massimilianogoi on 8/6/2009 at 19:52
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
How's about some spoilers in here?
I want to know what people's opinions are without having plot points splayed all over. Yes massimilianogoi, I'm looking at you.
Ahah I knew that! :laff: Sorry buddy, I remediate immediately! :)
thefonz on 8/6/2009 at 22:04
Surely "McG" (Gayest fucking name ever btw) spoiled this already for all of us.
:cool:
massimilianogoi on 9/6/2009 at 00:17
Quote Posted by thefonz
Surely "McG" (Gayest fucking name ever btw) spoiled this already for all of us.
:cool:
Are you talking about me?? There's nothing bad to be gay. So I feel not offended. (this is not an outing however)
catbarf on 9/6/2009 at 01:26
Quote Posted by pdenton
Does anyone remember the future war sequences from the previous films? Everyone was dirty. Bloodied. Scarred. Watch the opening of T2. Everyone in TS looks grimy but that's it. They have perfect white teeth, great skin, and apparently running around an epic war zone doesn't cause miscarriage:rolleyes:
Not just the people- the setting. While I can understand that T4 is a prequel to the future sequences, it's just so different that it feels like a complete retcon.
Especially day/night. In T1, Reese comments that you stay down by day, but move around at night. In T4, it's the opposite.
I also thought it's interesting that Reese comments that he doesn't know if he can kill the Terminator with 1980s-era weapons in T1, but in T4 an M-16 can blow great chunks out of a machine that makes Ahnuld look like Stephen Hawking.
rachel on 9/6/2009 at 04:49
Me, I picture the robots must be sneaking behind cactus and tip-toe around when no-one's looking, just like in cartoons because the guys heard a Jeep™ coming and were waiting for them fully armed but when a GIANT 50 FT TALL MONSTERBOT appeared out of fucking nowhere in the middle of the desert to get them, they were all like, "shiiiiiiiit!".
Must be rats.
Morte on 9/6/2009 at 06:00
Not that I want to defend the movie, but the giant monstarbot appearing out of nowhere didn't bother me that much since it had an aircraft to ride on. I hear those can be pretty fast.
Thirith on 9/6/2009 at 07:24
I don't think I'll ever be able to hear or read the name "McG" again without hearing Mark Kermode squeak the "Geeeee!" bit.
rachel on 9/6/2009 at 08:31
Morte, fair enough, except the mothership isn't visible anywhere until they are in the canyon.
And that brings me to the other thing: They can fly wherever they want so why the f do they need fracking motorcycles.
brain: override
I did love the design of the HK though. Slick. These and the T3 ones are really badass.
Rogue Keeper on 9/6/2009 at 09:50
Quote Posted by Wormrat
On the other hand, the intelligence of the machines was way the hell higher than the earlier films suggested.
Despite Skynet being self-aware and all that, the machines were still presented as fairly "dumb." Arnold and the T-1000 certainly aren't terribly
sophisticated; they brute-force their way through a lot of problems.
In this one, it was like Matrix overmind superadvanced AI bullshit, with all the elaborate deception that was going on. That, coupled with the massive destucto-bots, made it was completely implausible that the humans would have stood any kind of chance. Ridiculous.
What demonstrations of AI are you talking about, specifically?
Well I didn't see TS so far (and have no intention to rush, as everyone says it's silly), but the advancement of machine intelligence in the Terminator series has something to do... well... with advancement of our time.
See, cyberpunk, cybernetics and robotics were somewhere else in 1983, they were somewhere else in 1991 and by now these fields have progressed significantly. Sophisticated, decentralized global communication networks as we know them today were a pipe dream back when they were making first two Terminators and likewise our current imaginations of futuristic arteficial intelligence are different. More elaborate, perhaps, with all those achievements in software development.
Originally Skynet was meant to be basically a supercomputer. That was the 70-80s idea of futuristic centralized AI which appears in many sci-fis and visions of futurologists. For example Philip K. Dick predicted something what we know today as the Internet, by describing (paraphrasing) "a central metacomputer with ever growing knowledge database, to which people can connect from everywhere in the world."
By the time of Terminator 3 the concept of Skynet has changed from a supercomputer to "network." I understand that Skynet is basically a sophisticated operation system, until the Judgement Day contained in some limited military LAN, but ultimately unleashed. Now it controls basically every corner of military defense network.
The Matrix has the advantage that it presented it's own vision of the "rise of the machines" and it has somehow set up conceptual and effectual standards of this theme for 2000s mainstream sci-fi cinema, during the time when Terminator series were dormant. Now it looks like the Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation creators didn't want to rely on outlived and limited 80s concepts of machine intelligence, because they would essentially produce a retro sci-fi.
We should also keep in mind that Skynet and his machine servants are constantly evolving and their evolution paths are probably different with each new movie, because of numerous changes of the past and paradoxes in the time line, caused by extensive time travels, whether by humans or the machines.
We didn't see much of the future war in first two films anyway, and we wanted to. Now we got it, for better or worse. But I think it wouldn't be realistic to want the filmmakers to present extensive "1980s concepts of future machine intelligence" in TS, because in the end it would look funny anyway. There are just too big time gaps between each Terminator films for them not reflecting the progress of technology in our world.
DDL on 9/6/2009 at 11:06
The idea of shitloads of computers linking together and forming a selfaware network is pretty old too, though:
I have no mouth but I must scream (by Harlan Ellison) features pretty much exactly that. And that was in 1967.
Also, the whole timetravel aspect of the terminator series is utterly broken and used pretty much as a "WOO TIME TRAVEL" get out of jail free card, as has been pointed out.
I mean, the whole cyclic 'man sends other man back to stop his mother being killed, but other man becomes father of first man in clever twist' was reasonably clever, but then you have the fact that now he KNOWS he's sending his future father back in time, which makes it all more silly: what happens if he just shoots reese? Does he fade away like marty mcfly?
And then T3 pretty much raped it completely by having skynet become selfaware by being uplifted by itself, only from the future. So rather than 'Humanity got too smart for its own good', we have some idiotic inescapable chicken-egg problem, where the reason evil skynet exists is because evil skynet exists.
WOO TIME TRAVEL
