Terminator XXIII Or Whatever Number They're Up To Now

Oh, you didn't get that?
It took me a couple watches.
He's an endoskeleton AND a liquid one layered on top that splits like Russian nesting dolls.
They cut it in an odd way that makes it seem like one guy, but look at it again, the liquid and the skeleton become separate guys after liquid reforms on the hood of the truck, and jumps at Grace with the rebar.
Then Sara shoots liquid with the shotgun, and skeleton with the bazooka.

Okay, I guess I didn't look closely enough.

Still feels pretty derivative.

Well....how much can you really alter the Terminator recipe before it's not Terminator?

You could have a good cyborg mentally fight Skynet in cyberspace, but then that's Tron.

If you push Skynet and the Terminators too far into the future, they become the Borg.

A little bit more, they become the humanoid Cylons.

If they go too far in the past, they become Game Of Thrones with metal White Walkers.

If you make a good guy cyborg powerful enough that they're not the underdog, you've got Robocop vs Terminator.

If you pit a good guy cyborg versus a physically huge robot to make them the underdog, you've got regular Robocop.

Hell, as it is, with a super agile Grace-inator, they're dancing the edge of Ghost In The Shell.

To stay true to the formula of that first movie, they necessarily have to get a bit repetitive.
It's a very specific story.
Bad computer tries to erase its enemy in the past, and that past has to be our present for it to be relatable.

And the cyborgs have to be humanoids for them to be relatable, and plausibly beatable.

Doesn't leave you with a lot of options.

I get that there's a certain formula for the films which, if you depart from it too much, you change the films into something else.

I think the essence of it is always this:

"That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever! Until you are dead."

The formula is the protagonist being hunted by a terminator, and that the terminator is incredibly resourceful and absolutely relentless, and will continue even in the face of great obstacles.

So, what would be an escalation in the basic formula?

Hmmm...

A Sharon Valeri Terminator that doesn't want to destroy humanity, but that's pretty much T:S. Perhaps you could find a way to reason with Skynet and end the war?

Not very exciting as a premise for an action movie. If you're going to have peace between Skynet and humanity as the central goal of a movie, the plot has to be about overcoming the obstacles or threats to that peace.

I have the germ of a pretty wicked idea that could greatly escalate the action while keeping the basic formula. My big problem is finding a way that the protagonist could prevail. I know! All the terminators are controlled by a single control ship and we blow tha...no, been done.

I would like that, but there's one problem.
It's the end.
Paramount can't milk it for money anymore.
Studios don't tend to like that.

Oh I agree, but it would be nice for some of these franchises to have closure instead of endless sequels. Imagine an epic Endgame like Terminator film that starts off with non stop kick ass action, a middle section that slows down with our heroes seemingly about to lose and that leads to a little bit of character exploration, then maybe for some reason Skynet made a copy of itself and the copy realizes humanity is worth saving, hacks some Terminators and builds an army and defeats evil Skynet in the third act. Or just show us the original war with John Conner. I was always more interested in the future war anyway.

Speaking of John Connor, where is humanities savior?

Actually, there is another way. You go with the premise that all the time travel has messed up the very fabric of the universe and that there are rifts starting to open up with all the various universes which have been created. This means that if something isn't done to address it, you'll go from an idyllic future co-existing in the same space with the nightmarish hellscape hinted at in the first Terminator film, to the entire cosmos (ie our universe and the various multi-verses) will be ripped apart and either reduced to subatomic particles, or we'll potentially get another Big Bang and everything will start all over again. The solution to this will require something like a cross between Sliders and Quantum Leap, where the characters are jumping around in both time and alternative universes to take steps to undo the damage. The ideal solution will reduce everything down to a single universe where Skynet never happened. As part of this, not only will people have to travel to different points in time than they have in the films to date (to kill, for example, a medieval monk who's mathematical work led to something like the algorithm behind Skynet's AI or time travel), but also they'll have to kill Sarah Connor in some of those universes.

That kind of reminds me of 12 Monkeys tv series.

Never saw it. Saw the film and wasn't entirely impressed. The French short it was based on, however, was interesting.

My theory is that they run with the idea that Sarah Connor has been going through this same shit over and over since T2. At some point Skynet succeeded and killed John. The Arnie we see is a T-800 that was there to protect him at that point or is even the Terminator that killed him and shut down once its mission was complete only to be reprogrammed and reactivated.

It adds both a futility and a hope to the fight if that's the case. Skynet is now sending back Terminators to assassinate this new character because in the future she will lead the resistance. Futility because its relentless and ultimately unstoppable, hope because no matter what happens and who Skynet takes out it seems like someone ends up rallying the fight back against it.

