Terminator: Dark Fate - Cause we need another one of these apparently.

[Your Starter for 10]

Terminator was a really great first couple of movies that quickly got overshadowed by the weird time travel bullshit.

It's amazing how closely it followed the Alien flowchart: Great Horror Movie ---> Good Action Movie ---> Potentially good movie ruined by studio interference ---> 30 years of utter shit.

 

[Overly Serious]

I loved TSCC for showing the Terminators as infiltrators. It made them all the more horrifying. One episode has the heroes hacking a Terminator's chip and going through its memories. It had posed as a woman's husband, I believe to ensure she went through her project at work that would lead to Skynet. All she ever suspects is that her husband is suffering depression, but the Terminator is able to encourage her in her work. It even has sex with her, and even acts affectionate, loving with it.
And once her task is complete, it strangles her to death.

There was so much good stuff in the "Vic's Chip" story. The wife makes some allusion to him being different "since the accident", implying that the Terminator staged an accident, disposed of her husband and then used that to take his place. It's brilliant, really. Make it severe enough and you have a reason for his changed mood, being detached, taking time off work (to minimise interaction with other people who knew him well) and even some partial memory loss from concussion if you need to plead that.

I also recall Cameron watching the memories and remarking:
Cameron: "That was effective."
John: "What?"
Cameron: "When he touched her face. She responded to that."

Just emphasizing that she too is designed as an infiltrator and is always learning how to interact with people and influence them. I feel like part of her mission is to help John develop into the sort of person who can be an effective leader. The question is, who is she doing this for.

And that's a really good element of the show - seeing John grow from the beginning where he begs his mom to stop Skynet because he's not the person they think he is, to near the end where he puts Derek in his place over the Riley situation and shows that he knows a lot more than people realise.

I also love that the show plays fair with the audience. There are no absurd misdirects and it places clues appropriately. "Apples and carrots," indeed.

I'm a huge fan, to the point that I even tried watching a reactor to the show on YouTube. Alas, she was incredibly annoying and just kept saying "butterfly effect" every five minutes.

I'm also reminded of an episode where Cameron attends a dance class as part of the plot. Everyone involved in that plot is dead or about to be by the end (I think Cameron coldly leaves the innocent behind once their purpose is served), and yet Cameron starts practicing dance at the very end, alone in her room, without any logical reason to do so. Sarah's narration talks about how if the machines learn to appreciate beauty and create art, "They won't have to destroy us. They'll be us."

Totally. It's a pleasure finding someone else who appreciates these details. It's a subtle extra layer of horror to Terminator that they're not just going to kill us, they're going to replace us. At the end of that episode the closing shot isn't on Cameron dancing, but on Derek's reaction to it. The expression on his face as the stuff of nightmares to him does something beautiful.

As a note on Cameron, I always thought that part of her influence on John came from knowing him in the future, that she knew exactly what makes him tick (and he very well may have instructed her). It's why she comes off more autistic (so to speak) when dealing with other humans.

That's a good point. Some of my favourite moments come from the interaction between Sarah and Cameron and who actually knows him best.

"John does these things."
"Not the John I know,"
"The one I know."

It's a really unsettling thing for his mother to feel like the thing she hates might know her son better than she does. In general the writing on the show is very tight:

"Don't you have to obey orders or something?"
"Yes, John's orders."
"So if I tell John to order you...?"
"Not this John."
"Aren't they the same?"
"Not yet."

Strongly recommend that series to anyone who hasn't watched it. When it comes to a Terminator 3 story, I'll only accept either TSCC or the video game Terminator: Resistance.

Our sole difference. I kind of liked T3. Of the original trilogy, it's probably my favourite. Thoughts below.

I think someone already mentioned ITT, but a plot some anon came up with awhile back would be to see the reverse, have the robots go back in time to protect someone like say Miles, and the humans are the killers. With the added fact that the type of human that lived through the apocalypse is going to be completely different from a human that wasn't. So you'd have the robots acting like humans vs a human thats so crushed by the environment where he was raised that he acts like a deranged killer.

You get a little of what you want from The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Some of the fighters sent back from the future are ruthless and have no problem killing their targets. Though there's an interesting twist with one of them. (Big spoiler): Andy Good in the original timeline lived and asked Derek to kill his younger self.

