New Terminator, anyone?
on May 23, 2019 at 10:51 AMAt least it doesn’t look like they skimped on the special effects and fight choreography:
I have a love-hate relationship with this franchise, but it’s had some high points even after Terminator 2. I liked The Sarah Connor Chonicles, as I not only thought the story was a lot more thoughtful than what was going into the movies, but it had the potential for filling out the lore a bit and maybe filling in some of the timey-wimey plot holes. For as much as the third movie was just a giant callback to previous films, I was impressed that it ended the way it did, given Hollywood’s usual go-to of happy endings. After that, about all I liked was the occasional action sequence and machine design, and I didn’t even bother watching Genisys apart from bits and pieces on YouTube.
This film at least has Gabriel Luna in it as the black goo version of the Terminator, and he did a bang-up job as Ghost Rider in Agents of SHIELD, so he’s probably going to sell being a nano-graphine robot pretty well.
That said, I’m still not clear on how the shapeshifting Terminators can travel through time if nothing living can go through the time travel process. It’s been a tenet of the series, but it appears that all you have to do is coat something in biological material (like the T-800) and it’ll make it through just fine, so… okay, I guess?
At this point, I’m thinking the franchise will have to embrace a kind of multiverse model. From what I’ve read, Genisys went so far as to have alterable timelines of a sort, but at this point I’m wondering if that’s not enough. I could see the future being portrayed as a kind of Matrix-style nightmare world of enhanced humans and Skynet AI at war over an increasingly unstable reality due to the constant alterations to multiple universes and their histories. It’d be very much like Doctor Who and the comics that Marvel and DC publish where groups of heroes from different universes and times band together to try and “fix” history. It would allow for all the nonsensical events to be explained as fallout from this time-war, and perhaps it could let a clever writer either set up the franchise to continue with this concept or collapse into a more coherent plotline. Yes, I know which one the studios would like, but there you go.
This concept would probably be better served by a TV show, since it could get pretty complicated at times. However, we’re coming up on needing a reason why Skynet keeps going after individual people rather than sowing the past with machines that remove other key players or making events turn out in its favor in ways that don’t involve nuclear war or a showdown with someone that is somehow “destined” to destroy you.
I mean, if Skynet just became a sapient version of Amazon, it’d pretty much have half the planet in its clutches already, right? 🙂
Somehow, when he was in the second grade, my 8-year-old kid knew more about the movie IT than I did. Apparently, his peers either had older siblings that had seen the film and passed the high points down like legends told around the campfire, or they’d seen it themselves somehow and had returned to pass the terror on. While Josh is still leery of clowns, explaining the main plot points of the original novel made it a little less scary. Stephen King’s novels largely rely on making compelling characters for us to root for so that we’re scared of something happening to them, not so much the actual monster. So when I described the clown’s true form (no spoilers), it took the edge off. It was kind of like saying “Jason Voorhees? He’s basically a hulk-zombie in a hockey mask.”
The photo to the left is of a new betta fish that’s been adopted by a preschool classroom that shall remain nameless. What won’t remain nameless, however, is the fish itself. Under our finny friend is a sort of primary election to name the fish from a classroom of three and four-year-olds that I found amusing, especially as you get near the end.