Tim Miller on Mackenzie Davis's character.

So, she's like Wolverine if he didn't have the healing factor to clean up the damage of the cyborg-ing after.

Source.

http://collider.com/terminator-6-dark-fate-new-character-explained-tim-miller/

Eddie Furlong is coming back as John Conner.

https://www.comicbookmovie.com/sci-...s-john-connor-in-terminator-dark-fate-a169518

If announced at this late date, it probably isn't anything more than a cameo.

Here's what I've pieced together.
I could be wrong on the finer details.

Featurette.

Did you see the name placard under Arnie? It said T-800. I guess that confirms it.

Arnold's character's name is "Carl".

Eddie Furlong isn't physically in the movie, they're going to Tarkin him in a retcon flashback.

http://www.darkhorizons.com/rumor-on-furlongs-dark-fate-role-revealed/

The weird song in the trailer?
It's a cover of a Bjork song.
And the Bjork version is better.

How about:

Carl is a T-800 who came back to kill John and succeeded. Once his mission was complete, he no longer needed to be in kill mode.

Makes for an awkward team-up with Sarah though.

"Hi, remember when you killed my son? Water under the bridge! Let's just aim you at some bad guys, what say?".

Yes, buuuut...

...that dynamic could work.

The biggest problem with T2 was Cameron's huge timeline problem. By fucking with judgment day and the creation of Skynet by destroying the lab and original terminator parts along with Dyson, it fucked with everything. I love the movie, but it is the giant glaring hole that you have to ignore if you think about it. Now you have the reality that we all know judgement day has passed so you instantly get taken out of the thrill of the original and the second one.

I will like it because I will just go along with it. I love Linda playing the kick ass from the second movie. Arnie can be arnie. Furlong did not age well, but we still need john. The whole reason the actor from the third failed for me was he totally did not look like John from the second one. That was the same reason the dark night sucked as john. At least the actor they found for salvation looked like a young Kyle.

The explanation is going to be so convoluted it might effect the rest of the movie. Why not eliminate the third movie claim Hamilton died of cancer. Have the third movie correction that judgement day happened. Start off the movie with Sarah and John going underground, and skip years into the future to them coming out of their protected bunker to gather up the survivors and start the resistance. Just have Hamilton get taken by HKs and bust out and have to get back to John with a terminator she acquired by opening up the CPU and switching a blank one into learning mode where she taught it to assist her since she would know how to do that according to cannon from T2.

That whole thing would take John out of the equation with minimal CGI time so you could put furlong's face over a younger actor. A captured T800 would explain how the resistance got info to study regarding how to combat those terminators and about skynet's time travel machine setting up either a second movie, or the climax of the first. It would set up how they knew how to reprogram and send a T800 back to protect john in T2.

I think I will just have to settle with Sarah kicking ass.

Way I look at it, the time displacement field bubble cut-and-pastes you out of reality, and back in, so it acts like the temporal shields from Voyager's "The Year Of Hell".
So, no matter what changes are made to the future, Reese, original T-800, Uncle-Bob-T-800, and T-1000 are constant.
So, this protects against paradox.

But that does not work with the cannon created with T2. T1 was self contained because it never explained how Skynet came about. The explanation that the t800 Skynet first sent being the creative point for Skynet was a Cameron t2 addition. In the original terminator we could have invented Skynet on our own with AI according to that plot. Again, I love t2, but Cameron's biggest weakness was to start to fool around with explaining everything, and he opened up the paradox.

The idea the terminator made Skynet was an interesting way to explain things, but it is the cause of so much timeline stupidity and explanation. Simply, in the original the terminator has to fail to kill john because it has no reason to send back a terminator in the future if the terminator succeeds, but it does not necessarily alter it's own existence by failing to kill john until Cameron explains it caused it's own existence.

There is a little bit of potential paradox with the original terminator going back and the butterfly effect which would cause massive time distortions as you got more distant from the original incursion. I would say it is more like the movie millenium where a small event in the past would cause massive time quakes and the eventual distruction of the future to which you might be able to use a time machine to sort of jump sideways in the future timeline, but it just seems like the more and more you make movies to try and correct the time problems you actually make them worse as the sequels go on. If you don't go back to the original incursion and try to lessen the effects of the original terminator the more you fuck things up.

Can't Cameron just stick to blue alien races and old ladies on sinking ships? There have been multiple terminator movies that have tried to correct his mistakes, and now he is going to destroy the timeline further. Still, saying that he did make the best terminator film so far.

Nope, you're wrong.
There's a deleted scene from T1 where the Cyberdyne guys retrieve the T-800's chip.
And it's an identical prop to the T2 one.
Cameron had that idea from the beginning.
It's in the novelization of T1 too.