My favorite feature from The Sarah Connor Chronicles were the Grays. People who not only willingly joined Skynet, but taught Skynet and Terminator units how humans worked and by torturing people in like a sort of horrific classroom setting. Surprisingly, Skynet was very loyal or at least trusted the Grays enough to allow them to use a time travel device (which is usually ruinously expensive power wise).

It might of been interesting to have a dark mirror of Sarah and Terminator or John and the Terminator in the form of a Gray and their "student".

Oh, that "Grey" episode was superb. The writers had a very tight grasp on human psychology in that with the interrogation by Derek. It's funny that Jessie who is downright heartless can't break the Grey but Derek who has more empathy is actually the better torturer. "You see some people you can hurt and hurt and they'll take it because deep down they feel they deserve it. But there's a person they used to be, a time when they still thought of themselves as good, that they can't bear to see hurt." Proceeds to reveal the Grey's younger self before he went to prison and starts to yank out finger nails in front of the older version.

I think that may have been one of the first episodes where we got our clue about how timelines actually work with Derek not remembering the Grey.

It's amazing how closely it followed the Alien flowchart: Great Horror Movie ---> Good Action Movie ---> Potentially good movie ruined by studio interference ---> 30 years of utter shit.

Okay, I know this is an unpopular opinion and T3 got slated by many when it was released for making a joke out of the original Arnie Terminator in the gay bar and for having the female one beat him up, etc. But the film recognised reality imo. When Arnie says "I'm obsolete" he's speaking the truth. The dumb brutality of the first movie is past. Stealing a bike and riding around trying to find someone from a phone book. Now there are networked computers, cars where every action of the driver isn't raw mechanics but processed signals through a chip, mobile phones, DNA records... the times have changed and the T-X uses those things, understands this world. Unlike Arnie, she actually does blend in. And she combines both the structural strength of the endoskeleton Terminators with the fluid changeability of the T-1000. The end also has a nice twist that helps justify John Connor ending up leading the resistance in a somewhat plausible way given how Skynet decapitates the chain of command and he is in the time and place to become central to coordinating things.

I'm not saying it's without flaws but I never actually found the first two Terminator movies that great. A good idea competently executed but not that special. T3 did something more interesting for me.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

I liked T3 and saw it at the cinema twice. The idea that Skynet was inevitable, and seeing that Skynet takeover and John ending up in his role worked really well. Hell I even liked Salvation for the Future War aspect, but it's a pity that they went back to memberberries and shit for the next movies.

BTW the Dark Fate RTS is a really good game, just a shame that it wasn't a Skynet game

 

[Battlefield42]

I liked the anime and also liked the the first two movies.

 

[SamTheEagle]

And that's a really good element of the show - seeing John grow from the beginning where he begs his mom to stop Skynet because he's not the person they think he is, to near the end where he puts Derek in his place over the Riley situation and shows that he knows a lot more than people realise.

Oh, same. My favorite scene of the whole series is John confronting Jesse. "Or maybe I wanted to win." - "That's just the thing, isn't it? I am John Connor." - "Go... If I have to live with this, so do you." And finally ending with John's "death of innocence" breakdown in Sarah's lap.
You really get to see why he's an effective leader in the future. He can make decisions, including the morally questionable ones, and he can win.
JOHN: And what is it that I do?
DEREK: You lead.
JOHN: And they follow?
DEREK: We follow.


Interesting take on the original trilogy, @Overly Serious. It's been years since I've seen T3, so I ought to give it another shot.

 

[Chunky Salsa]

I'm not saying it's without flaws but I never actually found the first two Terminator movies that great. A good idea competently executed but not that special. T3 did something more interesting for me.

Ending for T3 is also fantastic.

 

[LightDragonman1]

Man, when the spin-off TV show (Sarah Connor Chronicles), anime (Zero), and video game (Resistance) are generally considered to be of a much higher quality and contain much more respect for the source material than the later movies, you know something's up.

Given that Cameron is thinking of making another Terminator film, I only hope that he takes a hard look at what those three pieces of media did well, and takes notes from them.