product, didn’t anyone tell him?

By: wengler

wengler — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:54:57 +0000

Christian Bale is good in The Machinist and great in American Psycho, but unless in the highly unlikely case an American Psycho II comes out, he is vastly overrated as a leading man.

This movie was made to hit a certain demo, a certain opening weekend profit, and crumble away into insubstantial dreck after that. There is no meat to this story, no background worthy of being retold, no story elements to at least make the people watching pretend that the creators of this movie gave a damn.

By: rick

rick — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:28:55 +0000

Hollywood is interesting, anthropologically, as one of the few industries regular people can actually see how the pitiful-minded executives of this generation “think.” As in: they don’t. McG and the guys who wrote Catwoman, huh? But Charlie’s Angels and Terminator 3 were technically profitable. That’s all these morons consider. I was watching the action scenes from T3 again, and stumbled into the scene where John Connor asks the new Arnold if he’s the same Terminator. WHAT!? How fucking stupid is this “savior of mankind?” 12 year olds with 85 IQs know it’s a new fucking Terminator, and the writers care so little about the material they have our hero ask him this? Christ Almighty. It’s right there on the page: the guys can’t write.

All capitalism can do well is verifiable technical skills (like make-up, special effects). Anything subjective (vision, writing) is utterly baffling to executives, even though you can call a film’s final quality almost perfectly by reading the script (try it, next time a script gets leaked…I’ve never been wrong, on 7 or 8 leaked scripts I cared enough to read.)

For more on idiotic empty suits, read Taleb’s “Black Swan” and “Fooled by Randomness”…best books I’ve read in a couple years. I’m not seeing Terminator Salvation…I watched the first two again, and was happy. On August 29, 1997, it’s gonna feel pretty fucking real to you too.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:41:56 +0000

Before I went to go see this film, I read the reviews and was disappointed that some dude with a three letter name who directed Charlie’s Angels had fucked up one of my favorite movie series. Then my boy scout training kicked in — be prepared. So, having seen the movie with a bottle of JD in my stomach, (why yes I had to go to the bathroom four times during the movie, thanks for asking) I was still terribly disappointed. Many of my gripes simply ape Ms Jones’ (and what I missed, my friend covered — “yo you notice that Bale sounds just like he did in Dark Knight “RAWR ARWR IM DETERMINED AND ANGRY”") but I did have a few specific ideas for improvement.

First of all, post-apocalyptic human society is simply not given any consideration whatsoever. To the extent that it is, it was bit from Road Warrior. That’s all that needs to be said on that. A chimp with fetal alcohol syndrome could fill a notebook with story ideas to that end.

Other thing was, it seemed that people seemed to be aware that John Connor had been fathered by a time traveler, and that he knew what shit was gonna go down. He’d definitely be a religious figure on the level of Jesus. In fact, the intro text says something like “…but some regard [Connor] as a false prophet.” Yet this theme doesn’t make it into the movie at all. Bale growls at Ironside, the resistance leader, about the desperate need to ensure Reese’s survival, but the leadership is all “yeah whatever.” The fuck?

I could have done a better job making this movie.